14

Disquiet

Ceylon and Melbourne, 1915–1916

STAYING FOR SIX weeks on a rubber plantation in Ceylon, Katharine ‘almost forgot the war’.¹ In April, her sister Beatrice had married the owner of the plantation, Patten (‘Pack’) Bridge, an old friend of the family. She was now four months pregnant. Beatrice had still been at school when Katharine last saw her and it must have been strange to find her little sister twenty-three years old, married and pregnant, already ahead of her in conventional life milestones. While she was there she wrote a poem to Beatrice with the lines, ‘You went into the dark house of your love / I stayed in the twilight’.²

Beatrice was returning to Melbourne to give birth and the two sisters boarded the Karmala on 26 December 1915. Katharine wrote that they ‘had an uneventful trip until the ship berthed at Melbourne’.³ Yet it was on the voyage she met a wealthy student activist named Guido Baracchi who changed her life.

Katharine hid her tumultuous two-year romance with Guido. One of the few times she publicly acknowledged he had any role in her life was in a 1961 interview: ‘I met Guido Baracchi on a boat, and he was getting interested in Marxism, too. He gave me a list of books to read, and when I got back to Australia my husband sent off and got them for me, all that were then available’.⁴ The misleading reference to Hugo was a deflection and she was conflating the events of three years. When she met Guido, neither of them were yet interested in Marx and she wasn’t married.

In the version Guido told Katharine’s son, Ric Throssell, in 1972, they met in the launch out to the Karmala. ‘Katharine took one look at me &, as she told me, sighed hopelessly to her sister, “Another planter!”’⁵ Guido was dressed like a planter because he had borrowed clothes from one. He wasn’t meant to be in Ceylon at all. A friend of his was enlisting in London and Guido was only meant to be accompanying him from Melbourne to Fremantle, but during the six-hour stopover in Fremantle, Guido got drunk at a party onboard and woke up already out to sea. He disembarked at the first chance in Colombo and spent eleven days awaiting a ship which could take him back to Australia.⁶

In the words of one historian, Guido was ‘the knight errant of Australian radicalism … A man of considerable wealth and emotional spontaneity, utterly without guile or worldly ambition, of luminous innocence and limitless self-centredness—his marital and romantic arrangements … in a constant muddle’.⁷ He was the only child of a wealthy family, born in Melbourne in 1887 to an Italian father and a mother of Irish heritage. A perpetual student and playboy, he switched between studying science, medicine and law. His politics evolved over the next years ‘from a hazy liberalism to something altogether more radical’—specifically, guild socialism at the time Katharine met him.⁸

In 1913 he’d written an article for a university magazine called ‘Picking Up: The Finest Game on Earth’, offering it as a modern alternative to the need for a formal introduction before a ‘respectable’ woman would allow a man to speak to her:

A man sees a girl whose looks he likes, stares at her a moment friendly-wise, and if her eyes reciprocate, conversation is forthwith begun. The reverse process may also occur, the glance of invitation coming from the girl …

The uncertainty of picking up can only be described as gorgeous. She may be a blank or a treasure, married or single, slow or not. She may be much besides. You never can tell.

He goes on to claim the approach is about far more than romance or sex: ‘Picking up is a very serviceable pestle with which to smash class consciousness in the mortar of socialism’.⁹

There was much which drew Katharine to Guido. He was on a political quest similar to her own and could talk confidently about political theory. He wrote poetry, as bad as it may have been. He was wealthy and charming and he had, according to his later lover, Betty Roland, a ‘gift of being able to efface himself, to put aside his masculine aggressiveness and become the listener, the sympathetic, gentle, understanding recipient of confidences’.¹⁰ In his obituary, Betty was quoted as saying, ‘He wasn’t exactly a handsome man—medium build, reddish hair, blue eyes. Yet he exuded such magnetism that all, friend and foe alike, were immediately attracted to him’.¹¹

At the end of the voyage, Katharine gave him a copy of Clovelly Verses, ‘a “Token of Amity”’, Guido remembered, ‘as she inscribed it for me on the fly-leaf’.¹² They arranged to stay in touch while they were both in Melbourne.

ON 12 JANUARY 1916, Katharine arrived back in Melbourne after five years abroad. Australia was unsettled. Her ship, the Karmala, was supposed to be carrying on to Sydney the next day but its departure was delayed by striking wharf labourers.¹³ An ad in the day’s Argus newspaper asked, ‘HAVE YOU ENLISTED? The Call is to You Today! Australia needs at once 50,000 Men for the New Army and 16,000 Men each Month as Reinforcements of the New and Existing Armies’.¹⁴ The day’s editorial began, ‘More deliberate and more wicked perversity was never displayed by an important body of workers than that which has culminated in the Broken Hill strike’.¹⁵ The home-front battlelines were being drawn along class lines.

KATHARINE’S MOTHER, EDITH, had moved from South Yarra to the suburb of Armadale, an area of ‘quiet respectability’ where Katharine had previously attended primary school.¹⁶ Katharine’s brother Alan was still at home, about to turn thirty and feeling the burden of being the only one of the siblings left in the country with their widowed mother while working as the mining editor of the Argus. Katharine found herself suddenly re-immersed in family life as ‘Mother and Bee chatted and sewed happily, making small garments’ ahead of the baby’s birth. ‘I was no use to them either for sewing or pre-natal gossip, so tried out on them some of the recipes I had learnt in France.’¹⁷

After a month at home, she rented a house by the beach for five weeks at Black Rock, 20 kilometres south of the city.¹⁸ She may have wanted her own space in order to write. She could only ever handle a certain amount of clamour and interaction; her need to retreat was a recurring one.

Her timing seems poor—just as she took the beach house she was honoured with a number of parties and receptions that required her to travel into the city, breaking the solitude. In mid-February, one columnist wrote that she ‘is the woman of the moment in Melbourne this week, and we are just tumbling over one another to say “we are proud of you, and welcome home”’. Looking for signs fame had changed Katharine, the columnist reported, ‘Outwardly and visibly it is the same bright, sweet face … with a certain “spring” and vivacity of movement that betrays the alert mind and vividly “alive” temperament’.¹⁹

On Wednesday 16 February, Katharine’s journalist friends organised a dinner to honour her at Café Francais on the corner of Swanston and Little Collins streets in the city. Years earlier, Edith had made a lace bertha for Katharine in the hope that she would one day wear it at her wedding; understanding the importance to Katharine of the dinner, she told her, ‘If you don’t want to be a wife and mother, dear, you might as well have the lace now’.²⁰

She wore the lace to Café Francais with a white satin evening dress.²¹ Her colleagues presented her with a souvenir menu painted with a scene from The Pioneers; on offer that night were devilled oysters, whiting, cotelette d’Agneau à la Francais (French lamb chop), and chicken casserole, with bombe and iced peaches for dessert and hock, claret, ale, lager and mineral waters to drink.²² Among the guests in attendance was an aged Frederick McCubbin, whose painting had inspired The Pioneers. Despite all the adulation, decades later when she wrote her autobiography Katharine was still stung that Nettie and Vance and Hilda and Louis were missing. Oversensitive, she assumed it was because they didn’t like The Pioneers.²³

On 1 March, the Liberal premier of Victoria, Sir Alexander Peacock, held a luncheon in Katharine’s honour at parliament and presented her with a six-month railway pass. The premier ‘spoke at length on the value of Miss Prichard’s novel to Australian literature and expressed his pride that an Australian woman had done so well in the English literary world’.²⁴ She seems to have got on well with Peacock and his wife; she also accompanied them on a visit to a flying school in July where she flew in an aeroplane for the first time.²⁵ The welcome the Peacocks gave her in 1916 suggests the life among the privileged Katharine might have enjoyed if she hadn’t turned so forcefully against their world the next year.

That same week, Katharine watched a special screening of the silent film adaptation of The Pioneers, directed by Franklyn Barrett, at Hoyts Olympia.²⁶ Katharine was possibly the film’s ‘most dissatisfied critic’ according to one columnist. ‘One most annoying thing was the changing of the conclusion … and scenes that should properly have occurred in the wildest of backblock country are played in a setting of semi-civilised vegetation. Oh, the woes of an authoress!’²⁷ Only some stills and a few seconds of the film survive, a fragment showing Mary Cameron loading a rifle. A five-minute fragment is all that remains of a second adaptation by Raymond Longford in 1926.²⁸ Even if they were not good, the loss of these and so many other Australian silent films is a sad one, their 35mm prints worn as they did the rounds of the suburban cinemas and then sold on to itinerant exhibitors who toured the scratched copies around outback towns until they were discarded.²⁹

FOUR NOTEBOOKS FROM 1916 to 1917 survived Katharine’s purge of her papers before her death. They are the notebooks of a writer at work, sketches of scenes, dialogue, and other observations interspersed with candid moments of feeling and confession, interiority largely unmoored from known public events.

The first of these notebooks—‘Australia I: Ti-Tree Studies 1916’—is from her stay at Black Rock in February and March. In this notebook, she is preoccupied with expressing a rapturous communion with the ti-trees which line the coast and with the ocean itself. Sometimes her connection to nature is a balm for the pain of love: ‘Oh, it was good to go down to the sea this morning. To give myself to the sea’s embrace, after the disquiet … the troubled thinking of the day & night’. At other times, her connection to nature is a substitute for romantic love: ‘Oh it was the ti-tree. The wonder shuddering & whispering of it … My happiness had nothing to do with any person. It was for the world, of the world—that I, for a moment was contained within the world life …’

Early in her stay, she was thinking of Reay and their time in a ‘little green parlour’ in Black Rock. ‘I walked & walked yesterday to find it … It was just as we left it. I sat down outside & thought of you & of the time when we used to come, plodding arm in arm through the sand together.’ But now she was in love with Guido, the ‘boy’ or ‘young man’ as she referred to him in her notebook, a few years younger than her and decades younger than Reay. Taking on Reay’s jealousy at her new love, ‘the sea broke on the shore with a dull, heavy sound. I heard it early this morning, at dawn almost—& then its voice was that of a disturbed & jealous lover’.

Her seaside sojourn meant she and Guido had time alone together and he could stay overnight. Three days after her walk to the little-green parlour she asked, ‘Does he feel as I do? Is he plagued like this? … Is he the le jeune gars qui s’amuse bien [the young man out for a good time]? … Is he angry, disappointed, practiced at bringing this phase into the … relationship … Is he simply agnostic, too?’ On 1 March she recorded nothing of her visit to parliament, writing instead, ‘Oh, there is something of the seas in our love—something restless, insatiable; something of its mute hunger, desolate passion, intensity & immortality!’ On 3 March she wrote, ‘The sick hungry suffering of these days! I cannot tell of them. I have offered three long days on the altar of my feeling for you, whatever it is’.

Katharine’s longing turned to disappointment after another visit from Guido; on 14 March she wrote, ‘For two nights & two days I thought that you were the wild adriatic lover I’ve dreamed of—but here you are now behaving like any other respectable, commonplace young man with no passion & dream in his soul to carry him out of his depth in the ocean of life’. On the next page of her notebook, she felt it was passion itself which was the problem, rather than the lack of it. ‘The great love-passion is anti-social. There is a nice working comradeship & affection that is much better. It enables men & women to live peacefully together and breed. The other is simply destructive of mind, body, & soul.’

On the final day of her stay she recorded on the last page of the notebook, ‘The ti-tree has bloomed for me! It is as if my love for it had brought the blossom, so unbelievably out of season’.³⁰

IN KATHARINE’S NEXT notebook, ‘Australia II 1916’, she narrated at length a shorter retreat on Saturday 1 April 1916, visiting her old friend Hilda Esson in Emerald, 44 kilometres south-east of the city in the Dandenong Ranges. ‘I thought that if I could see the hills, I would cease to think of you. The pain would lift from my heart and my mind would cease to plague me for a little while.’ Between the train station and Hilda’s cottage, she climbed up a hill beside the creek and spread her coat under a big blackbutt tree, feeling as small as the ants swarming ‘over a gaping wound from which the red gum dripped & over me’. When the rain came, she stayed lying on her coat. ‘The dampness … was stealing over my body, but I did not want to move. I wanted to lie there all night. I wanted to lie there in the darkness & see the stars come out …’ Eventually, the ‘thought of Hilda waiting for me … coming to look for me with lantern at night—& explanations—roused me’. At first, she went ‘almost drunkenly down the track, intoxicated with the wild joy that had taken me’. Her clothes heavy with rain, the track slippery, she held her face up to the rain. ‘It was one of those moments of ecstasy that even a lover’s embrace cannot give—golden flooding, deepening of consciousness, wrapping from earth in an ether of exquisite joy.’

Yet her joy once more turned to misery as she lost her way, hurt her ankle on a sodden log and found herself wet and tired in the rain. ‘I thought of you then—& went on sobbing.’ She came out of the bush ‘& saw Hilda’s house on the other hill side & the grey walls spoke of so much home comfort & the very drift of smoke from its chimneys told of the easy, domestic happiness from which I am forever divorced’. Louis was away and after ‘talk & music all evening’ with Hilda, Katharine slept before the fire until dawn came.³¹

Through the war, she would keep returning to that cottage which spoke of ‘home comfort’ and ‘domestic happiness’, first to visit the Essons and later the Palmers. Then, in 1918 her mother would buy it for her; and finally, two months after Armistice, she would honeymoon there.

IN 1916, KATHARINE spent much time reflecting on the ‘domestic happiness’ from which she felt forever divorced. Marriage had never been an expectation with Reay but it was more complicated now she was in love with Guido. Hilda was in the happiest phase of what would prove to be an unhappy marriage. Nettie was married with a baby; Sumner was to marry in December; and Beatrice was pregnant. After visiting another, unidentified friend, she wrote, ‘B says she is happy. Her love for husband, his love for her, their quiet & harmonious life together for two years has been so serene’.³²

If Katharine was sometimes attracted by the prospect of marriage and children, she was just as often repelled by it. In October, she glimpsed ‘the flat, cheap suburb’ of Gardenvale from the tram and imagined the father of one of the households coming home for the day and wondering whether his children ‘have rooted up his broad beans growing in neat rows in the back yard. He probably does not think he is happy. Probably he does not think of enquiring whether he is happy or not. He has not time to think of such things, he would probably say’. She felt the residents of Gardenvale should take comfort from the ‘prospect of the hills’, but she suspected they took comfort from their red-tiled roofs instead.³³

TRIPS ASIDE, KATHARINE herself was living a suburban existence in Armadale, even if temporarily, with Edith, Alan and Beatrice in the last month of her pregnancy. ‘I always feel like a day when I’ve been home I want to go out and howl.’³⁴

On 29 March, she recorded in her notebook a strange waking dream about a mother who has just given birth. The ‘quiet of the valley of shadows’ still hung in the room, the mother and baby having survived a dangerous passage. The father entered the room and knelt at the bed, full of ‘reverence, tenderness, emotion’.³⁵ Ahead of her sister giving birth, Katharine was experiencing both awe and anxiety.

Beatrice gave birth to a daughter on 27 April and named her Katharine Beatrice, the first of several babies to be named after Katharine, although she was always known as Thea. In the first weeks, Beatrice was sick and Katharine took care of Thea. ‘Her fingers curled round mine and she clung to me, wailing and refusing to suck from an ugly rubber-tipped bottle, instead of the rosy nipples of her mother.’ Edith was worried the baby was growing too attached to Katharine and thought she should go away for a while once Beatrice was stronger.³⁶

IN LONDON ON 1 March 1916, the medical board of the Wandsworth Hospital found that Hugo ‘is still somewhat nervous and suffers from continuous headaches. In view of his meningitis the Board is of opinion that he should have extended leave’.³⁷ Ruled unfit for any service for three months, he was sent back to Australia.

On 20 June, he arrived in Melbourne on the train and sought Katharine out. ‘There were a few days of whirlwind love-making’, she wrote, ‘from the moment Hugo arrived’.³⁸ Their time together was limited—Hugo had many functions to attend and toured regional Victoria. However, in the time they did have together in June and July, Katharine introduced him to her mother and brothers; Alan apparently told her she should marry him. ‘More deeply stirred than I had ever been, I cursed myself for letting Hugo go back to the battlefields with no more than the memory of kisses and our last passionate embrace. Was it the end of this brief madness? Would Hugo survive the war? Would he ever return to overwhelm me again?’³⁹

The posthumous revelation of Katharine’s relationship with Guido—which was still smouldering until at least November 1917—complicates her account of Hugo’s courtship in June and July 1916. Was she involved with them both at the same time or was her relationship with Guido on hold? Or could she be confusing aspects of this visit with Hugo’s 1918 visit?

Whatever the case, with Reay waiting in London for her expected return in November and a complicated relationship with Guido, Katharine was now torn in three directions.