The deaths of John Curtin: his biographers’ accounts of his last days

04 Friday Jul 2025

Posted by in biographical method, John Curtin

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The other final photograph of Curtin - Ray Tracey, John & Elsie Curtin, Jessie Pincombe at the Lodge, 27 April 1945, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, JCPML00450/6.

Prime Minister John Curtin died 80 years ago on 5 July 1945 in an upstairs bedroom at the Lodge. He’d been taken up to the bedroom by stretcher on 22 May after leaving a small private hospital in Canberra. He never came back down those stairs. He died in his sleep at 4am with a nurse named Marjorie Sirl by his side. His wife Elsie was in an adjoining room, unable to sleep.

Or was she? The newspaper accounts of the time seem to have all used the same press release (I haven’t been able to find it in the archives though) which stated Elsie was also by his side when he died. But Elsie wrote a short memoir of Curtin as a series of articles published in Perth’s Daily News in 1950 and she states that the nurse came to her room to tell her he was dead. I trust her own account, five years after the event, over the reporting at the time which would not have come directly from her or Sirl. It’s a small detail but it dramatically changes the picture of Curtin’s last moment.

I’ve been writing my account of Curtin’s last months and death in my biography. Not because I’ve nearly finished – far from it – but I was working on an exhibition on this theme at work and so it seemed a good time to immerse myself in this period at home in my research.

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The Mysterious Cities of Gold

22 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in fiction, television

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Over several months, I rewatched The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982) with my kids. It was my favourite show when I was nine; it is even stranger than I remember. In a quest for the seven cities of gold, two orphans with matching pendants – one of them apparently an Incan – lead a group of treasure hunters across South America in the sixteenth century. A joint French-Japanese production, it is a 39-episode serial, repetitious and veering between the predictable and the bizarre. In many episodes, the children solve an ancient puzzle or discover an artefact or a clue, only for the temple or other structure to collapse around them. Everything is designed for self-destruction in the path of the Spaniards. They find a solar-powered ship made of gold then, after it burns up, a flying condor made of gold, both of them the creations of an ancient vanished civilisation. But then it grows even stranger two-thirds through the season as they encounter alien humanoids with futuristic technology who are also in the hunt for the cities of gold.

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1945: The Price of Peace exhibition

21 Saturday Jun 2025

Posted by in archives and sources, John Curtin, Katharine Susannah Prichard

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For many weeks, my son asked me each day what I was doing at work, and each day the answer was the same: the exhibition! His anticipation built and I was relieved when I could finally tell him it was installed. (How long can it possibly take to do one exhibition?) Last weekend, I took him and the rest of the family to Curtin University to see it. Curated by the special collections co-ordinator, Sally Laming, and I, ‘1945: The Price of Peace’ commemorates the death of John Curtin and the end of the Second World War. The title is taken from the words of John Curtin in parliament a few months before his death: ‘There is a price the world must pay for peace … I shall not attempt to specify the price, but it does mean less nationalism, less selfishness, less race ambition.’

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A Katharine Susannah Prichard treasure from Ebay

10 Tuesday Jun 2025

Posted by in books, Katharine Susannah Prichard

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I’m only missing a few Katharine Susannah Prichard books from my collection and so these days filling in a gap is rare – and often expensive. I wasn’t expecting to come across a copy of Clovelly Verses, especially not at a price I could stretch to. But there it was in my Ebay alerts for $200.

Clovelly Verses was Katharine’s first book, a tiny pamphlet of conventional nature poems privately printed in 1913 while she was living in London. ‘Let me not forget / Each tiny floweret / Which in the hedgerow grows’. It was an undistinguished debut, if it could be considered that, but it pleased the dedicatee: her mother.

Katharine would hand copies out to friends and people she met. She gave one to the playboy socialist, Guido Baracchi, when she met him on the boat from Columbo to Australia in the last days of 1915. He thought it was brilliant and nearly 60 years later, after Katharine’s death, he told her son he would pay anything for a copy; his had been borrowed and not returned.

I’m not sure of this inscription in my copy – I think it will remain a mystery. Katharine has also made a couple of hand corrections to poems.

I’ve seen the book twice before. The first time, at the National Library, an uncatalogued copy was slipped in a file of other items. A secret copy to greet future researchers. The second was in a private library of the son of a friend of the family. It had a lengthy dedication and a letter from Katharine’s son slipped inside it.

A consequence of my acquisition: I’m now checking Ebay far too often, greeted by alerts from a seller eagerly relisting a 1980s KSP paperback each week.

A Memorial Trail for Griff Watkins

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in biographical quests, creative nonfiction, news and events

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Griffith Watkins in Kalgoorlie, 1966. Courtesy Betty Brennan.

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.

Water colour painting of trees.

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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Kim E. Beazley: Father of the House

05 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in book review, John Curtin, memoirs, politics and current affairs

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When Kim E. Beazley (father of the Labor leader) died in 2007, he left behind the manuscript of a memoir, Father of the House. It was published posthumously by Fremantle Press in 2009, edited by the wonderful Janet Blagg, who also worked on my first book. Beazley emerges in the pages of this memoir as a principled politician, and an uneasy Laborite. He succeeded John Curtin as the federal member for Fremantle after Curtin’s death in 1945; he was only 26 and he was to remain in parliament though the entire winter of opposition for Labor from 1949 to 1972, before finally retiring in 1977.

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An Eye for Eternity, chapter 1

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in biographical method, biographies, biography as a literary form

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Cover of the book

Mark McKenna opens his 2011 biography of the Australian historian Manning Clark (1915-1991) with a beautiful section describing Clark’s voice. ‘His voice sounded the entire person.’ We read accounts of what Clark sounded like from different people who knew him, weaving snippets of quotes, ranging over his whole life. It’s such a wonderful way to introduce Clark, giving a sense of his character and some landmarks of his life. It shifts subtly into a discussion of his appearence and then onto his personality. It’s a brilliant opening chapter.

Another thing I love: the photographs are integrated into the text. They’re right next to the relevant text. I wanted this for my KSP biography but wasn’t allowed it, alas. I think I’ll try again next time!

Two page spread of the book.

Author Talk at Dianella Library: The Life, Loves and Books of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the Red Witch of Greenmount

11 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by in news and events

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I’m giving a free talk about Katharine Susannah Prichard at Perth’s Dianella Library on 24 July. Thanks to Stirling Libraries and Community History for hosting me. If you live nearby, please come along. I will have copies of The Red Witch for sale at a special price.

The Life, Loves and Books of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the Red Witch of Greenmount
5pm, Wednesday 24 July 2024
Stirling Libraries – Dianella, Waverly St Dianella.
Free tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/the-red-witch-author-talk-with-nathan-hobby

The Death of the Author

01 Wednesday May 2024

Posted by in R.I.P.

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Paul Auster has died. He is my favourite novelist. Being of a morbid disposition, I’ve been imagining this day for many years and now it’s true. I’ve been reading him for 25 years. Appropriately, there’s two versions in my memory of how I found him. In one version, I remember roaming the shelves of the Murdoch University library as a first year, picking books off the shelf serendipitously – which is not quite randomly – and once I picked up one of his books – perhaps Leviathan – and was hooked. In the other version, it was through my creative writing class I discovered him, an extract from The Invention of Solitude which I loved. Either way, I took out the Invention of Solitude after that and halfway through, I accidentally left it on a bench at the Perth Busport and had to pay $100 for a replacement (they did not replace it) and be reprimanded by a librarian. It was some years before I got to finish reading that beautiful memoir.

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