20

York Road

Greenmount, 1920–1929

KATHARINE AND HUGO decided to settle permanently in Greenmount. Life there in the Darling Ranges suited them both. Their house was on York Road, gateway to the Wheatbelt where Hugo had grown up, close enough to the city to remain connected but semi-rural so they could keep horses, an important common interest. Describing Hugo to an old friend who’d never met him, Katharine focused on horses: ‘My Jim is a wonderful horseman and beauteous & behaved with horses’.¹ On her return from a trip to Melbourne, she wrote of ‘a stolen hour or two on my beloved red Wyburn among the deep hills—where not the signs or the sound of a soul but ourselves and the birds’.²

Katharine loved the Darling Ranges:

Every spur of the range is heavily timbered with jarrah and red gum, through which white-bodied trunks of wandu stand, with their saplings about them, slender and graceful as nymphs in the dark forest. Townships are scattered among the hills, of course. There are isolated farms, orchards, and vineyards; but for the most part, the country still belongs to the trees and wild flowers. It becomes a wilderness of miraculous beauty during the spring time.³

The wildflowers meant much to her. ‘When I came to live in Western Australia I was enchanted by the wild flowers. With the help of the government botanist Mr C. A. Gardner I learnt their names and was able to greet them like friends when we met in the bush which covers the hills of the Darling Range.’ For several years she arranged to give lessons on wildflowers to the children from the Greenmount State School, taking ‘a flock’ each Wednesday afternoon during spring ‘through nearby stretches of bush where over a hundred specimens of wild flowers could be found’.⁴

After living at Wandu for fifteen months, they bought a cottage a few hundred metres down York Road in June 1920. Built in 1896, the cottage was made of jarrah weatherboard and had four rooms coming off a central passageway, with an outside kitchen and verandahs on three sides. The Guildford Grammar headmaster, Rev. Percy Henn, had been using it as a weekender. Years later, first Hugo then Katharine were to die in that cottage. They bought an adjacent vacant lot as well, giving them a hectare of land with an orchard and enough of a paddock for horses, and then 140 acres of grazing land on the other side of York Road where Hugo kept cattle.⁵

It was a modest house and Hugo always talked of building something grander once he’d made money. ‘It would be made from granite cut from the old quarry, with wide windows overlooking the plain and vine-covered verandahs.’⁶ The aspiration stoked his financial recklessness.

IN JANUARY 1921, Katharine and Hugo had been married two years without children. Unlike many of her generation, Katharine knew about contraception and wasn’t embarrassed to use it. She once wrote of a visitor with too many children, ‘Evidently, she doesn’t know all she ought to. I’ll have to have a word with her, or her great big husband, which I’m quite capable of doing’. She went on to tell her adult son, newly married, ‘there’s plenty of time, and you’ve got so much to do together, before any infant need apply, I hope’.⁷

Katharine and Hugo were ambivalent about children. Katharine was sick and busy trying to establish the Communist Party. Ric, their only child, later imagined Hugo’s reluctance: ‘Still, a baby! A man might not be ready to be a father’.⁸ In The Roaring Nineties (1946), Morris, husband to the novel’s protagonist, ‘had decided they must not have children until they had made their fortune’.⁹

They had a taste of parenthood that year. Katharine’s five-year-old niece, Thea, nicknamed Biddy, arrived on a boat from Ceylon on 11 February 1921. Thea wasn’t flourishing on her parents’ plantation and was sent to Perth so she could eat better. She was to stay at boarding school but come to Greenmount with Katharine and Hugo on weekends and holidays. Ric writes that ‘Katharine used to think of [her] as her daughter’.¹⁰ ‘Greenmount, with Katharine and Unc’, writes Thea, ‘was my real home and refuge. I remember the feeling of sanctuary and love that those two offered and I loved Greenmount’. After Ric was born and Thea’s brother Alan also came to school in Perth, ‘in many ways we formed a family group’.¹¹ Years later, Katharine wrote to Ric of Thea, ‘So close to us, she is really. Seems to belong to me, as well as Bee … somehow, I feel, the affinity is with me & the point of view & interests in life, more my way, than towards golf & bridge wh chiefly interest my little sister’.¹²

It seems Hugo and Katharine were ready for parenthood in September 1921 and their child was conceived on ‘a glorious spring morning’:

I returned from a trip to Albany [on the south coast] to welcome Hilda [Esson] who was coming home after some time in London & New York. It was an all night train journey, and Daddy met me at the station with horse & buggy. Then, it was coffee for two, and——Such a joyous occasion for both of us, the reunion after a few days separation & a glorious morning of sunshine & wildflowers out along the road, hovea & scarlet bottle bush. I remember it so well and being intoxicated with happiness.¹³

Their baby was born at dawn on 10 May 1922, a fortnight early. Katharine gave birth at home—on the jarrah dining-room table, she later told guests, as uncomfortable as it sounds.¹⁴ She wrote that ‘the incidents’ of the birth ‘went into’ her play, The Great Man (1923).¹⁵ In it, the baby is born at home because the hospital is so full that there are ‘patients sleeping on the verandah’.¹⁶ A neighbour named Ethel Parker helped Katharine give birth.¹⁷ ‘Then I saw you’, Katharine remembered to Ric years later, ‘so fat and red and lovely, and they bathed you beside the fire and I said: “Put on his Bolshevik gown, please”. That was the little gown I had embroidered with wheat ears and a hammer and sickle’.¹⁸ Hugo was outside ‘hanging onto the clothesline in an agony of mind’ when Mrs Parker came out to tell him he had a son. ‘How gloriously happy we were! Daddy’s shouting with joy & telling everybody he weighed 8lbs, & me just holding him tight, as he snuggled beside me’.¹⁹

They called the boy Ric Prichard Throssell. His first name was in honour of his dead uncle, Hugo’s brother Eric, who had always been known as Ric. In The Great Man, the baby’s aunt complains, ‘That’s why they call the babe “the great man”. Expect him to revolutionize the world, abolish poverty, misery, battle, murder and sudden death’. As a young man, Ric left Western Australia to serve overseas during World War II and he never returned to the state to live. His birthday became a lonely occasion for Katharine and each year she would write him a letter recounting again her ‘great day’ and then go to visit Ethel Parker in celebration.²⁰

Years later, she told her daughter-in-law that having a baby was a ‘glorious experience’ but the fulfillment was mixed with a sense of ‘having given “hostages to fortune”’.²¹ She articulated those maternal anxieties in a letter to Ric in 1961. ‘Oh darl, I used to be so afraid that you were too wonderful to last. The world seemed full of germs & wild beasts of all sorts wanting to devour you. How cd I ever protect you from them—and yet make you strong enough to fight them yourself?’²²

Katharine was thirty-eight when Ric was born and sick in the years which followed, two possible reasons he turned out to be an only child. Hugo, she wrote, was ‘jubilant when our son was born … though he never wanted more children’.²³ Perhaps he was reacting to growing up in such a big family. In a short story Katharine wrote in 1924, Rose, the main character’s wife, ‘did not want any more children; she dreaded having another baby. It seemed simple and natural enough for a man and woman to have children. But not for Rose, or for him’.²⁴

IN 1923 LOUIS ESSON was setting up the Pioneer Players in Melbourne—dedicated to staging Australian drama—and he wanted a play from Katharine. She wrote The Great Man for him and it was performed as one of five short plays on 16 August without Katharine to witness it. A reviewer dismissed it as ‘a rather artificial trifle, showing the lovemaking and quarrelling of an emotional and a not very sensible young couple, who had been thrown out of their stride by the advent of the first baby’.²⁵

The play was written out of the frustrations and anxieties of Katharine’s first year of motherhood. She called it a comedy, but the tone is one of conflict and unhappiness. Isabel is trying to raise her infant son according to the principles of a pamphlet called The Care and Feeding of Babies—the title of an actual publication issued by the NSW Department of Public Instruction in 1914. The sterilised bottles and the timed feeds are met with disdain by Isabel’s sister and sister-inlaw, who give her conflicting advice. Meanwhile Isabel and her husband, Robert, argue terribly, too; Isabel only has time for the baby and her housekeeping is no good. She tells Robert, ‘Ours wasn’t an ordinary marriage. Don’t you remember it was to last as long as we liked. Not a moment longer than either of us liked’.²⁶

THE NIGHT KATHARINE went into labour, Hugo had read in the newspaper that DH Lawrence was staying in Darlington, just a few kilometres away. ‘I explained to Jim that D. H. Lawrence was the most brilliant of modern English writers and that I would like very much to meet him. Jim promised to drive me over to Darlington the next day.’ Hugo called and wrote after Ric was born, but when Lawrence eventually wrote back he was in New South Wales and said he’d already left Western Australia by the time the letter came. Katharine and Lawrence exchanged books and several letters with Katharine telling him she thought her baby had arrived early in order to try to meet him.²⁷

The Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson wrote to Nettie after reading Working Bullocks (1926), ‘Katharine Prichard has great talent—but I fear for her, if she cannot shake herself free of the apeing of D. H. Lawrence … the undoing of more than one promising novelist’.²⁸ Critics often noted Lawrence’s apparent influence on Working Bullocks and Katharine’s story ‘Grey Horse’, both written soon after his visit. Katharine denied it, dating her period of interest in him much earlier to her London years when she wrote The Pioneers and Windlestraws, novels which bear no sign of his influence. She remembered she read Sons and Lovers soon after it was published in 1913 and ‘felt as if a comet had swung into my ken’.²⁹ She was so affected she paced around her Chelsea flat all night.³⁰ In the rest of his work she ‘did not find quite the sensitive realism and power which had impressed me so much’ and she became ‘dissatisfied with the diffuseness, arrogance and morbid mysticism which had become associated with his work’.³¹ The only debt she would acknowledge to him was a general ‘liberating effect on the writers of his time, with regard to style, construction, the discussion of sex and thought processes’.³²

KATHARINE’S ONLY LITERARY friend in the Darling Ranges was Mollie Skinner. Mollie, seven years older than Katharine, had written newspaper articles and a book about her experience as a nurse during the war. She ran the guesthouse in nearby Darlington where Lawrence stayed while he was in Perth. He was so intrigued by Mollie he collaborated with her on a novel, The Boy in the Bush, published in 1924.

In December 1924, a profile of Mollie written by Katharine appeared in the magazine Woman’s World:

That the writing and ideas of M. L. Skinner are naive and individual, we can believe. She herself is. She has strength of will and mind to go her own way; say her own say; courage, too, taking attacks of the Furies with energy and placidity, the precipitate of years of sensitive and tragic realisation.

The impression you have of her is of a tree that has been blasted by lightning. A tree lithe and beautiful in its growing time.³³

Katharine did not particularly like Mollie’s writing. When Nettie was curating a collection of Australian stories and looking for a recommendation for a story of Mollie’s in 1928, Katharine wrote that there was nothing of hers she was ‘particularly shook on’, though she liked her ‘immensely’ and found her as a person ‘much more original & individual than anything she’s written’.³⁴

Mollie was more interested in spirituality than politics and she exasperated Katharine at times, but they maintained an uneasy friendship for thirty years until Mollie’s death.

ANOTHER OF KATHARINE’S somewhat unlikely literary friendships in Western Australia was with the younger writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman, daughter of the prominent feminist doctor, Roberta Jull, and married into a Perth establishment family. ‘It was an intimate friendship, despite political differences’, Katharine wrote years later. ‘She confided in me as I’m sure she didn’t to anyone else.’³⁵ In 1926 Katharine wrote a profile of her for Home magazine, declaring, ‘Witty and well informed, a lover of Australia, our life and people, by temperament and ability, Henry Drake is splendidly equipped for her career as a writer’.³⁶ The fact Katharine’s friendship with the politically conservative Henrietta was to survive the Cold War and the most rigid phases of Katharine’s politics shows her commitments never completely closed her off to other people.

IN 1924, KATHARINE re-immersed herself in writing, producing two major works that year, the novel Working Bullocks and the story ‘The Grey Horse’. She had just turned forty and it was the beginning of the creative peak of her career. Over the next five years she would also write the novels Coonardoo, Haxby’s Circus, the play Brumby Innes, and many of her best short stories. Her peak can’t be explained simply. She largely gave up political activity over those five years but she was busy with parenting and housework, and she had a more active social life than ever before. Her health was often bad and financial problems were beginning to trouble the family. It wasn’t the happiest time of her life; the joy of her first year or two of marriage had faded. She wrote out of the disappointments and frustrations of marriage and middle age. When Nettie saw Katharine in Melbourne at the end of these years, she wrote perceptively:

In a way she’s found herself. Even in those old days in London she knew the kind of books she wanted to write, but she was wavery in her approach to life and unsure of her powers. Now without having lost any of the sensitiveness … she’s gained a sort of toughness. She can be deeply moved by the treatment of natives on the stations … yet can look at the whole question with clear unsentimental eyes.³⁷

The first fruit of her creative peak, ‘The Grey Horse’, was written for a £50 short-story competition announced by Art in Australia in April and closing on 31 August 1924. It was open to its subscribers ‘with the object of encouraging a perfection of style and treatment, which is so evidently lacking in the shorter fiction appearing in Australia at the present time’.³⁸ Katharine’s entry was the judges’ unanimous choice for the prize and appeared in the December issue.

In the story, a farmer will neither share his coveted grey stallion nor let it mate. One day it breaks through a fence to reach a mare and, tasting sex, can never be controlled again. The stallion is contrasted with the farmer’s neighbour who is trying to make a success of an orchard so he can marry. He gets what he wants, at least at first, and marries his sweetheart but then their firstborn baby dies, the orchard fails, and his wife turns off sex.

Katharine was never to write a novel about Greenmount, but ‘The Grey Horse’ and a number of her other short stories are set in the area. She wrote to the American critic Hartley Grattan in 1938, ‘The grey horse lived in the yard below our verandah. You know where you stood with me, and I told you a fire had burnt down all the wattles. I watched the grey horse at his gambols for a year or so—and was always afraid the old couple who lived there would sue me for libel!’³⁹

The elegant Art in Australia, with its high aspirations for Australian art and literature and its tolerance of the avant-garde, was important to Katharine’s literary career.⁴⁰ Winning the short-story prize boosted her confidence after a hiatus. She became a favourite of the literary editor, Leon Gellert, and in the December 1925 issue, he published ‘Ti Tree’ and ‘The Wild Cherry-plum Tree’, two poems Katharine had written during the war and put aside after the indifference of the Essons and the Palmers. It would have helped resolve Katharine to pursue the publication of her second book of poems—including these two—eventually released in 1932.

In 1926, Gellert asked for a story, written ‘freely, in any way that I wished’.⁴¹ She had been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and she wrote the most experimental story of her career, ‘The Curse’.⁴² The story describes a hut in the bush overgrown with Patterson’s Curse, with a dialogue between two disembodied voices remembering Alf who used to live there and preferred to read rather than subdue the bush:

‘The curse!’

‘Patterson’s curse?’

‘A noxious weed …’

‘That’s what it is, he says.’

‘Salt and poisonous as the sea.’

‘An enchanted sea.’

‘Sea of dreams.’

‘Dead sea.’⁴³

In her youth she had emerged as a writer publishing fiction in newspapers and popular magazines; in her publications with Art in Australia she was consciously writing literature, not entertainment.

As well as being literary editor for Art in Australia, Leon Gellert was the editor of the company’s lifestyle magazine, Home, and after persuading the other directors to make it a monthly from January 1926, he needed to find more material.⁴⁴ He probably asked Katharine what she could send him; she decided it was time to revisit The Wild Oats of Han, written nearly twenty years earlier but possibly revised at this time. It was serialised from July 1926 to May 1927.

Katharine asked Gellert to send the manuscript on to the publisher Angus and Robertson; after initially rejecting it because they feared it would not sell, they eventually published it under their Cornstalk imprint in October 1928. ⁴⁵ It had proved harder for Katharine to publish books in Australia than in Britain and The Wild Oats of Han was only a temporary breakthrough; despite her growing reputation, she was not to have another book released by an Australian publisher until 1944 when Angus and Robertson brought out her collection of short stories, Potch and Colour.

The Wild Oats of Han was marketed as a children’s book which may have caused critics to take it less seriously; the short, positive reviews described it with adjectives like ‘delightful’. Some reviewers, however, noted that it was more suited to an adult readership. HM Green found room for it in his Outline of Australian Literature (1930), writing that it was ‘removed by a whole world from the ordinary children’s story’.⁴⁶ It had a print run of 1500, and by the end of 1929 had sold nearly one thousand copies, earning Katharine a modest £28.⁴⁷

AS KATHARINE WAS coming into her creative peak, her health was worse than ever. In late 1923, she had another unknown operation. Then, a few days before Christmas 1924, she came down with typhoid and was in hospital until 23 January 1925. Typhoid is a bacterial infection spread through contaminated water or food; it sets in with a worsening fever, abdominal pain, and severe weakness lasting weeks. Before antibiotics, it killed one in ten people who contracted it and a newspaper reported Katharine ‘has had a hard struggle for life’.⁴⁸ After epidemics in the goldfields in the 1890s and 1900s, by the 1920s it had become a rare disease in Western Australia but a boy from Greenmount came down with it at the same time as Katharine.⁴⁹

Writing the novel Coonardoo in 1928, Katharine gave typhoid to Hugh, the main character. He suddenly becomes sick and ‘could not eat, rolled about with a pain in his stomach; his eyes and hands blazed feverishly’.⁵⁰ He is near death for a time. ‘Each day Hugh became weaker, more exhausted … and, although the fever abated, his heart seemed to swim all over his body, his breath came in such faint windy gusts, that he lay without speaking more than he had to.’⁵¹ Drawing on her experience again, Katharine has Sally suffer typhoid in The Roaring Nineties (1946) while prospecting in particularly harsh country; an Aboriginal woman, Kalgoorla, nurses her through the sickness, saving her life.⁵²

KATHARINE WOULD TALK of her marriage to Hugo as the happiest years of her life. Ric writes that she ‘remembered only the “halcyon days” in Greenmount before anxiety and stifling domestic triviality settled about her’.⁵³ Tensions in her marriage were already apparent when she wrote the play The Great Man in 1923; in 1927 she wrote a kind of sequel to it, a comedy called Bid Me to Love or The Caught Bus. In it, marital happiness has come to an end.

Set, according to the directions, ‘on a sunshiny autumn morning in the late 1920s’, Bid Me to Love is the story of Louise, married for six years to Greg with two children. He tells her, flippantly, that he doesn’t need to bother romancing her any longer because ‘a man doesn’t run after a caught bus’. Later that day, she discovers he’s secretly planning to meet a woman on his business trip to Sydney. Physical fidelity doesn’t matter to her, she declares, but she hates deception. Until now, she’s been faithful to him, saying, ‘I’ve been so busy trying to be a good mother and model housewife. There hasn’t been any time or energy for diversions of any sort’.⁵⁴ She decides to exact her revenge by having her own tryst with Don, ‘a good looking young man of Italian extraction, but Australian in every word and gesture’. She says, in words Katharine would reuse in the novel Intimate Strangers (1937), ‘Every woman of forty needs a lover to keep her self-respect … and her husband’s’.⁵⁵

Ric finds the play obviously inspired by the family’s home life:

To me the reality of the settings and characters of the play was transparent. The verandah of our home at Greenmount was described in the stage directions; my father spoke in Greg’s every word; I saw my mother’s romanticism and unconventionality in Louise; found my own childish sayings recalled; even Phoebus Apollo, the family cat, was included in the cast. As to the plot—fact, or fiction to tease her own Jim? That remains KSP’s private joke.⁵⁶

If the play was Katharine’s private joke, Hugo didn’t find it funny—she wrote that although she called it ‘an honest-to-God attempt at comedy’, ‘Jim says it isn’t!’.⁵⁷ Elsewhere, Ric remembers Katharine’s flirtations with the Italian ‘who used to plough the orchard, showing off by singing all the operas for her. She pretended that she had run off with him for the day and put it all in that blasted play, Bid Me to Love for him to see’; Hugo threatened to beat the man up.⁵⁸

Despite the marital difficulties, Bid Me to Love is set in a middle-class idyll—the family are well-off and spend their time playing tennis on the nearby courts, riding horses in the bush and attending social nights. ‘This contented, unawakened life as it existed in the twenties is most delicately portrayed by Katharine Prichard, with an accuracy which today we can place in perspective.’⁵⁹ There is no shadow of the Great Depression over the play, as there would be over the related novel, Intimate Strangers.

The family in Bid Me to Love do not have a maid, but the Throssells usually did have one in this period, an important factor in giving Katharine time to write. In 1924 Katharine wrote to Vance Palmer just before she came down with typhoid saying, ‘the domestic affairs [are] overwhelming. I barely have a minute to think much less talk. And now the aged virgin who does my chores has sprained her wrist & the book has had to be set aside again’.⁶⁰ In July 1925, Katharine advertised in the local paper, ‘WANTED: Capable Houseworker, fond of children, washing done, four in family; 30s per week’.⁶¹

Even with a young child, Katharine and Hugo had an active social life. In April 1924, Hugo officially opened the state’s first electrically lit tennis courts at Wandu, playing in the first match. The court ‘presented a brilliant appearance, and its glowing outline could be discerned at a distance of several miles. The house beside which it lies … stands in a picturesque old garden and the powerful lights, shining on trees and shrubberies, transformed the scene into a veritable fairyland …’⁶²

In September 1926 they hosted a racially insensitive ‘gipsy’ party at their house for the engagement of Hugo’s niece, Grace Throssell. There were one hundred guests. ‘The gardens were prettily illuminated and made to resemble a gipsy camp’. When the couple arrived, they were led down a ‘gaily’ lit path to ‘the wishing well, where, under the guidance and counsel of Mrs Hugo Throssell they were asked to drink of the delicious love potion’. A band played fiddles and sang as the guests danced the foxtrot on the verandah. Hugo sang ‘The Bandolero’ on horseback. ‘Supper was then served on the verandah, in gipsy fashion, seated on bags of chaff and other rustic seats on the floor; after which Mr and Mrs Throssell arrived in their donkey cart, which was laden with every possible kitchen utensil, and presented them to the happy pair.’⁶³

It was the foxtrot that year; in 1927 it was the Charleston. ‘We have … parties on the verandah’, Katharine wrote to Vance, ‘where everybody practices the Charleston with various results. It’s so thoroughly ridiculous, but splendid exercise really. When you see fat middle-aged men & women taking themselves quite seriously. Trying to do the absurd shuffle & genuflexion!’⁶⁴ This detail found its way into Bid Me to Love, with Miss Kenny, the local gossip, comically practising her Charleston moves.

In 1928, Katharine and Hugo visited the Green Room Club Cabaret most Thursday nights. Katharine’s varied costumes were noted: once it was ‘black taffeta silk’; another time a ‘striking frock, with fitting bodice of oxidised silver lace and skirt of cloud grey georgette in pointed flares’.⁶⁵ Each New Year’s Day they were at Perth’s Ascot Racecourse for the Derby.

Katharine’s political involvement thinned out as the 1920s went on. It wasn’t that her political convictions had consciously changed, but she was no longer giving it priority, uninspired by the embers of activity in Perth and busy with other spheres of life.

One ‘thoroughly depressing and disappointing experience’ was attending her first conference of the Communist Party of Australia, held in Sydney from 26 to 28 December 1925. Katharine said of the conference later that she was delayed getting to Sydney on the train and two unemployed activists from Western Australia were ‘accepted as credentialled delegates. I, the first communist in Western Australia, was allowed to attend only as an observer’. Afterwards, the delegates had no money and Katharine was asked to help. ‘I gave them enough for food and paid their fares back to Western Australia, where they were instructed to build the party. They disappeared and weren’t seen by us again.’⁶⁶

After that conference, Katharine’s main link to political activism was through her friendship with the radical unionist Cecilia Shelley, who had been part of the Labor Study Circle with her. Cecilia was ten years younger than Katharine and had grown up on the goldfields. She controlled the WA Organisation of Labor Women but in a tussle over the influence of communists in the Australian Labor Party, the party expelled her in 1925. The organisation continued without ALP endorsement and by 1927 Cecilia had persuaded Katharine to be one of its executive councillors. For years, Cecilia and the organisation—with Katharine’s help—had been raising money and enthusiasm to establish a Working Girl’s Club in the city, a resting room for young women and girls in between split shifts or after their day’s work. They raised enough money to purchase premises at 25 Irwin Street in the city and stage an official opening in 1927, but the enterprise soon fell over. Cecilia and Katharine’s political partnership and friendship, however, endured and they were to work together on new ventures during the Depression.⁶⁷

IF HUGO’S CELEBRITY dimmed over the years, he was still highly regarded as a war hero. In November 1923, he led a guard of honour at a ceremony to unveil a clock placed on the dome of the Midland Town Hall, a memorial for soldiers killed in the war.⁶⁸ At an Anzac Day service in 1925, Hugo’s businessman friend, Ashton Hunter, presented the people of Northam with an oil painting of Hugo by visiting Scottish artist Duncan Macgregor Whyte.⁶⁹ Its acquisition challenges the idea that Northam had disowned Hugo after his Victory Day speech.

Hugo was still showing the effects of the war. When a doctor examined him in June 1923 he noted, ‘He has had several turns of palpitations; the slightest thing that irritates him produces an attack’. In November 1923, the doctor granted him an increase to a 40 per cent pension, writing: ‘Has increased in weight—and looks well, but he cannot do hard work yet … I have had this officer under treatment and have seen him on good days and bad days … The likelihood of further improvement is somewhat doubtful’.⁷⁰

In December 1925, the government was scaling back the settlement scheme and Hugo’s income as soldiers’ representative was reduced to a payment for each meeting he attended.⁷¹ Looking for employment, he worked for a short time for a real estate agent named Alfred Leslie Wyly who was later convicted of fraud.⁷² As ambassador, Hugo used his good name to induce South Australians to buy up farm land in Western Australia, despite knowing that many Western Australian soldier–settlers were struggling.⁷³

Hugo, the putative socialist, had become obsessed with real estate. In August and September 1927, he bought five lots of land in Greenmount and dreamed of making a fortune on a subdivision.⁷⁴ As motor car mania swept Perth, ‘Mr H. V. H. Throssell, Greenmount’ the Swan Express declared in February 1928, ‘will utilise a Chevrolet car in visiting his extensive estates’.⁷⁵ He was borrowing too much and their finances were overstretched. Katharine felt the need to earn more money and took on some freelance journalism, writing feature articles; she was noted attending meetings of the Society of Women Journalists in Perth in 1928.⁷⁶

Like retired sports stars, the glory for returned war heroes was always in the past. Hugo was still respected, but he’d had little success since returning from the war while Katharine was more famous than she’d ever been. In August 1928, a couple of weeks after her win in the Bulletin novel competition for Coonardoo was announced, Hugo was in Kalgoorlie. Attending a performance by Paddy Hanna’s Famous Diggers, a vaudeville theatre troupe made up of returned soldiers, perhaps Hugo had been reminding people it was the thirteenth anniversary of him receiving the Victoria Cross. Paddy Hanna announced it from the stage during the performance and ‘the orchestra led the singing of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” by all those present’.⁷⁷

ON 28 JANUARY 1929, Katharine and Hugo celebrated their ten-year wedding anniversary. They were now in their mid-forties. Ric turned seven in May and was attending the local primary school in Greenmount. Katharine and Hugo’s two de-facto children, Thea and Alan, were now thirteen and nine. After Katharine and Hugo’s initial flurry of activism and romance, they had settled into a middle-class life and a marriage which, despite tensions, was tolerable. In the middle of 1929, Katharine sent off a manuscript in time for a novel competition run by Jonathan Cape; it was the third of the remarkable trio of novels from her creative peak, the first about workers in a karri forest, the second about the people living on a cattle station, and the third about a circus.