PART 1
1
Levuka, Fiji, 1883–1887
KATHARINE’S FATHER WAS Thomas Henry Prichard, usually known as Tom. He was the editor of the Fiji Times when Katharine was born. Late in 1882, on the eve of his departure to marry Edith Fraser in Melbourne and bring her back to Fiji, the Levuka community held a function to honour him. The German consul presented him with a purse of a hundred sovereigns collected from the other white colonists, saying, ‘We recognise, sir, the services you have rendered the colony as a fearless, vigorous and able writer. We know that in you its interests have found a capable advocate’.1
Tom’s response is a rare surviving instance of him talking about himself. ‘When I came to Fiji I was a young man. As you now see, I am approaching middle age, yet I am one of the youngsters of my people. I am the waif, the stray, the wanderer of the lot; the rolling-stone that was expected to gather no moss.’ He declared, ‘I hold the journalist to be the great lay teacher of the age’, and finished his speech by saying, ‘My heart has ever been in my work, but when I return I shall resume it with redoubled energy, and if I fail to justify your estimate of me it will not be for want of trying, but because you have rated me altogether too highly’. He was a driven, sensitive man.
In his spare time, Tom wrote fiction and poetry with some success, appearing in a number of newspapers and magazines and even having one novel published in 1893. He regarded himself as a wit, writing satirical rhymes for his newspaper column which haven’t aged well. A devout but theologically moderate Anglican, he was anything but moderate in his politics.2 A hard-line conservative, he railed against a minimum wage, welfare and anything else progressive.3
Katharine spent long periods of her early life in the shadow cast by Tom’s depression. She struggled against his desire for her to be a ‘domestic angel’, desperate for him to approve of her own ambitions. After he killed himself in 1907, she tried unsuccessfully to find publishers for his writing. He was on her mind the rest of her life. In 1950 she was planning to write a book about him. By 1969, she had conceded that it wasn’t to happen, but in one sense it already had—the story of Tom’s life as she knew it fills a good proportion of her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane (1963). Five days before she died, she wrote to the National Library enquiring about stories of her father’s she had sent them years earlier, promising to send the rest when she’d finished submitting them to publishers.4
SOME OF THE family stories Katharine told in Child of the Hurricane aren’t quite true, but it is true that all four of her grandparents were on the same boat, the El Dorado, sailing from Liverpool to booming Melbourne in 1852.5 Over the decades that followed, three sets of Prichards and Frasers married, including Katharine’s parents, ‘so family relationships became somewhat complicated’.6 Tom was seven years old on that voyage, having been born in 1845 in Monmouth, a town on the border of England and Wales.
Tom’s father, Charles Allen Prichard, had ‘set himself up as an importer of cheeses’ in Australia; later he tried to make money in tallow but ‘misfortune seems to have followed every attempt he made to be a businessman’.7 The Melbourne directory for 1865 listed him as a grocer living on Gipps Street in the suburb of Collingwood. He and his wife, Agnes, died there within months of each other in 1867.8
In 1863, the year Tom turned eighteen, his older sister, Ada, married and moved to the goldmining town of Ararat; Tom and his younger brother, Frederick, seem to have moved with them while their parents remained in Collingwood.9 He spent at least six years as a ‘rolling stone’ in different goldfields towns. He worked on a newspaper in Castlemaine, gaining his first experience as a journalist, and as a bailiff in the court at Beaufort.10 By 1868 he was writing; that year, he took out second prize in a poetry competition for the Glassblowers’ Exhibition in Ballarat.11 He resigned as bailiff in May 1869 and migrated to Levuka, then Fiji’s capital.12
Between 1868 and 1872 the ‘Great Fiji Rush’ brought many ‘young, restless men’ from Victoria and the other Australasian colonies to Fiji.13 Alluvial gold was getting harder to find and wool prices were falling; newspaper reports led people to believe their fortunes were to be made in Fiji. Tom and the others who came hoped to turn Fiji into another of the white colonies of Australasia, prospering on the back of indigenous labour and resources. ‘A rough-and-tumble time we had put in, as we helped to plan an outpost of the Empire in the very heart of barbarism’, he wrote in a short story. ‘It had been ten years of fry and frizzle, of sweat and swelter, of yams and bulamakau [beef], of sardines and square gin, of hard graft and unrealised hopes, of exile from civilisation and yearning to return.’14 He worked for a time as the clerk of peace at the Levuka court before becoming the editor of the Fiji Times in about 1877.15
For years he courted Edith, nine years his junior, by mail. ‘Father used to say that he fell in love with Mother when she was a schoolgirl, and made up his mind then that she was the girl he wanted to marry.’16 One of his surviving poems is called ‘To Edie, on her birthday’, dated 25 April 1878, the day she turned twenty-three: ‘Not with my hands but with my heart I wreathe / A natal garland for thy brows to-day.’17 As sentimental and formal as it is, it would have impressed Edith as she waited to join her adventurer across the seas. ‘My heart is sore for Somebody’, she copied into her commonplace book in 1879.18
TOM AND EDITH married on 24 January 1883 at St Mary’s Anglican in Caulfield.19 He was thirty-seven; she was twenty-eight. By the time they set off on the SS Hero back to Fiji, Edith was pregnant. Though not Australian-born, Katharine was Australian-conceived.
Edith Isabel Fraser was born into a large middle-class family in 1854 in the Melbourne suburb of Williamstown. Her parents were from Scottish families, although her father had grown up in Ireland.20 She was the fourth of eight daughters from her father’s two marriages, with just one brother surviving infancy. Katharine remembered ‘the aunts’ as a strong presence in her early life.
Edith was a gentle, conventional women who left few historical traces. She was adventurous enough to leave her family home and work as a governess for a time before she married.21 Her commonplace book survives, filled with quotes and jokes by other people. There is a brief and formal letter she wrote to Alfred Deakin, a family friend, when he became prime minister in 1903. A couple of times, the facts of her presence and the colour of her dress at social events are recorded by newspapers. And then there is her sad testimony of her husband’s final day preserved by the coronial inquest.
By 1883, the number of settler wives in Levuka had increased, but they were still far outnumbered by men. In that first year of marriage, a pregnant Edith was taken out of a close family network in Melbourne into a colonial outpost.
Child of the Hurricane begins with a hurricane destroying Levuka on the night Katharine was born. Their ‘frail’ huts smashed, homeless Fijians took shelter in the one house on the hill with its roof still on—her parents’ house—just as she was being born. The Fijians ‘gazed with awe at the baby the hurricane had left in its wake. “Na Luve ni Cava,” they exclaimed. “She is a child of the hurricane.”’22 It was a messianic birth, foreshadowing the drama and tragedy of her life.
The problem is, there was no hurricane on 4 December 1883. There were some heavy rains on 29 November which caused the creek to flood, although the Fiji Times from the day after her birth doesn’t mention the weather at all, let alone a hurricane which destroyed Levuka. Katharine’s journalist father, Tom, chided the Australian press just a few months after her birth for exaggerating Fijian hurricanes, turning ‘the most innocent gale’ into a ‘Frightful Hurricane in Fiji’. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he claimed, ‘Fiji is no more subject to hurricanes than is Victoria’.23
Although Katharine had the reason for her nickname wrong, she was dubbed ‘Na Luve ni Cava’ while still a baby. Tom wrote a poem of that title describing her—‘a sprite of nature intense’—to send to her aunt.24 In choosing the name, he may have been inspired by a novel about Fiji published the month Katharine was born, Henry Britton’s Loloma, or Two Years in Cannibal Land. King Big-Wind declares that the narrator, who has arrived with a storm, is ‘the Child of the Hurricane, a white God from unknown countries’ and the tribe will adopt him.25 It’s one of the only other recorded uses of the phrase.
The earliest known version of Katharine’s hurricane myth appeared in 1916 in an article by Mary Gilmore for the Australian Worker. ‘Miss Prichard was born in Fiji during the worst hurricane known there for years. The roof of the house was blown off and the new-born infant wailed with the tempest. In Fiji she is called “Hurricane” by the populace.’26 Katharine’s mother, Edith, was still alive then but apparently never took the chance to correct the story Katharine had already begun telling.
KATHARINE WAS NAMED after her mother’s late half-sister, Katherine Susan Davies. The original Katherine Susan died in Melbourne two weeks after giving birth to her second child in 1872.27 In Katharine’s autobiographical children’s novel, The Wild Oats of Han (1928), the protagonist, Han, ‘had been called Hannah Frances after a saintly great-aunt of whom a dark oil painting hung in the dining-room. She had excelled in good works, Great Aunt Hannah Frances … Han was named after her in the hope she would imitate her virtues’.28
All her life, Katharine’s names were regularly misspelt, even on the covers of some of her books, reporters and publishers blithely adding a ‘t’ to Prichard, or turning ‘Katharine’ back into ‘Katherine’. She ‘detested’ these misspellings, writes her son.29 The problem began with her birth certificate, which she must never have looked at too closely. The loopy handwriting is a little ambiguous, but it recorded her name clearly enough as ‘Katherine Susannah’.30
AFTER KATHARINE’S BIRTH, Edith had a nurse to help her, a man named N’gardo. It was customary, according to Katharine, for white women to have male nurses help them. When she was ‘a few days old’ N’gardo supposedly took her away for hours to see the chief without telling her parents. Over time, he taught her to speak the Fijian of the chiefly caste and told her stories from their mythology. ‘Maybe N’gardo is responsible for the instinctive sympathy I’ve always had for people of the native races. It is, I think, a tribute to that dark, protective presence in my early life.’31
Tom tried to arrange for N’gardo to accompany Katharine and her mother back to Melbourne for the birth of Katharine’s brother, Alan, in March 1885, but regulations prevented it. N’gardo died, she wrote, before she returned and ‘it was nothing but grief for the child from whom he had been parted that caused him to will his own death’.32
It’s a shocking story, but it might not be true. The shipping page of the Sydney Morning Herald recorded Mrs TH Pritchard [sic] with two children and a servant boarding the Rockton on 13 June 1885, bound for Fiji.33 Katharine didn’t mention any other servants, so this was possibly N’gardo, well and truly alive. Whatever actually happened, N’gardo became an antecedent for later tragedies. In her suicide-filled autobiography, he was the first man close to her to kill himself.
It wasn’t long before Edith was pregnant again and Katharine’s second brother, Nigel, was born in Levuka on 21 August 1886. Katharine’s earliest memory was from this time. ‘There’s a picture in my mind of a balcony veranda with white rails, pink flowers below it, and blue sea beyond. Alan and I were playing on the veranda and a baby cried.’34
TOM WAS TO look back nostalgically on Levuka as a ‘merry, bustling and busy’ centre where ‘adventurous spirits from the Australian colonies traded, paid their debts, drank, made merry and socially frizzled together under the torrid tropic sun’.35 However, by the time Katharine was born the port was in decline and it had lost its status as Fiji’s capital to Suva.36
Levuka’s decline was hastened when a hurricane struck it on 4 March 1886, the event which probably formed the basis of Katharine’s birth mythology. Katharine was two and a half years old; she may have had faint memories of it. ‘The evil hap which Levuka, in common with the rest of the colony, has for so long experienced, culminated on Thursday morning in the heaviest hurricane which has visited the town since that of 1871.’ The worst of it lasted from daybreak to 6 p.m., buildings ‘going down in every direction’, as debris flew through the streets.37 Katharine the toddler would have been huddled in the dark bungalow that day, her pregnant mother worried for her and baby Alan, who was eleven months old. Tom’s scoffing at the dangers of hurricanes now seemed foolish. Writing for the Argus, he reported that ‘the streets of a city under bombardment would not have been more dangerous’.38
Rather than rebuild, many white colonists left. The European population of Levuka fell from 2000 to less than 500. Levuka became, in Tom’s words, a ‘decayed, deserted fishing village’.39
At the end of the year, the Fiji Times moved to Suva and Tom moved with it. On 4 January 1887, the Taupo steamer arrived at Suva and he disembarked while Edith and the three children stayed on the ship, continuing on to Melbourne.40 Their stay in Melbourne was only meant to be temporary—Tom still hoped that Fiji would prosper and the family could make a permanent home in Suva.
In September 1887, he led a deputation sent to Melbourne on behalf of the colonists to call for Fiji to be annexed by the colony of Victoria.41 The settlers were unhappy with the British governors; they were looking for a government which would allow them to more easily exploit indigenous labour and land. When the premier finally met with Tom, he said the proposal had great difficulties and no advantages for Victoria.42 Reported in newspapers across Australia, it was Tom’s moment in the spotlight and it ended ingloriously.
With Tom’s hopes for Fiji dashed, it seems he felt it was time to finally end his self-exile and settle the family in Australia permanently.
Fiji was to become a land of myth for Katharine, a place for her father to play out his exotic adventures in the stories he would tell her during her childhood. He was happy in these stories, carefree, a contrast to the anxious and depressed father she was to know for much of her childhood and youth.