Honouring KSP: 2 short videos on Katharine’s life & a tour of her house
20 Friday Nov 2020
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard
Tag Archives: KSP Writers’ Centre
The death of Katharine Susannah – 50 years today
02 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, link
It’s fifty years today since Katharine Susannah Prichard died. To mark the occasion, I wrote a post about her death for the KSP Writers Centre: https://www.kspwriterscentre.com/single-post/2019/10/02/Your-KS-48-The-death-of-Katharine-Susannah-Prichard.
Next month, Westerly will be publishing my creative non-fiction piece “‘As my Great Day Approaches’: Katharine Susannah Prichard in 1969”, which intertwines an account of Katharine’s final year with my own reflections on writing her biography and the meaning of death.
Katharine Susannah Prichard and David Helfgott: fundraiser this Friday
05 Tuesday Feb 2019
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
In March 1966, Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote to her son, ‘I had a wonderful night this week. My young friend, David Helfgott came to dinner – and played to me all the evening… To have so much glorious music – Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Liszt all to myself. It was almost too much. I felt quite drunk with it. But the young man himself is so modest & simple, although well informed about literature & art – discusses with me all the questions of political importance in our time.’ Continue reading
Katharine Susannah Prichard commemorative competition
23 Friday Nov 2018
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
Katharine Susannah Prichard looking out from her workroom. From This Australia 1985, date of photograph ca. 1930s.
Next October will be the fiftieth anniversary of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death. To mark the occasion, KSP Writers Centre (which meets in her house) is holding a literary competition. Entries are open to all Australian residents and citizens until 22 February in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The best entries will appear in an anthology to be launched in October. It is a themed competition, with entries needing a connection to Katharine, her work, or her house. I will be judging the non-fiction and fiction sections. I encourage you to enter!
http://www.kspwriterscentre.com/ksp-commemoration-competition
Katharine Susannah Prichard and Greenmount: the Biography and Literature of a Writer at Home
28 Saturday Jul 2018
Katharine Susannah Prichard in her garden in 1967 (Source: KSP Writers’ Centre)
Saturday 10am #9
This is a paper I presented at the Limina Conference at the University of Western Australia on 27 July 2018. The conference theme was “Home: Belonging and Displacement”.
In her memoir, Perth journalist Justina Williams describes seeing Katharine Susannah Prichard’s house for the first time in the 1930s:
[My uncle] Harry… gave up Sundays to drive us all in the A-model Ford… on an excursion to the hills… Ascending Greenmount’s steep stretch, the radiator fulfilled all [Grandma’s] fears by boiling over.
The car stopped at the junction of Old York Road—the original route to the Eastern Goldfields—and the Great Eastern Highway, almost at the gate of a small wooden cottage half hidden by pale blue plumbago and tangled grape vines. A red witch lived there, Grandma said, named Mrs Throssell… ‘She’s quite a famous writer… An awful scandal about her book…’
My desire to meet her stirred…. [But] [t]he house was empty. Harry got some water somewhere else and we moved on.[1]
Katharine Susannah Prichard Heritage Trail
07 Thursday Jun 2018
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, link
Katharine Susannah Prichard in her garden, 1967. Photo: KSP Writers’ Centre archives.
It’s always a beautiful shock to see Katharine Susannah Prichard in colour. This photo comes from my KSP Writers’ Centre column in May. I’ve written four columns about the heritage of the house itself, with more to come later when I’ve done further research. Katharine lived at the house in Greenmount for nearly fifty years, and the centre hopes to install a series of heritage plaques. The columns are available to read on the KSPWC website:
Reading at KSP Writers’ Centre, 19 February
01 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
Alas, blogging is one of the things which have fallen by the wayside as I try to keep up a gruelling (for me!) chapter-a-month. So far I’m on track. It’s complicated by the fact that several chapters, including February’s, have divided into two. I’ve given Hugo Throssell VC his own chapter to introduce him and describe how he met Katharine, his future wife, in 1915 after Gallipoli. It means Guido Baracchi, the perpetual student Katharine met at the end of the year, gets his own (shorter) introductory chapter too.
My reading from the biography at the KSP Writers’ Centre was a couple of weeks ago now. There were over thirty people who came, braving the extreme heat and the drive out into the hills. There were many people I knew and many I didn’t; I was grateful to them all for coming. It was so encouraging to see so much interest in the biography. I love engaging in discussion after a reading, and there were some perceptive questions. I need to come up with a concise answer to the question: “Why Katharine?”; there are good reasons, if not necessarily obvious ones. Novelist Jenny Ackland was at KSPWC for a writing retreat ahead of Perth Writers’ Festival and I was chuffed that she wrote about my talk and the centre on her blog.
Governess: a reading in February from the KSP biography
30 Monday Jan 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events, Uncategorized
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s also given me the rare opportunity to spend time in my subject’s house. The centre has many writing groups across genres, demographics, and timeslots. If you are a Western Australian writer, I encourage you to join up and be involved in some way – it needs your support more than ever in these days of limited government funding.
It’s chapter five I’ll be reading, “Governess,” the story of 1904 in Katharine’s life. I chose it because it’s a dramatic and largely unknown year of her life, as well as being quite self-contained as a narrative. Twenty-years-old and living away from home for the first time, Katharine set the tongues wagging in Yarram, a small country town in Gippsland. She beguiled several men, including a drug-addicted German doctor on the run from his wife. Starring in a play, she earned a new nickname. She gathered notes and impressions that she would turn into her first award-winning novel, The Pioneers, a decade later.
What better place to hear the story of this important year in Katharine’s life than at the house she lived in for fifty years? Tickets at the door.
Cyril Cook & the Lost Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard
27 Thursday Oct 2016
Your KS #15: Cyril Cook & the Lost Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard
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!
Katharine and Hugo in the shadow of the Great War: speech on Sunday
02 Wednesday Dec 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events, Uncategorized
It’s a hundred years ago on Friday since King George V decorated Katharine Susannah Prichard’s future husband, Hugo Throssell, with a Victoria Cross, Western Australia’s first. To mark the occasion, I’ve been asked to give a speech at Katharine’s Birthday, the annual end-of-year celebration at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, alongside Chris Horvath, a specialist on the 10th Light Horse. It’s an interesting assignment for a pacifist like me. Continue reading
