Remembering the Collie Saints: reflections of the 1996 Under 16s Most Improved

22 Sunday Feb 2015

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The captain of the Collie football team was in court last week, escaping jail after being convicted of kneeing an opposing player in the face during a game. I grew up in Collie, a coal-mining town fifty kilometres inland from Bunbury, two hundred kilometres south of Perth. I played football for a year, too, and going through a packing box which has sat in our spare room for two years, I recently found my trophy for Most Improved, Collie Saints under sixteens in 1996.

That year of football was a culmination of my three years at the high-school. It was a rough school, where fists ruled, and kids were brutal to each other. I took up playing football after years of hockey because we’d done football in phys-ed class in year nine, and everyone was amazed that I was one of the better players, at least against boys who mostly didn’t play. The ones who did play were inviting me to join their team; it was half a joke, because I was a nerd, and so very skinny. A second reason: I wanted to be consistent. I watched football on television with my dad and brother every weekend, and I collected football cards. It seemed inconsistent to not play.

There were two teams, the Collie Saints and the Mines Rovers, and you had to choose. The rivalry was not just friendly; it was more defining than religion or ethnicity. I chose the Saints, because I liked St Kilda. In the clubroom, there was a picture of an aerial mark from the sixties, with a caption, “The closest a Collie Saint will ever get to heaven,” disturbing for an earnest Baptist.

I wasn’t prepared for the violence of the game, the constant, bruising physicality of it. It was a test, and I endured, but not easily. The first game on a Friday night was a derby against the hated Mines Rovers Eagles. We had a full team that week, bulked up by five or six good athletes who came just for the derby. I was in the front pocket, and panicked the one time the ball came to me, kicking it out of bounds. The rest of the season, I was moved to the back pocket, usually finding myself pitted against solid behemoths on the other team. I was reasonably effective, with only one or two goals scored by my opponents in the whole year. Once when we were losing badly, one of the dads at half-time pointed at me and said, “Look at this kid – fuck-all skills but there he is trying his guts out. Can’t you at least do that?” I nearly cried; it was a harsh compliment.

Our team didn’t do well; that first derby match was one of the few we won, as our undermanned team played in the mud of country town ovals each week against stronger, better teams. There was a strong sense of camaraderie, though; we were warriors together.

At the end of the year, our family moved to Bunbury. I trained a few times with the South Bunbury team the next year, and coming home with bruises, exhausted by all the running, I asked myself why I was doing it, and I realised I didn’t know. I quit football, not just the playing, but the watching. In the years since, I’ve developed an allergy to the dominance of football in Western Australian culture.

*

Some time after I left, the two struggling Collie football clubs merged, and became one very strong club, the Collie Eagles, winning premiership after premiership in the league. Perhaps in having to swallow old rivalries, a new peace exists in the town and in the school.

I haven’t been back to Collie much. My childhood has this extra layer of distance from me, having grown up in a place I no longer have ties to, even though it lies just up the hill from where my parents still live. It seems a strange place for me to have grown up.

“So let us put him in the thick of it”: reconstructing the unknown

20 Friday Feb 2015

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Cook-tableau

I’ve just been to a Perth Writers’ Festival talk by two biographers, Hamish McDonald and Madonna King. The conversation around the process of biography was interesting. McDonald’s latest book, War of Words is the biography of a Japanese-raised European, Charles Bavier, born in 1888, while King’s is a biography of Australian politician, Joe Hockey. They are both journalists, but King’s book seemed particularly a work of journalism from the way she spoke about it. She interviewed three hundred people and wrote it intensively, seven days a week, over the course of a year. McDonald started his in 1982, when there were still were people alive who knew Bavier well, but it is inevitably a historical enterprise. Despite this, he said at one point that he wasn’t pretending his was a footnoted history. In the literal sense this is completely true – indeed it is not referenced at all (there is a bibliography), which seems a terrible lack to me. I may be an unusual reader, but footnotes reveal much about method, and can be fascinating to me. But he also meant it in another sense – his insertion of several scenes of reconstructions, where he imagines what Bavier was doing during historical events McDonald knew he experienced. Continue reading →

Forgotten century?: the problem of preserving the past against obsolescence

13 Friday Feb 2015

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News story on the Guardian today:

Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.

In this story comes together all my hats: librarian; novelist writing about memoralisation; biographer using the traces of the past. In the long and often intelligent conversation in the comments thread, opinion seemed divided between those who agreed there was a problem (many of them Gen Xers and Baby Boomers); the technological optimists who think it will take five minutes to write a program to read anything in the future; and those living in a perpetual present who don’t even care if our worthless traces are obliterated.

In 2008, when I started working in the library I remain in one day a week, I was confronted with the problem of the Tape Collection, thousands of significant and insignificant public lectures and sermons recorded on decaying cassettes in a time-poor library. In the early 1980s, it was the pride of the library; they had to limit how many tapes anyone borrowed at once. They had a master version and a copy of each one. Thirty years later, we could never give the Tape Library the thousands of hours it required. We weeded. We began a digitisation program in between the gaps of just trying to get through the mountain of new material. IT issues ground us to a halt; there wasn’t enough server space to provide public access to the files. The digitised files are waiting for the right moment on a hard drive. But the majority of the data remains on tapes. And here, as far as I’m concerned, is the real problem. Not a limit of technology, but of time, in libraries and archives with mountains of Material Awaiting Processing, often measured in metres.

James Wilson’s The Dark Clue: A fictional biographer on the trail of J. M. W. Turner’s secrets

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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Spoiler alert

In James Wilson’s The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (2001), Walter Hartright and his sister-in-law, Marian Halcombe, set out to investigate the life of the British painter J. M. W. Turner a couple of decades after his death. Walter has been informally commissioned by Lady Eastlake, supposedly to provide a more acceptable account of Turner’s life than a muck-raking biographer named Thornbury, who we never actually meet. With its subject and setting in London at the height of Victorianism, as well as borrowing its protagonists from a Wilkie Collins’ novel, it is a deeply Victorian novel concerned with respectability and repression. Walter sets about interviewing people who remember Turner, and learns contradictory things about the painter. Marian tries to unearth Turner’s early life through letters and journals. They are led toward dark secrets in Turner’s life, only to begin to suspect they are actually being used for other people’s agenda. The mania Walter finds in Turner’s life infects his own, as he unleashes his repressed sexuality and becomes, a little unconvincingly, something of a sex fiend.

It is an intriguing premise, and seems well-researched. However, its epistolary narration works against it, and the whole novel feels as if it is relating events at too far a remove as characters diarise or correspond about things which have happened to them. The most engaging scenes are those which shake off the pretence of being letters or diaries and just directly narrate.

I was drawn to it as an example of the biographical quest novel made famous by A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). Many bioquest novels are set in the present with biographers unearthing the secrets of past ages, particularly the Victorian or Edwardian ages. Yet The Dark Clue has an intra-Victorian setting – the mid-Victorian era interrogating the early-Victorian era. The passages most typical of the bioquest are the ones in which Marian uncovers archival secrets. The novel has the quest structure, yet resists the romance conventions of the genre – it has a darker heart, with the quest leading not to personal redemption for Walter and Marian but near-destruction and misery.

The biographical project itself is left quite unresolved, abandoned because of the effect on the biographers. Walter and Marian end up fearing they are being tricked into producing a biography which condemns Turner as a paedophile and murderer in order to get around a stipulation in his will requiring that a gallery dedicated to his work be built if the nation wished to retain ownership of the paintings. This central premise seems slippery to me. Firstly, isn’t the rival biographer, Thornbury, supposed to be the muck-raker? Secondly, and more importantly, Victorian biography avoided scandal. Would there have even been muck-rakers like Thornbury, let alone a gentleman like Walter publishing shocking allegations about a well-known painter? The biographer Froude was heavily criticised in the period for merely suggesting Thomas Carlyle was impotent. The abandonment of the project, at least, is realistic for the period if such discoveries were made. Interestingly, it echoes another bioquest from the same year, Barbara Vine’s The Blood Doctor, in which the secret is too shocking for the present-day biographer (the subject’s descendant) to continue.

I haven’t yet seen the recent film, Mr Turner, so I can’t make the obvious comparison to it, but I do half intend to watch it.

Details

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Katharine Susannah Prichard, research

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A trap for biographers is to think others will care about the details as much as they do. Don’t get me wrong – people really care when biographers are sloppy in their research and gets the details wrong. But I think of Alister McGrath’s 2013 biography of C. S. Lewis and how he devotes so very many pages to his great discovery that Lewis’s conversion to Christianity needs to be redated by a year from Lewis’s own account. The redating is somewhat significant, the conversion being a defining event of his life, and no doubt it affects some other things – but it doesn’t actually change the story of his life, which I think is what matters most to readers and even to our sense of history. To put it another way, I’m not sure most readers share McGrath’s sense of triumph, even if they’re glad he’s corrected the historical record.

I’m having many Alister McGrath moments in my Katharine Susannah research, redating and revising details of her childhood. I feel like such a clever detective as I edit my spreadsheet. But in the end, much of this will not even make it into the biography.

Several such moments today. Try to share my excitement, will you?

I’ve long been stumped by just when the Prichards left Fiji, and in my last post I said I wasn’t sure if it was 1888 or 1889 when they arrived in Melbourne. Yet it turns out there was a good reason they weren’t appearing in the shipping records for either of those years – Katharine Susannah arrived with her mother and two little brothers on 15 January 1887 as a three year old. She was in Melbourne not only for the great centennial exhibition of 1888, but also for Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations of 1887. She was so young she may not have had any memory of them later, but the spirit of those years must have affected her.

The movements of Katharine’s father, Thomas Henry, are curious. He stayed behind in Fiji for another eight months, before leading a delegation to Melbourne to urge the annexation of Fiji by Victoria. Leading such a delegation doesn’t seem the action of someone about to leave the colony, with his family already in Australia – yet it seems likely he resigned as editor of the Fiji Times (or was sacked) at about this same time, when the newspaper itself was moving from Levuka to Suva. There is no record of him returning to Fiji, and the next sighting of him is on a ship to Launceston, Tasmania in May 1888.

Here’s where a source I’d dismissed proved to be true. Because he was the deputy-editor of Launceston’s Daily Telegraph from 1893 to 1895, I assumed the Cyclopedia of Tasmania was simply wrong when it said he was the editor in 1888. But it was correct – he did spend a stint as editor at this time, possibly leaving due to ill-health, eventually taking up the position of editor of Melbourne’s The Sun around August 1889.

Two lessons for me – firstly, not to dismiss the piece of the puzzle which wasn’t fitting. It actually was a fact I wasn’t ready to accept. Secondly, the truth is rarely neat, and a challenge in narrating all this will be to sum up all these comings and goings in an engaging way. (If I was writing a novel, I would not be making such a messy series of events, with THP going back and forward so many times.)

For two and a half years, Katharine would not have seen her father much at all. It wouldn’t have been an unusual situation, but it must have been difficult, such a long time for a child, and she doesn’t mention it in her autobiography. It accounts for just how significant the big network of aunts and uncles are in her own account of her childhood. Getting the dates right – the details, if you will – has revealed something which wouldn’t be apparent otherwise. So details do matter, but more for how they change the story than for their own sake.

Australia Day reflections: the 1888 centenary

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Katharine Susannah Prichard arrived with her family in Melbourne as a small child in 1888 or 1889 – I’m yet to pinpoint the date. I do hope it was 1888, as it is a symbolic year – the centenary of white settlement. I’ve been reading about the centenary celebrations this week, and they reveal much about Australian sense of identity at that point. Australia was wrestling with its still recent (in some places) convict past; ignoring the white displacement of Aborigines, and still very excited about gold.

It had been Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations the previous year, and that had exhausted much of the money that might have gone into celebrating the centenary in New South Wales. The richer and newer “little sister” to the south – Melbourne – offered to take the lead, putting on a great exhibition that ran from August 1888 to March 1889, with two million people passing through. If the Prichards had reached Melbourne by then, they were surely among that number. In Social Sketches of Australia, Humphrey McQueen notes “Melbourne’s leading role in the centenary celebrations confirmed that it was recent wealth and not early beginnings which was being reviewed, though not scrutinised.” (2) Richard Waterhouse notes that “when those commemorating 1788 referred to the colony’s founder it was Captain Cook the discoverer of New South Wales who was valorised, not Arthur Phillip the founder of a convict colony.” (“Commemoration, Celebration, and ‘the Crossing'”). This suggests the long confused association of James Cook with 26 January 1788 is not simply a recent mistake of the ignorant.

The references to Aborigines in 1888 in the two contemporary sources I’ve read both call attention to their failure to “use the land” productively, a convenient myth which is still being corrected today. One of these sources is “A Centenary Review”, which appeared in The Argus at the opening of the exhibition. It’s a little tedious when it’s not being outrageous by today’s understandings, but in between it is also quite fascinating, offering a history of the nation as it was perceived in 1888.

The article looks toward the hope of federation, and Katharine Susannah Prichard was truly to be a writer of the new nation which would formally begin a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday. Growing up in Melbourne and Launceston, living for fifty years in Perth with a stint in Sydney and regular visits to Canberra, she cared about the whole nation and depicted so many phases of its life – from miners to station workers to Aboriginals and even to the comfortable suburbanites most of us have become.

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Winged Seeds: A Review

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Spoiler Alert

The third novel in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy, Winged Seeds (1950) sees her writing about a war which was only just over. It begins brightly in 1936, with vivacious twins turning up on the doorstep of the trilogy’s hero, the aging Sally Gough. Pat and Pam are twenty years old and the stepdaughters of Sally’s arch-enemy, Sir Paddy Cavan. Their visit gives Prichard an opportunity to show us the state of the goldfields at the time. Their flirtatious ways set tongues wagging in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, and a barometer of the sexual mores of the time. Yet the twins are not as easy as they seem; Pam is faithful to her fiancee fighting in the Spanish Civil War and Pat is in love with Sally’s grandson, Bill. They are fiercely anti-fascist, but cannot reveal their true sympathies until they turn twenty-one and inherit their father’s fortune, currently held by their wicked stepfather. Bill is the communist hero of this installment, taking on the mantle from his uncle, Tom, who dies early in the novel, his lungs destroyed by the mine. Bill is torn between his dedication to the cause and his desire for the “siren” Pat.

With various other subplots, there is already plenty enough to sustain an interesting narrative, but as in several other novels of Prichard’s, she unpicks her own set up. The twins leave suddenly; Bill goes off to fight World War Two. The protagonists of the first half only put in guest appearances for the rest of the novel, as the focus returns to Sally, as she struggles with what to make of World War Two, swayed and confused by debates around it, as well as re-living the grief of the Great War in which she lost one son and a second from its after-effects. Bill returns home from Greece injured, only to recover and be sent to New Guinea, where he goes missing, presumed killed by the Japanese. Pat drifts away from her commitment to progressive politics, marrying an American officer.  What was the novel building toward in its first half if not for Bill and the twins to do something extraordinary for the cause of communism? There is poignancy, though, in Sally trying to make sense of Bill’s death, and to find transcendence in the midst of death and disappointment.

The trilogy finishes wearily, with the two survivors, Sally and Dinny, burying Kalgoorla, the Aboriginal woman who they have known from the beginning, and finding hope in the winged seeds blown out from the kalgoorluh plant. Sally’s sons were dead, her grandson Billy was dead, but the ideas they lived for were immortal:

The life force strives towards perfection. What other imperative is there in living? The struggle had gone on through the ages. The vital germ in a seed attained its fine flowering and full fruit. How then could the great ideas and ideals of human progress be denied and annihilated? They could not. That was what Bill had believed , and what he tried to make people understand. (379)

Sandra Burchill comments that “… the optimistic vision for the future is not supported by any event in the novel and exists as a contradiction of what the trilogy has defined as a worsening situation both locally and internationally…” (364) The Cold War was a difficult period for Prichard to be writing in. She was a survivor like Sally, and had lived long enough to see more deaths and disappointments than most could bear.

At times the novel shimmers with the intensity and beauty of Prichard at her best. The scene in which Sally confronts her cheating lover, Frisco Jo, is particularly vivid. However, these passages are surrounded by long sections of “reportage”, the broader picture of the conditions of the goldfields conveyed through a session of “yarning” in which characters become mouthpieces for the information (Burchill, 313-314). It is a bold attempt to achieve a bigger canvas, but it is a significant reason why the trilogy was not as well regarded as Prichard hoped.

It is in print with Allen and Unwin, including in digital form; you can also pick up a secondhand first edition for not much more.

Work Cited

Burchill, Sandra. “Katharine Susannah Prichard: Romance, Romanticism and Politics.” PhD diss., UNSW (Australian Defence Force Academy), 1988.

My favourite albums of 2014

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

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I’ve been finding almost all my music on Radio National’s Inside Sleeve. I assumed my taste was quite broad, and then a reviewer compared the two most different albums I bought all year as being in the same family (those by Lily & Madeline and Luluc). To rework an old joke about country and western, these days I like all three kinds of music – indie folk, new folk, and folk pop. As long as it’s a woman singing, by the look of it. This photograph shows Luluc, who released the widely-acclaimed Passenger this year, playing to an audience of thirty in the Rosemount. I liked being on such intimate terms with them, but they deserve better!

1. Laura Jean – Laura Jean

Melbourne’s Laura Jean is very droll and confessional, and likes to sing about kelpies. Her songs are poems. “First Love Song” and “Don’t Marry the One You Love” should be hits.

Days can be filled so easily / With small tasks and pottering / People ask me what I do / I guess now I look after you.

2. Luluc – Passenger

Luluc are a duo also from Melbourne. Their music has a smooth, melancholy beauty.

Your words fall down like water/ Spilling off the page

3. Soko – I Thought I was an Alien

Soko is French; her music is quirky but also earnestly beautiful, as she pleads and denounces her lovers in her husky little-girl voice.

Today was your birthday / And I didn’t dare to call / But I thought about you all day / Even at midnight I wanted to call /
To be honored to be the first one to send you my love / And wish you / Happy hippie birthday

4. Alela Diane – About Farewell

Diane is a US singer-songwriter, with a country tinge which is under control in this break-up album. I bought it in July, and it has the winter chill in it.

Some things are best if kept in darkness
Only true before the dawn
Ghost ships, silent, deathly sting
Before the canon storm

5. Kathryn Williams – Crown Electric

Williams is a British singer-songwriter who Spotify recommended because I liked Holly Throsby, which is a good comparison. It’s an album ranging across moods and themes, often finding transcendence in the everyday.

Come and go faces in the crowd
Like one big wave crashing into town

*

I bought Tiny Ruins’ Brightly Painted One just in the last week of the year and it will be bound to make next year’s list, as I like it very much.

Link: Review of The Quest for Corvo

03 Saturday Jan 2015

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Fellow biographer Laura Sewell Matter has been reading one of my favourite biographies, A. J. A. Symon’s Quest for Corvo. Her post intertwines a review of the book with reflections on writing biography. I identify with her thoughts on the personal relationship between the biographer and subject, and particularly like this:

Others have admired Rolfe’s work, but only Symons knows it comprehensively. There is, almost, possessiveness in this. Consider two meanings of “subject”: 1. the person or thing being described, 2. one placed under the authority or control of another, as a vassal. If Rolfe was Symons’ subject in the latter sense as well as the former–and arguably a writer is always in control of their subject–at least Symons was a benevolent ruler, who cast his subject in the most favorable light possible, given the life in question.

I hadn’t thought of the second meaning of “subject” in connection to biography, but it does shed light on one of the impulses in the relationship.

I, for one, am really looking forward to reading Laura’s biography of Charles Fisk one day.

Lessons from biopics: reflections on biography and The Imitation Game

03 Saturday Jan 2015

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The Imitation Game adapts a 768 page biography, Andrew Hodge’s Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). It does it very well, focusing on the years Turing spent at Bletchley Park in World War Two breaking the German Enigma code but intertwining it with a past and future strand – his doomed love for a fellow-boarder, Christopher, as a young teenager; and his arrest for indecency in the 1950s. In two hours we gain some sense of the span of his life, and the film succeeds as both a thrilling war drama and a biopic. Lytton Strachey would approve. When he set out to change biography, he believed that biography could be art by virtue of selection, the artfully arranged, representative scenes of a life. Today, “biopics” (think Iron Lady, Walk the Line) attempt this, and biographies, seeking to be comprehensive, generally do not.

Biopics have much to offer the biographer in methodological possibility. Surely there are other readers like me who want to read biography for interest, but not generally the comprehensive brick. We should look to biopics for inspiration for a form of biography which is not simply a condensed brick, but a more Stracheyean form. Perhaps a central drama in a subject’s life, intertwined with subplots from past and future points. There would be a suggestion of the whole, without the detail of the whole. It would be the length of a shortish novel, two to three hundred pages. It need not take on the biopic’s creative sins – the amalgamated characters, the invented dialogue – but rely on the best tradition of biographical storytelling without being shackled by comprehensiveness. It would not replace the comprehensive biography, which needs to be written, but it would supplement it so well, perhaps revitalise biography as a readers’ genre and as an art form.

(I say this, and yet my first comment coming out of the cinema was that there was so much to Imitation Game that really it required a long-form drama, a series of ten to twenty hours. The problem of scope and detail is a significant one in biography. Yet perhaps my point stands, because far more detail fits within a two hundred page book than a two hour film – it could be enough to tell the kind of representative story I have in mind.)

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Speaking of the biopics’ “creative sins”, it’s actually a curious thing that biographies are adapted as biopics rather than documentaries. Biographies are not generally written in scenes (although this is something I want to attempt as much as possible, in a modified way), and biographers who invent dialogue are often heavily criticised. Biopics are given far more leeway – it’s usually acceptable to amalgamate characters or create them and to simplify chronology and turning points. Of course, there’s still pushback, with many viewers and critics expecting a high degree of historical accuracy; Imitation Game’s Wikipedia article currently has a lengthy section dedicated to perceived inaccuracies. A documentary would actually recreate the approach of a biography much more closely on film – a narrator takes the place of the author. Actors read portions of documents. Re-enactments have a certain tenuousness to them – it’s a mood or a setting rather than a full scene. Interviews are used. These conventions are able to convey the limits of the historical record, like biography does.