I came across Griff Watkins (1930-1969) for the first time in The Fremantle Press Anthology of WA Poetry, edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan. It was a wonderful poem about a Perth heatwave in the 1960s which reminded me of W.H. Auden. The snippet of his biography intrigued me: he drowned himself in the Swan River at Claremont a couple of years after the publication of his debut novel, The Pleasure Bird. After that, I kept on running into him. I found out he’d taught at Collie Senior High School in the South-West, where I’d gone to school in the 1990s. I was visiting Murdoch University’s Special Collections and saw his papers on display. I read his novel and I loved it. I wondered if it would be possible to write a whole book about my quest for Griff, a book about posthumous obscurity, the more typical writerly life of moderate success and many failures, the hauntings of a literary ghost in Perth. But there wasn’t enough material and there wouldn’t be enough interest.

I was thinking of abandoning the project altogether when a PhD student named Mary asked me what I was working on. It turned out her mother, Betty, now in her late 90s, had taught with Griff in Collie. (Coincidentally, Mary’s sister, Pip, was also my mentee in the Four Centres Writing Program.) It was a sign. I interviewed Betty over the phone; she remembered Griff so sharply and insightfully. She had the beautiful photo, above, of Griff on a motorbike from his last visit in Kalgoorlie, and this painting of his (below) he had given her as a wedding present. The scale of my piece shifted: I would tell of my quest for Griff in a single creative non-fiction essay. It was published last year in Westerly 69.1 – my great achievement of 2024!

Some postscripts:

Mary read the piece to Betty, and said she enjoyed it. I was sad to hear of Betty’s death soon after.

I found out after I’d published that my great uncle, John Stanlake, going strong at 94 and an exact contemporary of Griff’s, had known him at Claremont Teachers’ College. I think the connections would keep piling up the longer I spent with Griff.

You can purchase Westerly 69.1 here. And you can read the manuscript version of ‘A Memorial Trail for Griff Watkins’ below.

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