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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cyril Cook & the Lost Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in archives and sources, biographical quests, Katharine Susannah Prichard, links, Uncategorized

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KSP Writers' Centre

Your KS #15: Cyril Cook & the Lost Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard

Source: Your KS #15: Cyril Cook & the Lost Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard | Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre – home

One of the most interesting things to happen in my research this year has been the discovery of “lost” letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard and new insight into the circumstances of Cyril Cook’s 1950 thesis on Katharine. It was my AS Byatt’s Possession moment, and I wrote about it for the KSP Writers Centre newsletter; read about it on the KSPWC website!

 

A working writer: N’goola and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

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Australian Short Story Festival, N'Goola, short stories

img_0731

Post #5 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

Katharine Susannah Prichard published two books in the 1950s – Winged Seeds, a goldfields novel, at the beginning of the decade in 1950, and N’goola and Other Stories at the end of the decade in 1959. It was a difficult decade for Katharine -she felt the sting of Cold War persecution as a Communist; her health was poor; her only son was living overseas and then interstate; and the writing projects she had envisaged in 1950 did not work out how she hoped. N’goola brings together this decade of troubled writing. There’s much in it which surprised and interested me. Continue reading →

Structurally speaking

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Series: Short Stories (2016), Uncategorized

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Australian Short Story Festival

structure_paris_les_halles

Photo by Procsllas Mosas, Flickr

Post #4 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

One of the panels I’m appearing on at the Australian Short Story Festival is “The Importance of Structure: How to Put What Where”. Structure’s a slippery term, especially when it comes to writing. I need to think aloud about just what it is we’re talking about. Continue reading →

Stand for the national anthem, or we’ll call the police

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in politics and current affairs, Uncategorized

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national anthem, patriotism, war on terror

The ABC understands one of the boys was questioned two years ago by New South Wales Police and the Australian Federal Police over an incident at his school.

It is understood that incident involved him refusing to stand for the national anthem at the morning assembly of his school — East Hills Boys High School – in June 2014 when the boy was 14.

When questioned why he would not stand for the national anthem, the boy said “he only stands for God”, “does not respect this country” and “this country sends troops to Afghanistan to kill our men and rape our women”.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-12/counter-terrorism-police-two-men-over-bayonet-incident-in-sydney/7926188

The news of sixteen-year-olds plotting terrorism is frightening. But just as frightening, buried in today’s story of the arrests, is the report that police were called to a school two years ago because one of the suspects would not stand for the national anthem. I cannot imagine a better way to radicalise a fourteen-year-old. It’s disturbing that he doesn’t respect Australia, the country he lives in, although it’s unsurprising that he’s upset about Australia’s involvement in disastrous wars overseas. It’s disruptive when people won’t stand for the national anthem. And this boy has gone on to plan violence. But however we regard it, refusing to stand for the national anthem itself must never be a police matter. When it becomes one, we are living in a dystopia. In the “war on terror” we are losing the very freedom we are meant to be fighting for.

Visible and invisible biographers: a quick response to David Marr

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographical quests, biography as a literary form, biography in fiction, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

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David Marr, Seymour Lecture

Sue at Whispering Gums has given a great overview of David Marr’s Seymour lecture, “Here I stand”. He focused on the biographer’s craft, and he said so many things of great relevance to me, but I’ll just engage this comment:

Marr spent four years (I think) on the project, meeting with [Patrick] White, visiting places he’d been, meeting people he knew, and so on, but he is not in the book. Editors today, he said, would “tell me to get in there”, to write of his adventures in research. He described this style as “quest biographies”, and he doesn’t (generally) like them. They “inflict their homework on readers”

I love biographical quests; they’re how I came to biography. For my Master’s thesis , I wrote a biographical quest novel (“The Remains”) and a dissertation on aspects of the genre, including the influence of its non-fiction counterparts. From AJA Symons Quest for Corvo to Laura Sewell Matter’s “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist” and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – and not forgetting Martin Edmonds Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, which I’ve just started – I’ve encountered some superb non-fiction biographical quests.  Continue reading →

An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Work of C.J. Dennis by Philip Butterss

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections, Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

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C.J. Dennis, Philip Butterss, Sentimental Bloke

IMG_0499

One of the few books – or objects of any sort – to come down to me from my great-grandparents is this battered copy of C.J. Dennis’s Songs of the Sentimental Bloke. Why did it survive when nothing else did? It’s not a signed copy, it’s not even a first printing, but an eighteenth impression from 1918. Like many Australians, my great-grandparents  would have loved this book during the war and perhaps that’s why it survived. As a kid, I remember my bewilderment at the cupid drawings and the impenetrable slang it is written in.

I dug it out from my bookshelf for the first time in many years because I’ve been reading Philip Butterss’s An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Work of C.J. Dennis. Published in 2014, it won the 2015 National Biography Award. I’ve just returned from Canberra where I had the chance to hear Butterss speak at a National Centre for Biography seminar.

Butterss’s biography covers the whole of Dennis’s life with a careful briskness and an admirable clarity. It’s a different kind of biography to what I’m attempting, perhaps more concerned with setting his work in the context of life and conveying information than weaving a narrative and creating scenes. That’s partly a consequence of its conciseness and scope; the author also mentioned to me the limited number of personal papers to draw on. The discussion of Dennis’s literary works are well integrated and gave me a good sense of his poetry. Butterss argues convincingly for Dennis’s significance to Australian literature while also demonstrating the limitations of Dennis’s work.

C.J. Dennis (1876-1938) was contemporaneous with Katharine Susannah Prichard, who was seven years younger. I was struck by some parallels and points of comparison.

  • Both had their first big success in 1915 during World War One, Dennis with the publication of Sentimental Bloke and Katharine with The Pioneers. Both books were popular works a long way removed from the war. Both writers had tribute dinners organised for them at Cafe Francais in Melbourne to celebrate their success a few months apart. It would be fair to say Dennis never developed far beyond what he achieved with that book, returning to the same characters and milieu in subsequent works with diminishing returns. Although Katharine’s breakthrough book sold well, it wasn’t nearly as successful as Sentimental Bloke, and it left her more incentive to develop as a writer.
  • While World War One radicalised Katharine, moving her to embrace communism, it shifted Dennis the other way. He’d been a radical and worked for Labor politicians, but he became quite conservative in his later years. In Butterss’ account, it was wealth and success more than the war which affected him. If The Pioneers had made Katharine a fortune, would it have affected her politics?
  • Both wrote in the Dandenongs east of Melbourne during the war. Dennis worked on Sentimental Bloke in Kallista in the early part of the war, while in 1918 Katharine wrote Black Opal 10km south of there in Emerald. This is why they appear together on this writers’ monument in Emerald. 20160115_125644
  • Both were journalists with strong ties to the Herald and Weekly Times – but while Katharine worked for the paper before the war, Dennis worked for it after the war.

I don’t yet know if they ever met, but they probably did. They at least had a number of associates in common, including Louis Esson, Furnley Maurice, and E.J. Brady.

I found particularly interesting the chapters in the biography on Dennis’s posthumous reception – his ‘afterlives’. I hadn’t realised that he is actually marginal in the Australian canon, his popular poetry not generally embraced by critics. His popularity has had its ups and downs over the decades, but more downs in recent years, light verse just not resonating with the reading public. However, the biography itself, the first full-length critical study, has ensured he is now better remembered a century on from his great success.

 

Prize money 

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Good on Charlotte Wood for breaking precedent and keeping her Stella Prize money. Could buy her enough time to write another. Writers make so little money that unless they’re  JK Rowling they should feel no pressure to give it away.

‘The bits that have floated to the surface’: a quote about historical evidence

16 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographical method, quotes, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

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Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner

Toward the end of her biography of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner offers a beautifully expressed quote from Louis Menand:

How much one can accurately convey of a life lived so much on the interior is debateable. As the American academic Louis Menand has observed, in the matter of historical research (and by extension biography), what has been written about takes on an importance that may be spurious:

A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance – even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. the historian clings to them while somewhere below the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

Suzanne Falkiner Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow (UWA Publishing, 2016) 726.

It’s more of a problem for a subject about whom little has survived – Shakespeare as an extreme example, the early Katharine Susannah Prichard as a less extreme example. Yet it subtly affects all biographies. Falkiner’s book would look very different if she her main source wasn’t Stow’s letters to his mother.

Soundtrack to a year: my favourite songs of 2015

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Nathan Hobby in lists, music, Uncategorized

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One album will put baby Thomas to sleep: Tiny Ruins’ Brightly Painted One. Itunes says I played the album’s best song, “She’ll Be Coming Around,” seventy times in 2015, but it wasn’t counting all the times it played in the car at 4am in the pre-dawn dark as I looped around the deserted restaurant strip. It’s a soothing indie-folk album, beauty inflected with a wistfulness, never completely sad like so much music I listen to.

It was the year of the Orbweavers too, a quintessentially Melbourne duo (also indie-folk, I suppose), who don’t sing about predictable themes, but instead draw on stories from their city’s history. Their most recent album, Loom, is superb, but my favourite of theirs is probably “On My Way Home,” a catchy and poignant song.

  1. She’ll Be Coming Around – Tiny Ruins (NZ, 2014)
    https://youtu.be/Up0bhJzi0iU
  2. On My Way Home – Orbweavers (Aust, 2009)
    https://youtu.be/ZycntAtNyWk
  3. Small Plane – Bill Callahan (US, 2013)
    https://youtu.be/Mh5km2xKlfk
  4. Gypsy Candle – Giant Sand (US, 2015)
    https://youtu.be/z3j522N_NNY
  5. My Least Favourite Life – Lera Lynn (US, 2015) –
    the best thing about True Detective season 2.
  6. Got You Well – Gabrielle Papillion (Canada, 2015)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr1-SKuNXyg
  7. Vacancy – Aisha Badru (US, 2015) – can you imagine if Sarah Blasko and Lisa Mitchell were the same person?
  8. Confession – Lotte Kestner (US, 2013)
    There’s a beautiful weariness to this song. “Sometimes the moment gets it right / I like the things you say when you drink”
    https://youtu.be/ZyihspIK57A
  9. Black Notebook – Ane Brun (Norway, 2015)
  10. If I Could Tell You – Nev Cottee (Britain, 2015)

Hugo Throssell and Katharine Susannah Prichard in the shadow of the Great War

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Katharine Susannah Prichard, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

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Hugo Throssell, World War One

A speech for “Katharine’s Birthday,” Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Sunday 6 December 2015

In London a hundred years ago Katharine Susannah Prichard met Hugo Throssell in the shadow of World War I. The war brought them together and cost them both so dearly. The Great War radicalised them, leading them to reject militarism and the system which had caused such a disaster. Continue reading →

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Archives

Recent Comments

informatika on Stella #1: The prologue
informatika on Giving a sense of everyday…
informatika on I’ve started a new blog…
industri on The biography of Hugo Thr…

Bookmarks

  • Adventures in Biography
  • ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
  • Bernice Barry
  • It only goes up to your knees
  • Jane Bryony Rawson
  • Jenn Plays Recorder
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre
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  • Treefall Writing – Melinda Tognini
  • Whispering Gums
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  • Glimpses of KSP - Leon Brodzky, Robbie and Bachelor Girls in 1909
  • Glimpses of KSP - Tarella Station
  • [Thursday 3pm #4] The tragedy of Robert Wadlow, world's tallest man?
  • Anger and Love by Justina Williams
  • Stella #1: The prologue

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  • 165,460 hits

Tag Cloud

9/11 19th century 33 1920s 1921 1930s 1950s 1970s 1971 1981 2000s 2004 2011 2015 2017 20000 Days on Earth A.S. Byatt Aboriginals activism Adam Begley Adrian Mole adultery afterlife Agatha Christie Alan Hollinghurst Alberto Manguel Alfred Deakin Amazing Grace Americana Amy Grant An American Romance Andre Tchaikowsky Andrew McGahan angela myers anne fadiman Anne Rice Arabian Nights archives art arts funding A Serious Man Ash Wednesday ASIO atheism Atonement Australia Australian film Australian literature Australian Short Story Festival autism autobiography autodidact Barbara Vine beach Belle Costa da Greene Bell Jar best best-of Bible Big Issue Bill Callahan biographical ethics biographical quest genre biographies birthday birthdays Black Opal Bleak House Blinky Bill blogging blogs Blue Blades Bodega's Bunch bog Booker book launch booksale Borges Brenda Niall Brian Matthews Brian McLaren Britney Spears Burial Rites Burke and Wills buskers C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis canon capitalism Carol Shields Carson McCullers Catcher in the Rye Catholicism celebrities Charles Dickens Charlie Kaufman childhood Child of the Hurricane children's books Choir of Gravediggers Christianity Christian writing Christina Stead Christmas Christopher Beha Cinque Terra Claire Tomalin classics cliches climate change Coen brothers coincidence Collie Collyer coming of age Communism concert Condensed Books consumerism Coonardoo Cormac McCarthy Corrections cosy fiction Dara Horn David Copperfield David Ireland David Marr David Suchet death Death of a president definition demolition Dennis LeHane dentist diaries divorce doctorow Doctor Who documentaries donald shriver Don DeLillo Don DeLillo Donna Mazza Donna Tartt Don Watson Dostovesky doubt drama dreams of revolution Drusilla Modjeska E.M. 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