18

Armistice

Emerald and Melbourne, 1918–1919

AFTER BEING PART of the Allied forces capturing Jerusalem in December 1917, Hugo’s health was bad for months and eventually the AIF sent him back to Australia to recover and help recruitment.¹ He left Cairo on 4 September 1918 aboard the Suffolk, bound for Melbourne. ‘Cable followed cable’, wrote Katharine, ‘from every port on his journey’.² He arrived in Melbourne on 17 October and came to see her at her mother’s house in Armadale. ‘I still felt afraid to commit myself where Hugo was concerned. But when … he stood at the foot of the stairs, a tall, masterful figure in uniform—returned from the maelstrom of war—my irresolution vanished. He held out his arms, and I walked down the stairs into them.’³

He had decided he wanted to marry Katharine and he came to her at just the moment she was willing to be wooed. A few ecstatic weeks of courtship followed. She would keep looking back on them for the rest of her life. ‘He was really a deliriously exciting and romantic lover … Such a gallant, striking figure he made as he strode through the streets. If we dined in town, I could hear the whispers going round, “Throssell, VC”, and the crowds collected to cheer as we passed.’⁴ A mythology had grown up around him and other Victoria Cross recipients as exemplars of the Anzac hero. The Age reported that year that he was ‘seven feet in height’ and ‘holds the distinction of being the tallest man in the Australian army’ when he was actually 5 feet 10 inches or 178 centimetres.⁵

If Katharine’s irresolution ‘vanished’ the instant she saw him, she still felt there were obstacles to their marriage—politics being one. ‘I told Hugo my political beliefs and he accepted them with me.’⁶ It was a stunning conversion for the son of a conservative politician but he was an impulsive man in love with Katharine and ready to be excited about whatever she was excited about. It was common enough to change religious denominations in order to marry; he could have seen a political conversion as an analogous compromise. Having lived through so much horror, Katharine’s claims of war-profiteering and the lives lost in the interests of capitalists must have rung true for him.

Katharine’s other obstacle was the promise she’d made to Reay that she would never marry. She took seriously his threat to shoot himself. When she told Hugo about it, he refused to accept it as a reason and told her he’d ‘kidnap’ her if he needed to.⁷ He might have been the first person she’d told about Reay’s manipulative threat. It was three years since she’d seen Reay and in that time she had distanced herself from him emotionally and sexually with Guido and now Hugo. Katharine and Hugo decided they would marry once the war had finished. She sent Reay a telegram to tell him. ‘There was no disastrous repercussion … a promise was broken, but no fatal shot fired.’⁸ She was finally free of ‘the vines of a possessive passion’ that had bound her for a decade.⁹

After many Allied victories over the Central Powers through October, in November there were rumours an armistice was about to be signed. In Victoria on Monday 11 November ‘the feeling that the great news was near at hand pervaded all sections of the community and a strong desire to be ready to celebrate in a fitting manner was evident’. Shops were selling as many flags and as much ribbon as they could stock. Then, in the evening, ‘the glad news that the German delegation had signed the armistice terms spread like wildfire. It reached the country almost as quickly as the more distant suburbs, and it kindled a blaze of feeling such as the State has never before known. Everywhere there was joy—deep unrestrained heartfelt joy’.¹⁰

Katharine and Hugo had spent the day at Emerald ‘and were walking to the train at twilight, when flares lit up the distant hills’.

Hugo gazed at them, a strange expression on his face. So moved and silent, he was, as flare after flare cast a yellow light across the sky … His arms folded round me. ‘The war’s over’, he said. ‘Those are armistice rockets. We can be married now. I won’t have to go away again.’¹¹

They told Edith they were marrying. She was thrilled but also horrified by Katharine’s insistence she didn’t want a church wedding. ‘I warned him and Mother that I could be married at the Registrar’s office, or not at all.’ When Edith protested, Katharine threatened to live with him without being married at all. ‘Terrified’ Katharine would follow through with that, Edith said she would be content with a registry wedding.¹²

SOON AFTER HER engagement, Katharine finished writing Black Opal.¹³ The machinations of Sophie’s complex love-life continue to the end of Black Opal. She is still in love with the station heir, Arthur Henty, even though he is now married. She decides to marry the devoted, reliable opal miner, Potch, saying to him that she was afraid of the power of her love for Arthur ‘and there’s no future that way. With you there is a future … You know I do care for you too, Potch dear, and I want to have the sort of life that keeps a woman faithful … to mend your clothes [and] cook your meals’.¹⁴ Returning to the couple after their marriage, Katharine wrote, ‘The days had been long and peaceful since they were living together … She believed her life had found its haven; that if she kept in tune with the fundamentals of love and service, she could maintain a consciousness of peace and rightness with the world’.¹⁵ Yet there is a further twist. Arthur comes to Sophie, desperate, and begs her to run away with him. When she refuses, he shoots himself. In a tribute to Arthur, Sophie rides his horse to his funeral. Leaving the cemetery, she starts singing for the first time since she lost her voice in America. ‘The notes of Sophie’s singing, with its undying tenderness triumphing over life and death, flowed.’ The novel ends with Sophie and Potch riding through Lightning Ridge. ‘In everybody’s mind was the enthusiasm of a new endeavour.’¹⁶ The nature of the ‘new endeavour’ is vague in the novel; it seems to be spilling over from Katharine’s new-found sense of political purpose in her own life.

The original manuscript—now lost—was the length of two standard novels at about 160,000 words. She felt confident about it. When, in 1919, a friend compared her to Jack London and Walt Whitman, she didn’t reject the comparison but wrote that it would only be true on the basis of the unpublished Black Opal.¹⁷ She submitted the manuscript to Hodder & Stoughton in London, the publisher of The Pioneers (1915). They wrote back in mid-1919, wanting her to drastically cut the length by 50,000 words and alter two of the main characters. ‘I told them to “go to hell”—or words to that effect.’ Yet she then realised that the ‘propaganda would go further’ if she made the cut, even if the novel ‘loses from a literary point of view’.¹⁸ Despite partially following Hodder & Stoughton’s advice, she still resolved to never send it or any other manuscript to them, the publisher who had made her famous. The novel would eventually find another British publisher, Heinemann, appearing at the end of 1921, five years after her second novel, Windlestraws.

ANOTHER REFRACTION OF Katharine and Hugo’s marriage is found in her play, Bid Me to Love, written in 1927 but only produced and published posthumously in the 1970s. Ric Throssell notes that the setting ‘was unmistakably the verandah at Greenmount’ where Katharine and Hugo were living in the 1920s.¹⁹ In the play, the husband, Greg, tells his wife, Louise, ‘Of all the trophies I ever won for running, swimming or boxing, I’m proudest of you, darling. Did it in record time too, didn’t I?’²⁰ In Child of the Hurricane, Katharine depicted only her wedding as unconventional, giving no hint the terms of the marriage itself were also unconventional. In Bid Me to Love, Louise discusses her marriage with an old flame who happens to be visiting, a writer named Woodbridge.

LOUISE: When we were married, I said to Greg: ‘If I don’t like it, married life, don’t expect me to stick it, will you? And if you don’t like it, I won’t expect you to stick it, either’.

WOODBRIDGE: Not a point of view he was accustomed to, I should think.

LOUISE: Greg has been a very well brought up young man. It was rather a shock to him, but—

WOODBRIDGE: He got used to it.

LOUISE: I believe really, the success of our marriage has been due to … a sense of its impermanence. (Frowning slightly) I’ve said: ‘If ever there’s anyone you care for more than me, Greg, I’ll make way. We’ll be good friends. Only tell me.’²¹

Louise goes on to tell Woodbridge that ‘physical fidelity doesn’t mean as much to me as psychological fidelity’.²² Even though these are characters in a play, it’s possible there’s more insight into Katharine and Hugo’s marriage in Bid Me to Love, written in the midst of it, than in the ostensibly autobiographical account in Child of the Hurricane, written when Hugo was long dead and the years of their marriage had become an idyll in Katharine’s own mythology.

ON 4 DECEMBER 1918, Katharine’s thirty-fifth birthday, she and Hugo publicly announced their engagement. One columnist commented:

Despite his experience of the horrors of war on Gallipoli and in Jerusalem, Capt. Throssell does not take either life or himself too seriously, and if there is any truth in the theory that those marriages are happiest in which the parties are of opposite temperaments, this particular match should prove a conspicuous success, for Miss Prichard is earnest and rather serious-minded.²³

Making a slightly different point about their compatibility, Guido’s partner Betty Roland would ask years later how Katharine came to marry a ‘swarthy’ ‘virile’ war hero, when they had so little in common.²⁴ If Betty had known Katharine better—or her fiction—she might have understood that Hugo was the kind of macho, outdoorsman Katharine was attracted to; his antecedent was Alfred ‘Redbeard’ Quin, whom she had a crush on in 1906 at Tarella Station.

Katharine would always insist, though, that she and Hugo also had an intellectual connection. In 1950 she wrote to her son Ric:

My Jimmy had a wonderful brain, that was never properly appreciated by his family, or even given a chance when he was young. Everybody seemed to live in the shadow of the old man [Hugo’s father, George Throssell]. Jim could have been & done anything, as far as his mental ability was concerned, I’m convinced. But they all treated him as a good sport & a playboy. Damn them! Never understood his great qualities. He’d never have married your mother if he hadn’t appreciated the intellectual things of life. He did: we had great times reading & discussing books, & always his points of view showed a clear & rigorous brain, capable of sound judgement.²⁵

In Katharine’s mind, she saw a side of Hugo no-one else recognised.

THE DAY AFTER the announcement, Hugo left on the train for Perth to spend a month with family. He and Katharine had been together for just six weeks. Asked about his future movements, he ‘said that after his visit to his old home in Western Australia he would probably return and settle in Victoria’.²⁶

In his first week in Perth, he was sent to the Army General Hospital in Fremantle for a medical assessment. The malarial symptoms had returned the previous month; he was suffering shivering fits and heavy sweats. The doctors declared him permanently unfit for general service and granted him a 50 per cent disability pension on the basis of his malaria, with the expectation that he would be fully recovered in a year. The part-pension was to begin after his discharge on 13 February.²⁷

‘Out of work’, Hugo declared to a reporter, ‘but never so pleased to lose a job in my life’. The question of employment—something at thirty-four he had yet to properly resolve—was weighing on his mind. While returning from the front in September, a repatriation form asked what occupation he desired to follow after discharge. He responded, ‘Undecided’.²⁸ He was still on that voyage when he was encouraged to stand as an independent candidate for the federal by-election in the seat of Swan.²⁹ His nomination was handed in on the last morning, only to be apparently withdrawn ten minutes before the deadline.³⁰ He was a celebrity son of a politician, beloved by the merchant and pastoralist classes he had been born into and yet also, as a war hero, by the working class. Despite his lack of interest in politics, he might have won the by-election.

While he was in Perth, he was offered a job as the soldier’s representative on the board of the land settlement scheme for soldiers, a full-time position paying a reasonable salary of £300 per year. The scheme granted land and loans to returned soldiers to set themselves up in farming. Hugo’s job would involve assessing soldiers’ applications and recommending how much the state-owned Agricultural Bank should loan successful applicants.³¹ He had accepted the job by the time he left Perth on 16 January 1919.³² There’s no record of the long-distance negotiations with Katharine, if there were any. According to Nettie, he had only taken the job for a year, which may have made Katharine feel able to leave her mother without any sons or daughters in Melbourne. Katharine ‘approves of this job a good deal’, Nettie wrote, ‘because Jimmy does know land & he’ll do his best for the soldiers’.³³

Hugo and Katharine would have seemed to be setting themselves up for a sound financial position, the new job supplemented by the £80 part-pension, earnings from his family’s estate, and Katharine’s income as a writer. However, Hugo was still carrying a debt of at least £1000 from his unsuccessful years of farming. ‘After the war’, Katharine wrote to the Repatriation Commission years later, ‘he was left with obligations on his own and his brother’s farm to meet, and tried desperately, in many ways, to fulfil them’.³⁴

HUGO ARRIVED BACK in Melbourne on 22 January 1919. He had less than a week to prepare for the wedding and he only bought Katharine’s ring on the day itself from a jeweller on Collins Street, the same street as the registry office.³⁵

Katharine and Hugo were married on 28 January 1919, the day Victoria and New South Wales were declared infected with Spanish influenza. The pandemic had been spreading around the world since the middle of 1918, but until now Australians had been living normally. The day before had been the Foundation Day public holiday—as Australia Day was then known—and in Melbourne, many spent the day ‘at the Australian Natives’ Association fete, in the fern gullies or hills, at the races or by the sea … In all the parks and gardens round the city and suburbs youngsters and their guardians frolicked to their hearts’ content’.³⁶ At 4.30 p.m. on the day of Hugo and Katharine’s wedding, after autopsy results showed the disease had reached Melbourne, Victoria was declared infected and traffic into South Australia, a state not yet infected, was stopped. All theatres and schools in Melbourne were closed.³⁷ The epidemic killed about fifteen thousand Australians over the next six months—half of them aged in their twenties and thirties.³⁸

A newspaper article from the period reported that registry marriages cost £2 4s 6d and ‘the ceremony can be performed in twenty minutes, provided everything is in order, without fuss or ostentation. These unceremonious weddings are becoming increasingly popular’.³⁹ The witnesses were Katharine’s brother, Nigel, her mother, Edith, and Hugo’s sister and brother-in-law, Ada and Frederick Constable. Katharine still gave her occupation as ‘journalist’, three years since she had worked as one. It was probably Hugo who gave her age as thirty-four, matching his. Katharine wrote decades later, ‘My husband objected to me being born a few months before he was, & always insisted that we were the same age. Because I was born in December, he declared I had no right to claim a year more than he had. So the mistake in my date arose, I suppose’.⁴⁰ There are still sources which give the year of her birth as 1884 rather than 1883.

They held a small reception at Edith’s house in Armadale. ‘Aunt Lil decked the house with branches of magnolia from her garden … The perfume of the big moon-white blooms was everywhere.’ Katharine’s friend, composer Henry Tate, ‘played the suite he had composed in honour of my marriage’.⁴¹ It’s not recorded who made speeches. Possibly Nigel, the conservative doctor, made one; he and Katharine never understood each other but he would have approved of her marriage. He might have joked, seriously, about Hugo being a good influence on Katharine, straightening out the strange ideas which had filled her head during the war.

Edith gave Katharine the deeds to the Emerald cottage as a wedding gift. The transfer officially occurred on 28 February, during the couple’s honeymoon.⁴² Nigel and Beatrice do not seem to have received anything from Alan’s estate. Both of them were financially stable; perhaps Edith had heard that Hugo was carrying debt from his farm and wanted to provide Katharine with some security.

On the day of the wedding, Nettie was writing to Vance, who was still serving with the AIF in Britain. ‘Katharine’s marriage is taking place just about this minute … I think she & Jimmy Throssell are going to be happy … Katharine’s married life shows signs of being more orderly & better “found” than she thought.’⁴³ Nettie had a cold and, fearing the influenza outbreak, was staying home that Tuesday rather than heading into the city, as planned, for something unspecified—possibly Katharine’s wedding.

After the reception, Katharine and Hugo ‘drove away into the hills’.⁴⁴

KATHARINE AND HUGO’S honeymoon in Emerald lasted most of February. The single surviving memento is a grocery receipt from the Emerald Corner Store, dated 1 February 1919. Their honeymoon fare was simple: bread, butter, rice, curry powder, apples, and Beefine (‘the original fluid beef’, an advertisement from the time proclaimed, is ‘more economical than meat’ and ‘makes delightful sandwiches in a moment’). Hugo kept it in his scrapbook, perhaps by chance or perhaps because it was one of the first documents to bear the name of the new ‘Mrs Throssell’.⁴⁵

‘She is never Mrs Hugo Throssell’, wrote Betty Roland, ‘always Katharine Susannah Prichard, poet, playwright, novelist … never a mere wife. It must be very difficult for him’.⁴⁶ Yet Betty was wrong; after her marriage, Katharine went by the name ‘Mrs Hugo Throssell’ socially and even had a calling card with the name on it.⁴⁷ She maintained her maiden name only as her literary identity. Even though the Freewoman Discussion Circle would have encouraged her to keep her own name in every sphere of life, gender issues had long been secondary for Katharine. As if to compensate for the radical political position Hugo took to marry her, she embraced a degree of conventional domesticity in her marriage and would be ‘as proud of her cupboards of jams and preserves as any good farmer’s wife’.⁴⁸

Katharine and Hugo would have been glad to be out of the influenza-ridden city, but after days of hot temperatures, bushfires broke out around Emerald and were at their worst on 2 February. ‘Several dwellings had narrow escapes from destruction.’⁴⁹ For Katharine and Hugo, the fires were ‘the only disturbing element of the honeymoon’, a newspaper reported. The fires ‘raged around with fierce and frightening intensity. Trees fell, and the wicked cracklings caused by the leaping flames were only too much in evidence’.⁵⁰

Sixteen years earlier, Katharine had written ‘Bush Fires’, the winning entry in the New Idea love story competition. In that story, a stockman named Angus was lying drunk in a hut in the bush in the midst of fires when his estranged lover, Kath’rin’, came riding in to rescue him. Reunited, they embrace and, even though the fires will soon kill them, ‘life seemed all fair now—a flower-strewn meadow, sunlit, winding tranquilly into Eternity’.⁵¹ The deaths aside, elements of Katharine and Hugo’s honeymoon—idyllic love in a hut in the bush in the midst of fire—were a neatly literal fulfilment of the naïve love story she’d written as a teenager. The success of that story had encouraged her at a critical point and made her resolve that ‘I must know more about bushfires, love, and the country beyond our ranges’.⁵² As it turned out, she learnt of the three elements in reverse order, finally completing them with her experience of a bushfire on her honeymoon.

ON 28 FEBRUARY 1919, Nettie and Christian came to say goodbye to Katharine at her mother’s house. Quarantine permits had been granted and a berth had opened up on a ship and so Katharine and Hugo were leaving for Western Australia sooner than expected. ‘We found Katharine in her study’, wrote Nettie

… tearing up mounds of old letters & she made us stay while she tore & tore & chattered. She seems well & rested & also quite comfortably mistress of her fate—and charming & young too, of course. When she took me to her room & showed me half-packed trunks of trousseaux things—sets of things sent her by her Ceylon sister, prodigiously beautiful & others made by her relatives here—I was astounded to find myself suddenly envious to the point of passion!⁵³

The letters Katharine tore up probably included those from Reay and Guido; she was making a new start.

On 3 March, Katharine and Hugo left Melbourne on board the Somali.⁵⁴ Katharine probably still expected she would be coming back one day to live in her home city. She never did; she would only ever return to Melbourne as a visitor.

She is rarely remembered as a Melbourne writer, despite living there for much of her early life. One reason is that she only ever wrote about the city in her final, largely unread novel, Subtle Flame (1967). She described writing Subtle Flame as if it were a literal trip to Melbourne: ‘For the setting of this story I left my spiritual home in the West, and went to Melbourne and the Dandenong Ranges, well known to me as a girl’.⁵⁵ Despite calling Western Australia her ‘spiritual home’, the fond way Katharine evoked the Melbourne of her youth in the novel suggests it also had some claim to that title. Critic Jack Beasley notes that even though the novel is ostensibly set in the 1950s, the Melbourne it depicts is that of a much earlier period.⁵⁶ As the main character, David, forsakes his comfortable existence to embark on an idealistic campaign for peace, ‘A stirring of pride and love for the city, and all that it held of human energy, swept him’.

Thought of the city’s history surged. He could see it as a ramshackle settlement of canvas and wattle and daub huts during the early days of pioneering and the gold rush, when bullock waggons and horse-drawn drays ploughed the streets: chase its growth though boisterous prosperity of the land boom, the chaos of economic collapse: follow its gradual resurrection and the renaissance of civic pride, until now Melbourne was being advertised to tourists as ‘The Queen City of the South’: a modern city vaunting its order, cleanliness and culture, its university, National Gallery, public libraries, hospitals and theatres, tree-planted streets and gardens.⁵⁷

Katharine’s Melbourne years took her from Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1887 to Armistice in 1918. Her life would have been very different if she had grown up in Launceston or Levuka. As significant as stints in the outback and London were to Katharine’s development, it was Melbourne and its people that shaped her more than any other place. There were her parents, old Melburnians, pioneers who brought her up with some of the optimism of the Marvellous Melbourne boom days they had known in their childhood and youth. With the new century, Katharine came of age in a city with a sense of its place in history, the capital of a new nation at work defining what it meant to be Australian. Conversely, the depression which clung to Tom through the 1890s and beyond reflected the long economic gloom of the city itself. Then there was her ambitious circle of school friends, Hilda, Nettie and Christian, all of them breaking through gender barriers; she was to keep up friendships with them for the rest of their lives. As disappointed as Katharine was by her lack of a degree, the educational opportunities she did have were crucial: the influence of the poet principal, JB O’Hara, at South Melbourne College, the evening classes with Walter Murdoch at Melbourne University, and the things she learned as the first student of the Victorian Labor College. She also furthered her literary formation informally at the Victorian Public Library, Cole’s Book Arcade, the Australian Literature Society, and the Melbourne Literary Society. Significantly, Melbourne gave her Colonel WT Reay and then Guido Baracchi, the older man and the younger man who helped her shift, respectively, from the conservatism of her parents to nationalistic reformism and then to the radical ideology of syndicalism and the foundations for communism.

Katharine was formed in Melbourne, and while she was there she was the student or mentee. When she arrived in Western Australia, she shook that off and right from the beginning assumed the role of political and literary sage. She was thirty-five years old, the author of a new novel she knew would cement her literary reputation, the wife of a war hero, and a syndicalist-communist with all the zeal of a new convert, preparing to publicly declare herself. She was ready to begin a new season of her life.

IT SEEMED, UNBELIEVABLY, after so many tragedies, that Katharine had found peace. In September 1919, she wrote to Nettie from her new home in Greenmount in Perth’s Darling Ranges:

I never thought life could be as good as it is. Jim is so unbelievably thoughtful, devout & adorable in all the little everyday ways.

I’m surer every day of the rightness of having married him. He is the best thing that could have possibly happened to a lone literary female. I really think I’ve been happy lately for the first time in my life …

I didn’t think it could ever happen to me. The Furies had chased me so far & so hard. And now this tranquil back water where I just live & am afraid something may happen!

The only way with happiness, it seems to me, is not to seek to hold it, not to peer at it too closely—& to be very humble about it and try to be working on it—by being willing to sacrifice even it to the great objective values.⁵⁸

Katharine was aware of living temporarily in a happy ending like she had given Deidre and Davey in The Pioneers and Sophie and Potch in Black Opal. But she also knew that happy endings could only be found in books, where the author could stop the story at just the right point.