12
London, 1914–1915
IN FEBRUARY 1913 the London-based publisher Hodder & Stoughton announced with fanfare the opening of the £1000 Novel Competition ‘for colonial and Indian authors’.1 The competition was dominion-based, with prizes of £250 each for Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa. One columnist wrote, ‘Whether the competition will produce the long expected Australasian masterpiece is a point upon which one may well remain dubious; still, it is a generous offer’.2
The deadline for the competition was over a year away—31 March 1914. Katharine was still working on Windlestraws in 1913, but she must have realised it was not the right novel for the competition, not only lacking in quality but also any Australian element. In that busy year as her thirtieth birthday approached, she saved up enough money to take off the first three months of 1914 from freelancing to ‘write the book which I’d been waiting so long to do’.3
For The Pioneers Katharine returned to the regional Australian landscapes she had used as the settings for the story ‘Bush Fires’ (1903) and the serial ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906), still her most successful works to date. Her time as a governess to the Muir children in Yarram in 1904 was a whole decade ago but ‘out came my notebooks of Gippsland; and, in a little while, the atmosphere of the great forests, cleared foothills of the ranges, the long plains, and the old township of Port Albert was filling my flat high up over London, despite the gloom and fogs of a northern winter’.4 She wove her memories of the landscape and folklore of Gippsland around the narrative of Frederick McCubbin’s triptych, The Pioneer (1904), which she had seen at the National Gallery of Victoria soon after it was acquired in 1906.5 ‘Casting about for a plot Mr McCubbin’s picture came back to my memory. It was like a ground-plan ready to hand. I … built upon and around it.’6 The novel follows the sequence of the three panels, the opening scene matching the left-hand panel as Mary and Donald Cameron set up camp in the uncleared bush at the end of a long journey. In chapter two, the narrative jumps ahead to the scenario of the middle panel—bush cleared, a baby born, a house built. Most of the novel’s events occur in this time frame. The novel’s epilogue, chapter forty-eight, evokes the third panel, as Dan, grandson of Donald Cameron, comes to a ‘lichen-grown wooden cross’, the grave of his grandfather, who had said that he wanted to be laid to rest where the wagon had come to a standstill.
Katharine had hired a charwoman at fourpence an hour, a Mrs Neal, who looked after her as she worked on the novel through the winter. ‘On cold mornings, at about eight o’clock, she would bring me a cup of tea and run a hot bath in the infinitesimal kitchen. She would remind me to stir the porridge on the small gas stove while I took my bath, and then bring coffee and toast into the sitting-room.’ Three months was an incredibly short time to write a novel. ‘I wrote all day and far into the night, often falling into bed, too tired to get there without holding on to the wall between the sitting-room and my bedroom.’7
Despite the circumstances, The Pioneers was a leap forward in Katharine’s writing. It has some of the exuberance of ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ while being a far more disciplined work. Read alongside the politically strident suffragette plays she wrote at the same time, The Pioneers shows a pragmatic restraint for an idealist like Katharine, engaging with the less divisive issue of the injustices suffered by convicts and a safe vision of Australia as a new country of opportunity. It is also a far more substantial and interesting novel than Windlestraws, less tied up by the contrivances of the romance genre.
The judge of the Australasian prize, Charles Garvice, was the bestselling author of the time, having written over one hundred romances with sales of seven million.8 Garvice’s name was held in contempt by the literary community; the Bulletin called him ‘Charles Garbage’.9 One newspaper complained that ‘to foist such a fifteenth-rate novelist as Mr Garvice upon Australasian writers as judge of their work was little short of an insult … Several … writers who had intended to compete simply laughed to scorn the idea of submitting their efforts to the critical judgement of a person such as Mr Garvice’.10 Instead of scorning the judge, Katharine decided ‘the story would have to be one of which he would approve’.11
The deadline was close by the time Katharine had finished her handwritten draft. ‘The first typist she engaged worked too slowly and confessed it was because she had become so interested in the story.’ A second typist finished it for her just in time, and Katharine hand-delivered it to the Hodder & Stoughton office on the day the competition closed.12
AFTER SUBMITTING The Pioneers, Katharine worked on two plays, Her Place and For Instance. Her Place is a twenty-minute ‘curtain-raiser’ in which a charwoman takes the blame for stealing a necklace actually lost by the landlady’s vain daughter. The charwoman’s ‘true place’—the final lines declare—is ‘on a pedestal or in a niche in a cathedral’.13 The play’s political message is the equality of all women, placing it on the side of the ‘Peths’ against the ‘Panks’ in the Women’s Social and Political Union conflict.
Decades later, Katharine scrawled on the front page of the manuscript that Her Place had been staged by the Actresses’ Franchise League, but she was probably confused with the other play, For Instance, the manuscript of which she lost. The production of For Instance was reported by a number of newspapers, while there are no known reports of the production of Her Place.
The Actresses’ Franchise League staged one act ‘playlets’ for the cause of suffrage that were ‘more propaganda than literature’.14 Katharine wrote For Instance for the opening night of the inaugural conference of the British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union, held at the Westminster Palace Hotel on 9 July 1914. Women from dominions such as Australia which had won the vote encouraged women from dominions which hadn’t.15
In the play, an English factory worker arrives in Australia and is amazed at the better conditions; one of her co-workers explains ‘the civil, economic and social superiority enjoyed by women under the Southern Cross’. Reay sat in the audience that night and enthused about Katharine’s play for the papers back home:
The piece de resistance was a stirring dramatic sketch For Instance, written specially for the occasion by Miss K.S. Prichard (Melbourne), and the scene of which was a room in a white blouse factory, Australia.
In this work, the writer showed a rare skill in compacting together romance, politics and social economics.
‘The sketch won hearty applause’, Reay concluded, ‘which would not be stilled until the authoress appeared and bowed her acknowledgments’.16 After many rejections and three years of literary obscurity in London, the staging of the playlet was a high point of public success for Katharine to that date.
ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE the staging of For Instance, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Serbia. By the time Reay’s report on For Instance appeared in Australia on 15 August, the Great War had begun. The momentum for women’s suffrage was lost as many of the women’s suffrage groups redirected their energy into supporting the war effort. In 1918, women over thirty with a property qualification—along with all men over twenty-one—were finally given the vote in Britain; only in 1928 were voting rights expanded to all women over twenty-one.
Britain declared war on Germany at 11 p.m. on 4 August 1914, with Australia and the other dominions following. It was the height of summer, and Katharine seems to have been on a trip out of the city that week. ‘The countryside had never looked more tranquil and beautiful than during those first days of August. The stubble of cornfields lay golden with fringes of poppies … It seemed incredible that war should break from the clear summer sky.’17
In response to the war, Katharine stepped back from the radicalism she had been flirting with. ‘Neither I, nor anybody I knew, had much sympathy for pacifists and conscientious objectors in that period of patriotic illusions about the war, the justification for it, and the need to win.’18 Reay and Sumner were both strong supporters of the war effort. Yet contradicting her memory of the mood, she also had friends who did not share the prevailing patriotism. Rudolf Broda began a pacifist supplement to his journal called La Voix de l’Humanite. And then there was her friend Nettie, not a pacifist but an early critic of the war.19
Reay immediately offered his services to the British War Office. He was appointed to help create and manage the special constabulary force, volunteers who would take the place of professional police sent to the front.20
Katharine wanted to help the war effort too, but not in a mundane role. She volunteered to train horses with the Women’s Emergency Corps but she was knocked back. She proposed to a newspaper editor that he send her to Serbia as a war correspondent but was knocked back again because she was a woman.21 She would have been disappointed to discover another Australian journalist, Louise Mack, had managed to persuade the Daily Mail editor to send her to report from Belgium just before the German invasion.22
AFTER A FIVE-YEAR courtship, Nettie Higgins had arrived in London and married Vance Palmer on 23 May 1914 at the Lower Sloane Baptist Church in Chelsea.23 Katharine was living on the same road as the church, but there’s no record of whether she was there.
Vance grew up in Queensland. Through his twenties, he’d travelled the world and was now making a living writing potboilers while also striving to create enduring literature. He and Nettie shared a dream of developing a distinctively Australian identity and culture.24 Katharine saw him as ‘one of those lamb-like men whom everybody loves. His kindliness and charm of manner are reflected in his writing; as also the tranquil depths of his austere mind and sensitive humour’.25
The newlyweds left soon after for a long honeymoon in France. After war broke out, they returned to London in September at the same time Sumner Locke left for Sydney. Nettie, Katharine’s new best friend in London, was very different to Sumner—serious, intellectual, and at a different stage of life, being newly married. In October, Vance travelled to New York chasing writing work and Katharine went to stay with the pregnant Nettie for some weeks until he returned.26 After the baby, Aileen, was born, Nettie brought her over to see Katharine in April 1915 for an afternoon tea with, of all people, Reay’s wife and daughter, Lucinda and Nan.27 Katharine would be a kind of secular godmother for the first five decades of Aileen’s troubled life as the baby grew up to become a communist poet struggling with mental illness.28
IN EARLY DECEMBER, Katharine finally had a taste of war when she travelled to northern France to report on the Australian Voluntary Hospital. Lady Rachel Dudley had established the hospital, staffing it with Australian nurses and doctors who were in London when the war began. Dudley herself had lived in Australia while her husband served as governor-general of Australia from 1908 to 1911 and Katharine had stayed in touch with her after interviewing her for a newspaper. Nan, Reay’s daughter, was one of the nurses.29
The hospital was in Wimmereux, near Boulogne, having taken over ‘a great, rambling, muddily-white French hotel. When first you see it, you want to draw it as it stands against the sea, under a clear, shining sky’.30 The First Battle of Ypres—fought only 30 kilometres away—had finished a week or two before she arrived and the hospital was quieter than it had been. Even before the war, Katharine’s journalism had been patriotic; now it became more so. One of her articles proclaimed that the AVH was the ‘best hospital at the front’; in another article, she wrote that ‘in Boulogne I had seen all manner of hospital nurses, but none, I thought, looked as sweet as the Australian Sisters in their grey zephyr gowns, with little scarlet capes’.31
Visiting the wards, the misery and waste of war struck her forcibly. She found it hard to believe that the ‘gaunt and weary-looking men … were the same strapping fellows whom I had seen leaving London blithely singing “Tipperary” a few months ago. There they lie, the wreckages of the war, so much splendid strength and virility maimed and thwarted’.32
SOON AFTER KATHARINE’S return to London, a journalist told her that he’d learned from someone at Hodder & Stoughton that Katharine was one of the winners of the £1000 Novel Competition. ‘There was nothing to do but wait for official confirmation of the rumour; but, of course, my hopes soared.’ It meant she was more devastated than she would otherwise have been when a form letter arrived one evening in February 1915, asking her to come and pick up her losing manuscript. It was winter and it was raining but ‘I went out and wandered about London, walked for hours. Didn’t know where: or why I was wandering’.33
The morning post brought another letter from Hodder & Stoughton, this one informing her that the previous letter had been sent to her by mistake and asking her to call by straightaway. At the office, the manager, Ernest Hodder Williams, told her she was the Australasian winner of the competition. When she left, she bought all the roses she could carry from a flower-girl and went along Fleet Street, finding friends to tell in the newspaper offices.34
Katharine’s uncle, the editor Frederick Prichard, and her lover, Reay, reported her win in Australian newspapers straightaway, even though the results had not yet been publicly announced.35 The official announcement came five weeks later in the April issue of Hodder & Stoughton’s journal, Bookman. It was the month of the landing of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli. The other winners were AE Taylor (Canada); F Horace Rose (South Africa); and Samuel Foskett (India), none of them as well remembered as Katharine.36
Katharine had become a literary celebrity. Those who knew her understood her breakthrough was the culmination of years of determined struggle; she ‘has been climbing into prominence by a kind of secret passage of sheer hard work for some time’, wrote one journalist. The day after the official announcement, William Moore—the director of the Australian drama nights in Melbourne, now working in London—came to interview her at her flat. Other interviewers and a photographer had already been there; ‘offers from publishers had come for serials and short stories’ and ‘some unknown financier had offered to advise her how to invest her money’.37
WITH PLENTY OF money for the passage home, Katharine planned a visit to Melbourne in the Australian spring, after the scheduled publication of her book in August.38 ‘Before I left London’, she wrote, ‘there were two or three things I wanted to do with my newly acquired wealth’. She took children from her street to the zoo and a restaurant, treats beyond their imagination. She sent her charwoman, Mrs Neal, and her sons on a month’s holiday in the country. And she went on an ‘orgy of shopping’ for her sister’s trousseau; Beatrice married a plantation owner in Melbourne in April.39
IN AUGUST, The Pioneers was published with the three other Hodder & Stoughton Novel Competition winners. It was a thick hardcover selling for six shillings and with a colour reproduction of Frederick McCubbin’s The Pioneer as a frontispiece. The initial print run of 8000 copies had nearly sold out by 1920; Hodder & Stoughton went on to print 35,000 copies in cheap editions between 1917 and 1927 but Katharine only earned royalties on the original edition.40
The reviewer in the influential Times Literary Supplement wrote that Katharine ‘has a sense of style, an intense love for more than the mere outer aspects of nature (and the book is drenched in Australian sunshine), an intimate acquaintance with the bush, and a faculty for conveying temperament’. The comment on Katharine’s appreciation for nature beyond the external was prescient, anticipating the even stronger presence the landscape has in later works such as Working Bullocks and the goldfields trilogy. The reviewer went on to criticise The Pioneers, quite reasonably, for several improbabilities, including Deidre’s unlikely marriage to the villainous McNab.41
The reviews in the Australian press were also very positive. Although her win in the competition had been reported around the country, it is a measure of parochialism that it was mostly newspapers in her home state of Victoria which reviewed the novel. The review in the Argus was typical:
The atmosphere is genuinely Australian and Miss Prichard has succeeded in producing an intensely interesting and engrossing story without a hint of exaggeration or overcolouring. Her style is quiet and restrained, she has good descriptive power, her characters are well realised and the story is well constructed. A touch of humour would have illumined it, for Australian life can never be accurately described by anyone who lacks the capacity for revealing the humour of a situation; but the book clearly indicates that Miss Prichard will rank fairly high amongst Australian novelists.42
The review reflects concerns of the time: the question of how truly Australian works of literature were; the significance—in a less visual culture—of a novelist’s descriptive powers; and the essential literary task of ranking writers. Perhaps Katharine took notice of the comment about the need for humour; from Black Opal onward her fiction often includes at least one comical character, from the layabout Paul in Black Opal to the larrikin Dinny Quinn in the goldfields trilogy.
Hodder & Stoughton’s sister company, George H Doran, published an American edition of The Pioneers in January 1916. A publicity flyer collected praise from twenty-one reviews in newspapers around the United States, including the New York Times, with several reviewers finding it a fascinating reminder of the lawless days of the American West.43 The nation which Katharine found unbearable in her brief stay gave her first novel an enthusiastic reception.
Overall, The Pioneers was seen as a fine debut of a potentially significant writer. If it was not generally thought to be a masterpiece, it was appreciated for its Australian setting and its homage to the pioneering generation who had now died out, as well as for its narrative skill. After years of disappointments and moderate successes, a novel written in haste but gestating for a decade had turned Katharine into a writer everyone was talking about.