IN THE 1930S, a journalist’s grandmother pointed out a wooden cottage near the top of a hill on the outskirts of Perth and said that a ‘red witch’ named Katharine Susannah Prichard lived there. Thirty years later, that journalist used the term in an article celebrating Katharine’s eightieth birthday and ‘red witch’ began to catch on as a moniker for her.1 It captures a notorious woman on the fringes, marked by her literary powers and her left-wing politics. She had other names too and the Workers Star ran many of them together when it used to call her ‘Comrade Mrs Hugo Throssell: world famous revolutionary authoress’.2 She was all of those things—founding member of the Communist Party of Australia, widow of a war hero who came from an establishment family, and an author whose distinctively Australian novels were published around the world.
My path to becoming Katharine’s biographer began with a novel I had been working on. Writing about a fictional biographer for five years before abandoning the manuscript, I was intrigued by the pursuit of the past, the quest to tell the story of someone from their archival remains. It became clear to me that I needed to do that in real life, rather than only imagining it. I wanted to write about someone who had walked the same streets as me in Perth. The more I looked at Katharine Susannah Prichard’s life, the more it seemed her many biographical mysteries and controversies hadn’t been untangled and her story had not yet been fully told. What’s more, I found her work as interesting as her life; I’d always liked Coonardoo, but I started reading through her other books from the beginning and found a breadth and vitality which surprised me.
Katharine’s first story appeared in 1899 and her final novel in 1967. At the high point of that long career, she wrote two novels widely regarded as landmarks in Australian literature, Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929).3 The Bulletin called Working Bullocks ‘a work of genius’ and ‘probably the best novel ever written in Australia’.4 In 1931, the critic HM Green wrote that she was ‘the most representative novelist that Australia has yet produced … No set of novels by any one author gives a better idea of this country than those of Katharine Susannah Prichard’.5 By then, she had written novels set in regional areas of four Australian states—nineteenth-century Gippsland, Victoria in The Pioneers (1915); the opal-mines around Lightning Ridge in outback New South Wales in Black Opal (1921); the karri forests of South-West Western Australia in Working Bullocks; Launceston, Tasmania in The Wild Oats of Han (1928); a cattle station in Western Australia’s Pilbara in Coonardoo; and regional towns across several states in Haxby’s Circus (1930). She would later add her saga of the development of the Western Australian goldfields, a trilogy beginning with The Roaring Nineties (1946). Given Australia was highly urbanised even then, it would be truer to say that Katharine largely gave Australia the idea of itself it wanted to read—an Australia of the ‘bush’ and the ‘outback’. Intimate Strangers (1937), set in Perth, is her only significant novel with a metropolitan setting.6
Katharine lived long enough to feel neglected in the post– World War II literary landscape. She wrote in 1968 that it was a ‘shock’ to read in the introduction to Modern Australian Writing a reference to ‘a “naissance”, not a “renaissance”, of Australian literature, implying that nothing worth mentioning had happened in the literature of Australia before the advent of Patrick White and Randolph Stow’.7 Today, while White and Stow may continue to have a greater cachet, literary scholars view Katharine as a major twentieth-century Australian writer. Coonardoo, with its story of the thwarted love between a white man and an Aboriginal woman, had become part of the Australian ‘canon’ by the 1980s, taught in high schools and universities.8 However, this century it has become a controversial novel, with scholars identifying problems in the way it depicts Aboriginal people, arguing it reflects racist assumptions of its time and fails to understand the white violence which formed the backdrop to Aboriginal lives.9 At the same time as this ongoing reassessment of Coonardoo, other scholars have recently examined less well-known aspects of Katharine’s work, including her drama and poetry, her reception in East Germany and the USA, and her first novel, The Pioneers.10 As well as this continuing scholarly interest, Katharine has a popular following, with a number of her books remaining in print and her wooden cottage now a writers’ centre named in her honour. In 2020, Working Bullocks and Intimate Strangers were selected for republication by Untapped: the Australian literary heritage project. All of this indicates Katharine’s ongoing significance to Australian literature.
Katharine’s life itself has also long been of interest to historians. She lived from the end of Australia’s colonial period to the middle of the Vietnam War and her evolving worldview—from doubting Christian to progressive patriot to idealistic radical to stubborn communist—is an illustrative journey through responses to the upheavals of the first seven decades of the twentieth century. In Exiles at Home (1981), Drusilla Modjeska discusses Katharine as a key figure in a generation of women writers negotiating writing, politics, and sexism between 1925 and 1945. Other historians have a very negative take on Katharine’s life. Desmond Ball and David Horner contend that she was at the centre of a Soviet spy ring during World War II; the claim, I argue in chapter 31, is unproven and dependent on an unreliable source. Just as The Red Witch is going to press, her granddaughter, Karen Throssell, has published a book telling of the effects of these allegations on the family and particularly her father, Ric. Conservative commentators such as Hal Colebatch believe Katharine’s support for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin make her legacy ‘a strange and dishonourable one’ to ever celebrate.11 It’s true that her loyalty to Stalin is a dark part of her legacy which needs to be reckoned with. In tracing her political journey in this biography, I found that she was guilty not of intentionally deceiving others nor of any evil intent but of deceiving herself; she had a fundamentalist faith in the Soviet Union and refused to accept anything which contradicted it.
Katharine had a troubled relationship to biography in her lifetime, and it carried over after her death as her son, Ric Throssell, became the guardian of her legacy. She found it harder to write her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane (1963), than any other book. She claimed she hadn’t wanted to write about herself but needed to set the record straight after a postgraduate student ‘wrote a very distorted version of my youth and childhood in a thesis’.12 Child of the Hurricane is padded out with anecdotes about Katharine’s family, celebrities she met, and passing crushes, while avoiding weightier matters. She hoped it would be the final word about her formative years. It is not that, but for a biographer it is a priceless record of her movements and memories, a road map for a fuller, historical account.
Just as Katharine wrote Child of the Hurricane as an act of self-defence, Ric Throssell’s biography, Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1975), was written to defend her posthumously. After her death in October 1969, Overland published an obituary by the writer Dorothy Hewett which was a brutal re-assessment of Katharine’s life and work, reflecting Hewett’s disenchantment with communism and with Katharine, who had been a friend.13 Hewett wrote that it was ‘as if, after the suicide of her husband, Hugo Throssell, she willed her own creative death’ and in her unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Union she closed off her ‘artist’s pagan and poetic sensibility’.14 Ric responded angrily, resolving to write ‘a factual biography’ to again set the record straight.15 Published in 1975, Wild Weeds is, in Ric’s words, a ‘personal picture’, drawing heavily on his memories and the weekly letters Katharine sent him.16 Ric’s later work, My Father’s Son (1989), is a hybrid work combining a biography of his father and an autobiography, as well as revisiting elements of Katharine’s life. Ric’s biographical writings about his mother leave room for a comprehensive, critical account of Katharine’s life, one with some distance in time and relationship to the subject.
In 1969 at the end of Katharine’s life, her pen-friend Catherine Duncan was thinking forward to our present: ‘in fifty years, dearest Kattie, the KSP you are now will have become someone else—she will have escaped you’. Duncan wanted Katharine to preserve her remaining letters so that she would be more accurately understood today. Fifty years was also the distant horizon another friend, the writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman, imagined for Katharine’s posthumous reckoning. ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard, both personally and as a novelist, is still the most controversial figure in Australian literature. It is unlikely that her work and influence will be justly assessed for another fifty years.’17 Drake-Brockman felt that the Cold War distorted opinions about Katharine and that a fairer assessment would only be possible once it was in the past.
Katharine now exists on the edge of living memory. Midway through my research, I found five boxes of material left behind by a biographer from an abandoned attempt fifteen years earlier. She had interviewed half a dozen people who had known Katharine well; they had all died by the time I started. It is the archive that remains and Katharine left behind multiple sources for every year of her long life. The many letters held in other people’s collections are as significant as the ones held in her own. The Red Witch is woven from her archival trail—letters, notebooks, clippings, ASIO files, government documents, and photographs—along with her published work and, importantly, the newly digitised newspaper articles on the National Library of Australia’s Trove site which reveal so much about her life and world. While alert to thematic connections, this biography is a chronological account, narrating the intertwined personal, political and literary strands. It adds nuance and detail to the contours of Katharine’s life, setting out to show what her life was like in its different phases and in the course of that, the biographical background to her literary works.
I hope this book will be of interest and use to scholars. However, I have written it for a general readership drawn to the peculiar pleasures of biography: the true drama of a life, the glimpses of a lost but familiar world, the recoverable details of the past. It is not a cultural history or a work of literary criticism but the story of one remarkable Australian life. The biographer Martin Edmond laments that the artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira—the subjects of his dual biography—had come to exist only as representatives of ‘notions espoused by others’, not as ‘real people’ acting in ‘real situations’. His biography becomes a mission to restore them. He won’t tell their story to prove a point—he will tell it to show a ‘lived life’.18 It’s what I’ve sought to do also.