17

Retreat

Emerald, Victoria, 1918

KATHARINE DIDN’T DEPICT the Great War directly in her fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. There are several returned soldiers—notably Greg, the shell-shocked husband in Intimate Strangers (1937), a significant psychological portrait of the lingering effects of the war—but that is all. She was not alone: ‘It is as if a whole generation of writers by tacit agreement declined to incorporate the Great War into their imaginative fiction’.¹ Katharine and other Australian writers may not have had enough distance yet. The communities she wrote about in those years—the timber workers of Working Bullocks (1926), the cattle station in Coonardoo (1929), the touring troupe of Haxby’s Circus (1930)—had a similar sense of timeless isolation from world events as the miners of Lightning Ridge in Black Opal (1921). She only came to write directly about the Great War late in her career in Golden Miles (1948), the second volume of the goldfields trilogy.

The protagonist of Golden Miles, Sally Gough, was born on 25 April like Katharine’s mother, Edith. After Gallipoli, Sally’s birthday is filled with ‘sadness and mourning for her, and for hundreds of mothers throughout Australia’.² Sally has two sons in the war; one, Lal, is killed, and the other, Dick, is shattered by his experience. Sally’s response to Lal’s death echoes Katharine’s response to Alan’s death. ‘But it was no earthly use to curse and wail: she must be calm, she told herself. She must think about this scourge which afflicted humanity: find out whether there was anything in what Charles O’Reilly, Dinny, and Tom were saying—that this war could be stopped, and the outbreak of future wars prevented.’³ Sally moves from voting ‘yes’ in the first conscription referendum to ‘no’ in the second one; she also develops new sympathy for the convictions of her communist son, Tom.

Although set in the 1950s, Katharine’s final novel, Subtle Flame (1967), also fictionalises aspects of Katharine’s political conversion during the Great War. In a psychologically intriguing union, the protagonist, David Evans, has elements not only of Katharine but also of her father, Tom, and her lover, Reay. Unsubtly echoing Reay’s position at the Herald and the Weekly Times, David is the editor and general manager of the Daily Dispatch and the Weekly Budget. Like Tom Prichard, David has two daughters and two sons—one of the daughters a committed political activist, the other quite conventional; one son a doctor and the other dying in a futile war. The novel begins with David learning of the death of that son, Rob, in the Korean War. It causes such a crisis of his worldview that he resigns from his job. On a retreat to read and think in a shack in the bush, he is converted to the cause of peace.

He was simply a man who had become conscious of a colossal confidence trick worked on the people: a sane man, in his time, concerned to look squarely at his own life; and the lives of men and women who made the population of this country. They had become like a mob of sheep rounded up by the press, the churches and big business, which doped and betrayed them to the shambles of war.⁴

David embarks on a one-man crusade to stir the apathetic masses to action. His activist daughter, Myff, guides him into using his journalistic skills for good: ‘He could use that “brilliant ironical style” of his more effectively. Not find himself limited and leg-ironed by the policy of a newspaper. He would make a name for himself as an independent writer of courage: turn out special articles exposing political skulduggery, religious hypocrisy, economic chicanery’.⁵ In fiction Katharine found a chance to give her father another chapter, erasing his suicide and redeeming him politically.

In life, Katharine had already radicalised before Alan’s death. Yet coming in the midst of that intense conversion, Alan’s death became a crucial part of it. The Russian revolutions had given her hope for a better society; Alan’s death made her feel just how appalling the present one was. In 1918 she retreated to the cottage in the bush of Emerald to finish writing Black Opal, to read Karl Marx, and to ‘absorb some of the vigour and beauty of the earth as an anodyne to realization of the woes of the world’.⁶

VANCE PALMER’S UNEXPECTED reaction to the anti-conscription victory was to announce that he was enlisting. Later, Vance suggested that if he hadn’t enlisted, he’d have been left feeling he’d missed out on something of great significance.⁷ On 7 January 1918, Nettie recorded in her diary that Katharine visited them in Emerald.

She had come up to persuade V not to enlist & she showed him some of her brother Alan’s letters … Says ‘no man can hope to get through it’. Also gravest belief that Australians have not only the most dangerous work but the heaviest. None of these sufficient reasons to keep a man from enlisting! Katharine very sweet & kind: also very broken down about her brother. She wouldn’t stay.⁸

With Vance enlisting the Palmers would be moving out of the cottage—which the owner had also put up for sale—and were on the lookout for someone to take over the lease.

Guido was meant to visit the Palmers at midday on Thursday 17 January. Vance walked to the railway station to meet him, but he wasn’t there. Instead, he’d sent a note dated Tuesday saying he would be delayed as he was ‘committing a rash & extreme act’ at 2 a.m. on Thursday morning in Upwey.⁹ The Palmers knew what he meant; Upwey was where their mutual friend, Reverend Frederick Sinclaire, minister of the Free Religious Fellowship, lived. ‘Passed a horrid afternoon’, Nettie wrote in her diary, ‘wondering precisely who was his wife’.¹⁰ Was Nettie upset that Guido hadn’t married Katharine, or was she worrying that he might have? The 2 a.m. ceremony adds to the bizarreness of the marriage.¹¹

Guido walked 11 kilometres from Upwey and arrived at the Palmers’ cottage at six o’clock in the evening without his new wife, who’d already returned to Melbourne. She was Kathleen Tobin—known as Katrina or Toby—and working as a pantomime chorister. The Labor Call newspaper reported, derisively: ‘Guido Baracchi, the plutocratic socialist … has acquired a wife in the pleasing person of Katrina Tobin, a decorative feature of the Aladdin panto chorus’.¹²

Guido returned to Melbourne the next day, Friday, on an evening train; Katharine arrived soon after, narrowly missing him. She seemed frenzied to Nettie, full of thoughts about the Wobblies after talking to Percy Laidler at Andrade’s Bookshop. On Saturday, Nettie and Katharine walked into town in the hot afternoon; when they returned, Katharine refused to rest. She was finally ‘finished by an atrocious headache (back of head) & collapsed till evening. Sat outside & K said her illness had decided her that she needed a rest in the country & would take the house & perhaps buy it. Talked plans of her novels & stories’.¹³

Nettie didn’t connect Guido’s impulsive marriage to Katharine’s collapse, but it would have been a shocking thing for Katharine to learn when she arrived. Marriage had seemed so far from Guido’s intentions when she was with him. It was only two months earlier that she’d written the unsent letter asking if she should still have faith in him. She had her definitive answer now.

Katharine and Nettie—as well as everyone else—would have been wondering why Guido married Toby. Betty Roland, Guido’s lover, wondered years later, and actually asked him; it was then she said he gave the candid answer that Toby would only go to bed with him if he did.¹⁴

On 25 January, Katharine moved in with a vanload of furniture and the Palmers moved out to live with Nettie’s aunt.¹⁵

THE EMERALD COTTAGE—home to the Essons and then the Palmers—was now Katharine’s.

It was a train ride of three hours from the city to Emerald, the 46-kilometre journey made slower by a transfer to a narrow-gauge line at Fern Tree Gully and the steep climb through dense ferns from there to Emerald.¹⁶ The village had ‘less than thirty houses, a few stores, a wine bar, a blacksmith, and a police station’.¹⁷ Two kilometres down the road, the cottage stood at the end of a driveway of wattles on 8 hectares of bush. The land had been cleared by a pioneer family, the Charmans, forty years earlier, but the trees had regrown and the eucalypts were now more than 7 metres high. The cottage had been built in 1908 for Rose Charman and even though she had only lived in it less than a year before she married and moved out, it’s still known by her name today. ‘It had a sitting room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a makeshift laundry on the back verandah. A primitive wood stove cooked the food and boiled the water for bathing.’¹⁸

David’s retreat to the bush in Subtle Flame after the death of his son in the war seems to reflect Katharine’s quiet months in Emerald. ‘At night, sprawled before a log fire’, he read poems and political pamphlets and spent time thinking ‘as he had never done before. The trouble and pain of the last few months brushed aside, still lurked at the back of his mind’.¹⁹

EDITH DIDN’T LIKE Katharine living in Emerald alone and sometimes came to stay with her for a week at a time.²⁰ Katharine remembered the two of them sitting by the fire one cold evening, Edith working on a lace cushion while Katharine read Karl Marx’s Capital. Edith told her to put down that ‘dry old book’ and give her head a rest. It wasn’t dry at all, Katharine replied and read her an excerpt about working conditions for women and children in English mines and factories. Her mother’s sewing stopped and she said, ‘I’d no idea there was ever such a terrible state of things’.²¹

In April, Edith inherited Alan’s estate valued at £1354, half of it real estate and the other half a life-insurance payout.²² With the money, Edith bought the Emerald cottage in July, perhaps as an inducement for Katharine to remain in Victoria with her rather than returning to London.²³

Nettie came to stay with Katharine at Emerald in September. Katharine was ‘sweating and groaning under the last chapters of her novel [Black Opal] which will have to be two volumes long. I do my whole duty by avoiding her all day long, though we talk by the fire at night’.²⁴

In a 1961 letter to Nettie’s younger daughter, Helen, Katharine related an incident which she dated to about 1918:

It happened soon after I returned from England. I had written some stray verses, The Earth Lover & Other Verses & not knowing what to think of them sent them to Hilda & Louis. They passed them to Vance & Nettie. None of them were impressed by the verse—in fact rather damning. So I put them aside.

When I went to see Nettie & Vance at Emerald, there was [Bernard] O’Dowd over by the mantelpiece & you & Aileen—lovely children—Aileen about three, & you just toddling—evidently brought up to regard O’Dowd & poets generally with veneration.

Aileen exclaimed eagerly, ‘Katharine poet? Katharine poet?’

I said (under the disapproval of my critics), ‘No, Katharine not poet’!

Aileen burst into tears & c[oul]d not be consoled until she answered that ‘Katharine might be a poet someday’.

I remember that lovely little face, all tears, & the sunshiny smiles breaking through.²⁵

Despite Katharine’s success as a fiction writer, she craved acclaim for her poetry, something neither the Palmers nor Essons could honestly offer. When she said she wasn’t a poet, the Palmers and their friend Bernard O’Dowd probably thought she was just being perceptive about where her literary gifts didn’t lie.

The Earth Lover and Other Verses was eventually published in 1932 in a limited edition of seventy-five copies. She dedicated it to Hugo, obscuring the origins of the poems, many of which developed out of her notebooks of anguish over Guido, replete with references to the ti-trees of January 1916. The collection follows an arc, beginning with several poems professing joy in ‘the beloved’ only for it to turn to heartbreak. In ‘Love Philtre’ she described a love potion she would brew with ‘all her wit and witchcraft’ which would either win him over or demonstrate for sure that he was untrue. She addressed the ‘whilom’ (that is, former) lover in another poem. It was a farewell:

I have washed your feet with my tears,

my love;

and dried them with my hair.

But you are not Jesus, my love,

you are only my love;

and I wonder if ever a god above,

or anywhere on the earth, my love,

would have failed to notice these things

and gone on his way whistling rag-time.²⁶

The poem after this is ‘For Alan’, evoking her ongoing grief at her brother’s death—‘No fruits are sweet now / The flowers are done’. Yet the second stanza of the short poem tempers the present struggle with a sustaining hope:

My way is like this way

Which goes through the hills—

A rough path—it seems to ascend, ascend:

But I know it will come to the sea,

And long day end.

The Earth Lover and Other Verses is more strongly felt than Clovelly Verses (1913) and has some striking imagery and moments of illumination. Katharine was developing as a poet, even if she had not come far enough to impress the Palmers or the Essons. It seems she was so sensitive about her poetry that their lack of enthusiasm was a major reason she stopped writing it.

KATHARINE HAD HER life worked out in 1918. Now her brother was dead, her mother needed her more and she gave up her plans to return to London. She probably expected things to continue as they were for years to come, her time split between her mother’s house in suburban Melbourne where she had a workroom with a piano, and the rustic Emerald cottage she loved. She had found time and space to write. She could stay connected to the literary and political bustle of Melbourne while maintaining a necessary distance from it in Emerald.

But just as things seemed to have settled into this pattern, Hugo was writing to her from Egypt. They now had a shared grief in the deaths of their brothers in the war. His letters were growing more passionate and urgent. He wasn’t going to leave her alone. In September, he cabled to tell her he was coming to see her.²⁷