PART 3
19
Greenmount, 1919–1921
WHEN KATHARINE AND Hugo arrived in the port of Fremantle on 11 March 1919 aboard the Somali, they’d been married six weeks. Perth’s Daily News noted their arrival; Hugo was a Western Australian celebrity and needed no introduction while Mrs Throssell was described as ‘a well-known writer and daughter of the late TH Prichard, editor of the Mining Standard’.1
There were 320,000 people living in Western Australia in 1919, half of them in the metropolitan area.2 A tourist book from 1914 claimed that ‘small and youthful’ Perth was ‘fast becoming a well-built city’, up to date with its electric light, and electric tram cars.3 Yet two years later a soldier from New South Wales on his way to the front wrote, ‘Perth is a place curiously behind the times. It is not very large, poor in public buildings [and] peopled with extremely nice citizens …’4 Katharine had only briefly visited Perth before for stopovers on voyages home from London to Melbourne. Having lived in London and Melbourne, it seemed a ‘backwater’ to her.
Hugo and Katharine rented a house called ‘Wandu’ in Greenmount, 25 kilometres east of the city in the Darling Ranges. In a letter to Nettie Palmer, Katharine gave her address as ‘House of the White Gums, On the Green Mountain’.5 Wandu was a ‘ramshackle’ eight-bedroom bungalow built in 1902, and described in 1919 as having ‘bath room, tanks, stables, and tennis court, 22 acres ground, including 8 acres orchard and vineyard’.6 Katharine wrote that there was ‘a wild garden screening us off from the road. We lived in only two or three rooms, and on hot summer evenings disported ourselves like Adam and Eve in the garden’.7
Katharine’s new life in 1919 was happy and busy. Hugo wanted her to hire a maid, but she was reluctant, ‘not wanting to be an employer of labour’, while also aware that there were people looking for jobs. ‘So far I’ve done all the housework, cooking etc’, she wrote to Nettie, as well as milking the cows. She hadn’t milked before and she found it ‘a most exacting business’; she sung arias in an attempt to ‘beguile’ the cows.8
The artist Tom Roberts visited their house on 5 December 1919 during a stopover; he was on a ship from London for his first trip back to Melbourne for years. Roberts had volunteered as an orderly at the London hospital where Hugo recovered from meningitis in 1915; he had been assigned to Hugo as a ‘batman’ and the two became good friends. Roberts’ account of his visit gives a glimpse of the Throssells’ life at Wandu:
[A] white gate & brushed against the shrubs & silver wattle of the wild garden Mrs Throssell got the key & opened up the house & I watched the VC feed the ducks & fowls, milk the cow …
We all helped the supper out the verandah from the kitchen through a passage from the hall. Kerosene lamps—one a hurricane. Cold roast duck salad with a dressing, thick butter & cream & fruits. Jasmine climbing up the verandah & pomegranate red flowers learning over to us, leaving a gap looking through towards the valley & distant hills. To go outside was to be in a strange stillness, only now & again a cricket or cicada & the pony moving in the yellow grass of the garden. But we had to set back to the ship at midnight …
Throssell looks first rate, & his wife is the same.9
After Hugo and Katharine moved out of Wandu the next year, the new owner, Mrs Blanche Hunter, turned it into a guesthouse and added the attractions of a golf course and the state’s first electrically lit tennis court. At the bottom of the block, right on York Road, she built a shop and let it out as the Wandu Weekend Tea-Rooms. For the next three decades until the original house was dismantled in the early 1950s Wandu was to be ‘a landmark and almost a symbol of hospitality and good cheer’ in the Greenmount area, including for Hugo and Katharine, who became friends with Mrs Hunter and her family. A remnant of Wandu still stands today—the old tearooms, most recently operating as a liquor store.10
IN THEIR WHIRLWIND courtship at the end of 1918, Hugo had told Katharine he agreed with her new-found political beliefs before he proposed to her. They didn’t have time to work out just what that meant and Katharine’s convictions were evolving anyway. Now over in Western Australia, she wrote to Nettie that ‘Jim has grown so to my point of view that he usually describes himself as a Bolshevik & certainly has done more explanations of what Bolshevism is than any man I know in this state. Can you hear him explaining what the word means to the State Attorney General?’11 In this initial phase, Katharine and Hugo saw themselves as partners in revolution. ‘I owe a great deal’, Hugo wrote, ‘of my new faith and understanding of the trouble and sorrow in the world to my wife, and that we hope to work together in ways which will make our lives of real service to our fellow men and women’.12 They were settling in Perth at a time of ferment; a long-running industrial dispute at Fremantle wharf culminated in a day of violence on 4 May dubbed ‘Bloody Sunday’ in which a unionist was killed by a police officer.13 Rather than seeking out the writers of Perth, Katharine launched herself into the city’s radical political circle. She and Hugo came into the city on Sunday afternoons for the Social Democratic League meetings on the Esplanade, ‘the green flats beside the shining river where the people of Perth gather for such occasions’.14
In the winter of 1919, Katharine and Hugo both made speeches revealing they were socialists. Hugo went first in July. Peace Day was celebrated around the world to mark the long-awaited signing of the Treaty of Versailles after months of negotiation over the terms of peace. It came just as the influenza pandemic had finally started to take hold in Western Australia and one author speculates that the spike in cases in August was due to the celebrations.15 Hugo was invited to speak at his hometown, Northam, on 19 July 1919. He wasn’t meant to be a controversial choice of speaker. ‘A scion of the Tory Throssell family’, one newspaper wrote of him, ‘a mighty warrior, a returned hero who sooled during the first conscription campaign—he possessed every qualification to keep up the Tory reputation of sleepy Northam, his native heath’.16
That Saturday started out overcast but the sun had come out by the time the long procession left the Northam Town Hall at two o’clock. The Salvation Army band marched first followed by Hugo leading the mounted light horsemen. The town’s war hero was dressed in full-uniform, ‘looking very splendid’, Katharine wrote, ‘on a great bay charger’.17 After the light horsemen was a car with Hugo’s sisterin-law, Nurse Isabella Throssell, and ‘three maimed soldiers’, followed by thirty returned soldiers, one hundred cadets, a motor ambulance, a fire truck, a tradesman performing a burlesque, decorated motor cars, and, at the end of the procession, a tin-can band. The procession followed a circuitous path along the streets of Northam, finishing at the showgrounds. The streets were lined with people waving flags of the Allies and making noise with whistles, kazoos, drums and conches.18
After a football match at the showgrounds, twelve hundred people gathered on Avon Street in the evening in front of a platform for a ‘demonstration’ beginning at eight o’clock. Gerry Throssell, Hugo’s 17-year-old nephew, remembers it was strange that Katharine came up to him and the other nephews and nieces beforehand telling them to give ‘uncle a loud clap & a big cheer when he made his speech’.19 There were five speeches interspersed with a choir of one hundred singing patriotic songs from the victorious Allies, including ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, ‘The Marseillaise’, and ‘Australia Will Be There’. Hugo was the fourth speaker. The first speaker, a Catholic priest, declared it was ‘now the duty of the people to preserve Peace’. An Anglican priest spoke second and ‘appealed to all creeds and all classes to work together’. James Mitchell, the state premier and local conservative member, spoke third; he was an old family friend of the Throssells. His message was far more hawkish, looking to the future and declaring ‘it would be absolutely necessary for Australians to prepare to defend their Country, and if that became necessary, to endeavour to emulate the deeds of the Australians in the great war’.20
With this lead-in, Hugo took to the stage and began his speech innocuously enough, saying how good it was to be back in old Northam again. He mentioned his football-playing days and boxing matches; at the time he left for war, the district would have known him as a somewhat irresponsible ‘lad’ but the war had made him a ‘man’.21
‘The war has made me a Socialist. It has made me think and inquire what are the causes of wars. And my thinking and reading have led me to the conclusion that we never shall be free of wars under a system of production for profit, with its consequent over production, periodic crises, unemployment and the struggle for markets …’22
As he spoke, Katharine wrote, his face was ‘all torn with emotion. It was terrible—but magnificent’. One newspaper reported applause at the end of his remarks, but his nephew claims decades later that ‘he was greeted with silence—except we nephews & nieces who clapped & cheered’.23
A bugler sounded the last post after Hugo’s speech and then the final speaker stood, 83-year-old Saul Solomon, a retired businessman and politician. Solomon wasn’t going to remain silent about Hugo’s incendiary words. Departing from his prepared speech, he claimed there ‘was no country in the world that gave so much in return for labour’ as Australia. He concluded by declaring that socialism had already failed in Australia. He sat back down next to Hugo, and the band played the national anthem, ‘God Save the King’.24
NOT MUCH OF the reaction to Hugo’s speech was recorded. The West Australian noted the ‘impressive speeches’ without any detail about what was said. It took the Northam Advertiser, to break the story on Wednesday with a neutral summary of the five speeches. On Friday the Westralian Worker called the speech a ‘veritable “bombshell”’ and published a lengthy verbatim transcript. It’s probable Katharine herself wrote the article—she knew the editor, the future Labor prime minister John Curtin, and was contributing some unsigned articles to the newspaper at this time.25
According to his nephew, Hugo would tell people he lost all but five of his friends over the speech and it’s this interpretation taken by Hugo’s biographer, John Hamilton.26 Yet the reality was more complex than that, other factors over the next fourteen years contributing more to the long unravelling of Hugo than just the announcement of his political radicalisation. After the speech he kept his job with the land board; one of the few public mentions of disfavour was in a gossip column in November saying that he ‘seems to have suffered a “slump” in those circles that were wont to honor’ his conservative father, George.27 Although there’s no record of him being asked to give further speeches at commemorative events, he continued to make appearances at ceremonies as an honoured veteran.
HUGO HAD BEEN Katharine’s first convert, won over so easily and completely that it had filled Katharine with hope and the expectation that many more would follow. The next month the ‘Perth Prattle’ column in the Sunday Times reported: ‘Mrs. Hugo Throssell’s address on “Socialism” at the Karrakatta Club last Thursday left the members thinking. Seems that it was Mrs Hugo who converted Hugo to Socialism. Socialism and novel-writing are her hobbies’.28
The speech was not publicly advertised as it was only open to the club’s members, the wealthy and high-status women of the state. Entitled ‘The New Order’, it was a much longer speech than Hugo’s, a carefully developed argument against capitalism and for socialism. Her tone was strident and her message uncompromising. ‘We are standing on one of those periods of history when the old order is changing and yielding to a new one’, declared Katharine. ‘Socialism stands for justice, light, reason, love, and honesty; Capitalism for greed, for war, for oppression of the weak, over-working and under-paying of men, women, and children.’ Only two things kept people from embracing socialism. The first was ignorance, because no-one who studied socialism ‘with an open mind’ could fail to be convinced. The second was greed, because some people were convinced but still said, ‘“Nevertheless, I want my profits, and I don’t care how I get them”’.29
Her speech shows extensive reading and thinking, outlining centuries of economic history and peppered with stories and statistics from around the world. At the end she gave a list of twelve books for ‘preliminary reading’. The speech was the culmination of her own period of intense reading, initially as the first student of the Victorian Labor College in 1917 and then in the isolation of her cottage in Emerald throughout 1918. She wasn’t yet a communist in a narrow sense, still placing hope in several movements, including both the Bolsheviks in Russia and the syndicalists in Spain. ‘Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, and Industrial Unionism all outline paths along which the workers may achieve … emancipation.’30
It was an unlikely audience to bring her message to and it’s not recorded that she made any converts. The invitation to speak shows an openness to Katharine from the elite women of Perth, but the contents of her speech marked her out from them. She was to exist on the fringes of the city’s cultural elite for the rest of her life, admired for her writing but separated by her politics.
IN NOVEMBER 1919, the government opened a surveillance file on Hugo. It came after he gave a speech one Sunday that month on the Esplanade denouncing Allied support against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and Katharine gave a speech explaining socialism to the Anglican Social Committee.31 Surveillance of left-wing radicals had begun during the war when the IWW were active and the conscription referendums caused such disquiet. At the end of the war, the government had decided to continue surveillance and secretly opened an Investigations Branch of the Attorney-General’s office, its staff drawn from military intelligence.32 A war veteran named Robert Weddell was one of the officers in Perth. His brief report stated:
The latest recruit in the ranks of the Social Democrats is Captain Hugo Throssell, VC … Many attribute his leaning towards Socialism to his wife’s influence, but he states that he saw the need of such principles whilst on service and on his return to Australia. However, he was struck on the head at Gallipoli and further he was a victim to Cerebro-spinal Meningitis, his mind perhaps having been affected.33
Weddell didn’t add anything to the file until March 1921, reporting that he had met Hugo and intended to ‘draw him out’ about communism. ‘A medical authority informed a friend of mine that he would not be surprised if Throssell went “off his head” at any time, so it is evidently his wife who must be regarded as the more dangerous.’ Hugo’s fragile mental state wasn’t observed on his medical record until much later, but the second-hand account from one of his doctors in 1921 was prescient.
Weddell or one of his colleagues compiled a two-page report on the couple in March 1922. The report writer was almost certain by then that Katharine was one of the ‘leading members and advocates’ of the Communist Party. The writer details Katharine’s ‘inflammatory’ speeches and her ‘mischievous propensities’, concluding that she ‘is regarded as a visionary but at the same time she is responsible for much harmful propaganda’.34 Before too long, Hugo’s file was relabelled with Katharine’s name as Weddell and his successors observed that only she remained politically active.
‘THE GALLAVANTINGS HAVE been interesting’, Katharine wrote to Nettie. ‘Trips with Jimmy on land settlement business into the country districts, down to the S[outh]-W[est] pastoral, grazing & orange growing, into the timber country, & out to the big wheat grazing lands. I’m simply gorged with stuff to write.’ Although so full of subject matter, she didn’t have the time she needed to write.
Under the influence of his brother-in-law, Percy Armstrong—a keen motorist and car dealer—Hugo bought a motorbike, a red 7.8 horsepower Indian Powerplus with a basket sidecar for Katharine to travel in.35 He took her out to his farm at Cowcowing, a journey of 200 kilometres. Travelling the bumpy roads in the sidecar of a noisy motorbike reduced Katharine ‘to the mental condition of a scrambled egg in the shortest time on record. But the journey was gorgeous! Every stockman and drover on the road knew Jim—and of course it was a case of pull up and yarn with everyone!’36 Hugo employed a farm manager, but he and Katharine made the trip out sometimes to help.37
Out of Katharine’s observations of Cowcowing came the only short story she published in her first five years in Western Australia, ‘Christmas Tree’, appearing in December 1919 in the Australasian. In it, Jinny Gillard and her husband are packing up their meagre possessions and leaving their wheat farm after fifteen years of struggle. They had come to the farm as newlyweds and the toil had taken their youth, only to leave them with nothing. The Western Australian Christmas Trees on the horizon ‘had thrown their blossoming crests’, but Jinny had read in the newspaper that the tree was actually a parasite, ‘Its roots throw suckers round the roots of other trees, and draw the sap from them’, she tells her husband. ‘That’s why the trees around it are so poor and dreary lookin’, and it’s so big and strong—and has all those yellow flowers’. On their way to their new place, they stop by the Christmas party at the town hall and encounter the banker who wouldn’t show mercy to the Gillards and other farmers forced off their land. They leave the party in disgust, the story ending with Jinny drawing a parallel between the banker and the parasitic Christmas Trees.38 It is her first mature literary work, restrained and lacking the melodrama of her earlier stories.
Katharine lapsed into a literary silence after writing ‘Christmas Tree’. ‘During this period of strenuous and exacting organisational activity’, she remembered later, ‘I did no literary work at all’.39 The silence was disguised by the delayed publication of Black Opal in November 1921, but the novel had long been completed. She cut the 50,000 words from it that Hodder & Stoughton requested and sent it to the London publisher, Heinemann, who accepted it in April 1920.40
Despite Katharine gaining notoriety for her political views, both the West Australian and the Sunday Times carried positive reviews of Black Opal. The reviewer for the West called it ‘a remarkably well-written and interesting novel, which may unhesitatingly be recommended to every reader of fiction. It is hardly necessary to say that the whole atmosphere of the book is essentially Australian’.41 The most enthusiastic review came from Triad in Sydney, which wrote that it was ‘the best Australian novel we have read for a long time’, praising the authenticity of its characters and plot.42 Overall, however, the reviews were more in line with the modest praise in London’s Daily News which called it a ‘wholesome, pleasant, virile story’.43 Its sales were hampered, according the Bulletin, by the fact ‘very few copies had come to Australia’, even months after its publication in London.44
KATHARINE’S MOTHER, EDITH, was in bad health and Katharine had been meaning to visit Melbourne for Christmas 1919. She was too busy and had to delay the trip, but finally set off on 12 June 1920. Once Katharine was in Melbourne, she became sick too and Hugo took the train over in July to be with her. In August, they were staying with the Palmers in Emerald for a couple of weeks while Katharine built up her strength for ‘a severe operation’, its nature unknown.45 The operation took place on the morning of Thursday 19 August; Hugo wrote to Nettie, ‘my woman came safely through … everything was very different from the last performance & [Dr] Lloyd told me he was perfectly satisfied … every minute now will see her making strength for which Glory be’.46
While Katharine was in hospital, Hugo was staying with Edith at her house in the Melbourne suburb of Armadale. Katharine hadn’t been discharged on Sunday 22 August when Edith unexpectedly died in her sleep from heart failure caused by an infection. She was sixty-six years old. ‘Mrs Prichard has never been really well since her son Alan was killed at the war,’ a newspaper reported, ‘and the added grief of the deaths of her two sisters following shortly one upon the other, further weakened her resisting power’.47
Edith probably knew nothing of Hugo and Katharine’s speeches in 1919; she didn’t live long enough to see Katharine become truly infamous for her politics. She died thinking life was turning out well for her eldest child, that married to Hugo Katharine had achieved middle-class respectability and normality. With Edith dead, Katharine had only her brother Nigel left in Victoria and her ties to her home state had been loosened.
KATHARINE AND HUGO returned to Greenmount in October 1920, the same month a group of radicals met in Sydney to form the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). There had been socialist and revolutionary parties in Australia before, but what set the CPA apart was its alignment with the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow. The Bolsheviks had formed the Comintern to spread communism around the world; the newly formed CPA were to do their part in Australia. Bill Earsman telegrammed Katharine with the news and she wrote back to say her health was improving and ‘she was prepared to work very hard to form a branch of the party’ in Perth.48 For the next year, Katharine worked desperately hard trying to fan the flames of revolutionary zeal in her adopted city.
At a meeting in the Perth Trades Hall in late 1920, six comrades signed a letter to the general secretary of the CPA, agreeing to accept its principles and policies and submit to its discipline. Katharine’s name was second on the list after the inaugural secretary, George Whitbread.49
Whitbread expressed doubts to Earsman about Katharine’s ability to contribute because of her ill health. Earsman responded, ‘I have worked with Mrs Throssell for a number of years and I strongly recommend that the branch secures her active co-operation in all work. I know her as a good teacher and a good tactician and her knowledge of the revolutionary movement is based on a good experience and a very wide reading’.50
From December, the fledgling Western Australian Communists held fortnightly Saturday night public lectures—explicitly called ‘propaganda meetings’—and a weekly study circle on Sunday mornings. The propaganda meetings soon faltered: there were usually about ten people who came to the public meetings in the Trades Hall ‘but even these dwindled’, Katharine reported, ‘until there were only four of us one evening the lecturer, the Secretary (then GW Whitbread), myself and my husband’.51
The study circle was more successful. Starting at eleven o’clock straight after the morning church services, it met with the seriousness of a new religion. Advertising the circle, the Westralian Worker wrote, ‘We are in the period of the collapse of capitalism. Crisis will follow upon crisis. The revolution is developing rapidly in Italy, France, and in England. It must hit Australia. But with sufficient understanding and an intelligent lead the problem of carrying on production for use here should not be difficult. Study groups should be formed everywhere.’52 Katharine later explained that it was called the Labor Study Circle ‘to get a foothold in the orthodox trade union movement’; the name also echoed the Victorian Labor College she had been a part of.53 While the relationship between communists and the wider labour movement was strained from the start, John Curtin promoted the study circle in the Westralian Worker. Katharine and her co-organiser, George Ryce, alternated leading the group week by week as they worked their way through the writings of Marx.
In September 1921, Katharine fell pregnant, worsening her poor health. She struggled on for a couple more months until the group went into recess in November. The Westralian Worker proclaimed, ‘Socialism is the nearer for what has been done. A great deal of self-sacrifice went to its achievement, and in this connection, Mrs Throssell’s health has suffered greatly as the consequence of the strain the Circle work added to her literary and other activities.’54 The study circle was the most successful communist activity in the state in the early 1920s and it continued for several more years under George Ryce’s leadership. ‘The influence of our study circle’, Katharine claimed, ‘was carried into the trade unions, unemployment camps, and ALP branches’.55
Hugo, despite his conversion and attendance at some meetings, soon became politically disengaged. After the Northam speech, he wrote an account of why he became a socialist at the request of Sydney’s Sun newspaper but they decided not to publish it.56 He made just one more political speech in November 1919. He never joined the Communist Party and instead became obsessed with making money from real estate. He’d once taken Katharine down the hill to Perth for the public meetings on the Esplanade on Sundays but by 1923 Katharine was reporting there are ‘no Sunday trains from our district which makes it almost impossible for me to attend Esplanade meetings on Sunday’.57
There was still much hope of a radical turn in Australian politics. In October 1921, the Australian Labor Party adopted the socialisation of industry as part of its platform. John Curtin was there at the conference and on his return to Perth came out to Greenmount, bursting ‘with the excitement of a schoolboy’ to tell Katharine the good news.58 Yet the CPA itself was struggling. A dispute rocked the state branch in late 1922 and early 1923 when one member publicly attacked George Ryce. The Central Committee tried to resolve the conflict from Sydney, the secretary, HL Denford, trusting Katharine enough to seek her opinion on the matter.59 Things did not improve over the years that followed and the party had only a weak presence in Western Australia over the rest of the 1920s.
Katharine’s health had broken down from overexertion worsened by tensions in the fledgling party and she didn’t attend party meetings in 1922. She gave birth in May and explained to the Central Committee, ‘my health is very uncertain and we live a long way from Perth’.60 Years later she wrote, ‘the birth of my son, and ill health for some years prevented me from doing organisational work … But those years of contact with the workers and the everyday struggle for improvement of their living conditions, bound me forever to their interests’.61