15
Lightning Ridge, NSW, 1916
NOW KATHARINE WAS famous, there was interest in her unpublished novel, Windlestraws. In March 1916, Melbourne newspaper the Age began serialising it. A British press, Holden and Hardingham, published it as a book later in the year, misspelling her name as ‘Pritchard’ on the cover and spine. A reviewer noted that the plot contrivances ‘show an ingenious indifference to probability, but they serve to stimulate the interest of those who only ask to be amused’.1 The novel received several mixed reviews and was then forgotten forever, facilitated by Katharine herself mentioning it as little as possible. ‘Windlestraws proved to her that her heart could not be in a novel that was not about her own country.’2
Katharine felt that her success with The Pioneers had ‘opened the door for more serious writing … Now I could devote myself to the literary work for which I had been paving the way for so long. I could write about Australia and the realities of life for the Australian people’.3 It was more than two years since she’d written The Pioneers. After deciding to write about the opal fields, she spent the rest of the war working on Black Opal (1921).4 She had visited the White Cliffs opal fields on a daytrip from Tarella Station in 1905, and included a description of the settlement and its miners in ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906). Since then, opal mining had taken off at Lightning Ridge, in northern New South Wales near the Queensland border, and it was now producing the most opal in Australia. The first step for her opal novel was to be a research trip to Lightning Ridge.
Katharine’s two assignments as a governess had been de facto research trips for her writing. This trip to Lightning Ridge was the first formal one as a published novelist. Research trips would become her signature method; among other adventures, she would stay at Turee Station in the Pilbara in 1926 for Coonardoo (1929) and tour with Wirth’s Circus in 1927 for Haxby’s Circus (1930). The approach reflected her background as a journalist, seeking a story outside her own world and building the setting and characters from observation. She explained her method in a letter to a scholar in 1938:
I prefer always to live among the people and the places I write of: use notes taken at the time, and try to discover the thoughts and reactions of people under my microscope to situations they have been through, or may have to encounter. The law of libel necessitates variations from the original, of course. Otherwise I am concerned to draw as I see.5
Later she wrote: ‘I do think those first, vivid impressions & the yarns one gathers on the spot are most valuable—the sense of gathering from the realities of a milieu, being a sponge for the absorption of speech & character’.6
Leaving for Lightning Ridge in early August, Katharine chose the isolated coastal route to reach Sydney. She travelled to the end of the eastern Victorian railway line at Orbost and then took a horse-drawn coach to Eden. The driver, Jack McAlister, was the son of South Gippsland pioneers; she was the only passenger. ‘Driving from dawn until sunset through the southern forests, seeing again the thronging columns of mountain ash and messmate, the tangled fern gullies, breathing the fragrance of sassafras and dogwood … made me feel as I were being newly baptized into Australia.’7 Transferring to a motor coach for the trip to Sydney, she was ‘unable to imagine anybody preferring to travel by motor-car when they could have had horses and a coachman like Mr McAlister’.8
From Sydney she took a train north-west to the end of the line at Walgett. ‘So far this country lay from the chaos of war, no bombardment disturbed its remote horizons; yet, barren and desolate, it held its own tragedy. The bleached bones of drought-stricken bullocks glimmered beside the track.’9 She set off from Walgett on 31 August on the all-night coach journey to Lightning Ridge, writing in her notebook: ‘I thought Death must be like this—a journey out at sunset, on an unknown road with an unknown driver. But I loved it—the loneliness—the great unknown before me. The sky bright with stars—the dark trees. The keen air.’10 As they came into town before dawn ‘the white clayey soil gleamed in the starlight’.11 Lightning Ridge was ‘a lake of life in the country of wide plains’.12 There were about two hundred miners in 1916; at the time of the initial rush in 1908, there had been two thousand.13 Germans were major opal buyers and the loss of their market meant the value of opal had declined sharply.14
Katharine wrote that she was initially mistaken for a visiting prostitute and treated coldly by the pub owner, given a noisy room behind the bar. When she explained she was a writer, she was treated with much ‘courtesy and kindness’ by the miners on the Ridge. The main character of her novel, Michael Brady, was closely based on a miner who showed her ‘every phase of work on the field’; an ‘intellectual’ and ‘humane’ man, he ‘told me about the struggle of the opal gougers to maintain their independence’ and their passion for ‘the precious red fires in black matrix which made Lightning Ridge opal the rarest in the world’.15 Katharine’s notebook is filled with sketches of the characters of the town, the specifics of opal mining, and descriptions of the landscape. When she left Lightning Ridge later in September, some of the miners gave her pieces of opal as farewell gifts.16
AS SHE HAD done with The Pioneers, Katharine wove the folklore of the town—renamed Fallen Star Ridge—into Black Opal. The year before her visit, two miners had found an unusually colourful opal of 500 carats nicknamed the ‘Empress of Australia’. Valued at £650, it was dropped and broken in three ‘when being looked at by an inquisitive stranger’.17 This incident, fresh in the minds of the miners, may have inspired the scene where Sophie drops Potch’s precious stone.18 In another story circulating the same month Katharine visited, ‘An American buyer visited the Ridge some time back, and made purchases at considerably advanced prices for this inferior opal. The miners were delighted, and prophesied that they would never see him again. He came again quite recently and bought many thousands of pounds worth more’.19 In Black Opal, an American buyer, Dawe Armitage, is inconsistently said to be offering the best prices to the miners for opal and depicted as ripping them off. His son, John, threatens the Ridge’s way of life by proposing to buy up all the mining leases and turn the miners into employees, giving them a guaranteed income but depriving them of their independence and the possibility of making a fortune.
Katharine wrote about Lightning Ridge through the lens of her emerging political convictions, left wing but not yet communist. The miners in Black Opal represent an idyll of working conditions: ‘Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself, or allow anyone else to use him, like a working bullock’.20 Together they had resisted being bought out by large companies and becoming wage slaves. The novel opposes the greed of capitalists and extols collectivist action, but the miners are working for themselves rather than for the good of the state and this individualism does not reflect orthodox communism. By the time the novel was serialised in 1936 in the socialist magazine, Women Today, Katharine was a committed communist and felt the need to explain that although the miners’ ‘Utopian experiment’ was bound to fail in a capitalist society, the ‘same spirit will lead us to a Soviet Australia when there is nation-wide organisation to support the workers in their control of industry’.21
BLACK OPAL is ‘set in an imprecise time, not quite up to the minute, and decidedly not nineteenth century’.22 It makes no mention of the war, suggesting Katharine’s sense of distance from it during her stay at Lightning Ridge. After weeks in the back country of Australia hearing only snippets of news, when she returned to Melbourne she found that the war had come close to her again.