21
Pemberton and Greenmount, 1919–1926
KATHARINE’S FIRST NOVEL written in Western Australia, Working Bullocks (1926), was seeded by a motorbike trip with Hugo to Pemberton at Christmas time in 1919. In 1913 the WA government had opened two state-owned mills and a small private town 300 kilometres south of Perth, originally known as Big Brook.1 In her notebook, Katharine wrote, ‘The wall of the forest surrounds the township, dead timber gaunt & blackened etched in silver against the darkness of the trees stretching away for miles across country in every direction’.2 They stayed for a fortnight in the boarding house, living ‘among the karri forests … going out every day to watch the timber men at work, and absorbing the spirit of the place’; Katharine said she even drove a bullock team.3 She recorded snatches of conversation between timber workers, word sketches of characters she met or heard about, details of logging, handling bullocks, and the sawmill operations, stories about capturing brumbies, descriptions of the plants and animals of the area, as well as the experience of being amongst the trees; she was interested ‘above all in the generative power and wild beauty of the land itself’.4 The bush resembled that around Emerald, a place precious in Katharine’s memory. She had many landscapes and industries to choose from in Western Australia—the Wheatbelt which had inspired ‘Christmas Tree’; the port workers at Fremantle; the life of the Darling Ranges around where she lived—but it was the karri district which captivated her.
On Boxing Day, she watched a log chop at the town of Greenbushes, and her notes from it inspired a crucial scene in Working Bullocks. She was taken with one of the axemen that day, describing his physicality: ‘The champion had a grace and poise that was incomparable … The muscles on his bronzed arms standing out, a pleasant, kindly-face … Column of his throat that of a thorough-bred bull’. While the unfortunate title of the novel critiques the treatment of timber workers, it also seems to have its origins in Katharine’s fascination with this axeman’s resemblance to a bull. She was to write of her main character, ‘He was a man like one of his bullocks, rooted in deep natural instincts, powerful and intent, with a capacity for dumb and obstinate endurance’.5
A timber worker named Norman Smith recalled in 1971 that Katharine
used to come here and I would give her a lot of information … and the principal character in that book was an old bloke at Pemberton; had a beard, red headed and that, called Bob Widdeson … he was a very brawly old fella and generally his job down there—he had a little bullock team of his own—was to clear the log lines, for the state saw-mills when they used to operate down there … He used to nurse them a lot, I can tell you, they were his life were those few bullocks that he had in the team.6
Widdeson was a well-known personality of the district. A local history remembers him as a man of horses rather than bullocks:
Swamper Robinson drove bullock teams and Jumbo Widdeson horse teams. Horses were generally used for logging in the jarrah bush, and for transporting material by road, but bullocks were preferred for logging in the karri country. They were slower than horses, but stronger and better able to cope with the mud and heavy going in the winter months. Swamper Robinson loved his bullocks and could do almost anything with them in the bush.7
The novel reflects the tension between Katharine’s admiration of the physical feats of the timber workers, her political concern for their exploitation, and her horror at the great trees being clear-felled. In the eyes of the character Deb, ‘The slain giants seemed always on the look out for vengeance—in sullen protest against dismemberment, that tearing of their living flesh by saws in the dark interior of the mill’.8 Historian Patricia Crawford comments that Katharine, in her notebook, ‘observed the mill at work, but most of all she was entranced by the forests, the “wonderful great effect of movement and colour, of light and shadow. And the smell of red gum—the forest through it all”’.9
THE NOTES FROM the December 1919 trip lay dormant for several years as Katharine devoted herself to the study circle and then to baby Ric. In 1924 she returned to the notes and began writing the novel; by September she had nearly finished and she wrote to Nettie that she had been to Pemberton ‘and addressed a meeting of timber workers on strike. Had a great jaunt & felt a great deal better for the two days. Have just been praying for this strike—and here it is—for me to study as I’m writing the last chapters of my book’.10 Katharine saw the strike as convenient to her writing; politics was again subservient to writing at this point in her career.
Three hundred fallers and haulers around the towns of Manjimup and Pemberton dropped tools on 5 September 1924. They were pieceworkers, paid by the load for their dangerous logging work and had been denied an increase of four pence. By the next week, the mills had stopped as there were no logs coming in.11 With no reporters on the scene, newspapers were scant on details and Katharine’s visit in support of the strike and her speech—a significant celebrity intervention—were not reported. On 22 September, soon after her visit, the strike fizzled out and the workers returned to their jobs at their old rate to await the Arbitration Court.12
In the middle of the strike, the Westralian Worker published photographs of the makeshift wooden shacks the timber workers and their families lived in. ‘In these places women live out a toilsome life and children are born and reared. The timber industry of the Commonwealth is a source of great wealth—but not to the workers in the bush.’13 It’s a contention Katharine fleshes out in Working Bullocks.
The hero of Working Bullocks, Red, works as a bullock teamster. He is a loner and a man of principle. He faces a series of trials—his brothers thought him dead in the war and sold off his precious team of bullocks; his partner and best friend, Chris, is killed in a timber accident; his glamorous girlfriend Tessa leaves him for a richer man. After noting that Red has just returned from service, the war is barely mentioned again. Yet despite this silence, Working Bullocks is a novel about the challenge of returning to civilian life—making money, keeping a job, finding a wife. Like Hugo, another returned soldier, Red has a special way with horses and he finds solace in an elaborate scheme to trap the finest brumby he’s ever encountered. Increasingly, he is drawn to Chris’s sister, Deb, an ‘elemental child of the forest, at one with its trees, flowers, storms and wind-driven surges of emotion’.14
Halfway through the novel, a communist named Mark Smith appears—Australian literature’s ‘first flesh and blood communist’.15 Mark becomes Red’s offsider and the closest he has to a friend. When Deb’s other brother, Billy, is killed in a sawmill accident, Mark channels the workers’ anger into a strike. Just as Alan’s death in the war helped radicalise Katharine, Billy’s mother Mary-Ann is radicalised by her son’s death and she helps organise the strike. However, the strike soon collapses and Mark Smith leaves the district; the political foray has come to little, reflecting not just the ineffectual strike Katharine observed in September 1924 but also her general feelings about the progress of radicalism in Western Australia. Mark rages at the workers, ‘You look like men, but you’re not. You’re working bullocks. That’s all you are … You make me sick, the lot of you!’16 Mark is particularly frustrated with Red. ‘He realized Red Burke had got his creed clearly enough. He had accepted it; it made common sense to him. But he did not want to bestir himself, throw off his lethargy, drugged invulnerability to any further jolt fortune might have in store for him.’ The timber workers would ‘do anything in the world if you gave them a lead now. Why don’t you? There’s big things to do’.17 Perhaps these words channel Katharine’s disappointment with Hugo, who had backed away from his speech in 1919, not standing for election as he had been toying with, and not taking his place alongside Katharine in the party.
The novel finishes with the same romantic musical chairs Katharine had played in Black Opal, as the estranged Red and Deb find their way back to each other. Red and Deb embody a simplicity and purity of life, two characters in touch with their environment, their work and their appetites.
IT TOOK LONGER than Katharine had hoped to finish Working Bullocks; after being inspired by the strike, she was delayed by weeks in hospital with an unknown illness.18 She finally finished the novel about a year later. She didn’t publish it with Heinemann, who had brought out Black Opal, complaining that they had ‘practically dumped’ and remaindered that book.19 Her fourth novel was published in London by her fourth publisher, Jonathan Cape Ltd, in November 1926.20 Jonathan Cape Ltd had been founded in 1921 by Jonathan Cape and his partner, George Wren Howard. It was already forging a reputation for a quality list and would publish major authors such as TE Lawrence, James Joyce and HG Wells.21 Reporting Katharine’s contract with Cape, Perth’s Daily News noted they were ‘doing all the more modern and progressive novels’.22 Katharine’s friend Mollie Skinner had published her novel Black Swan with Cape in 1925 and may have suggested she try them.
It was to be the major publishing partnership of Katharine’s career, with Cape publishing nine of her books between 1926 and 1950. Yet the partnership started badly, with Katharine writing to Vance in June 1927:
But Lord, Cape, I think are probably the world’s worst publishers. My first royalties account was for £23—dears what do you think of that? Despite the notices there has not been a copy of the book in Perth for over three months. My typing bill for WB was £25 incidentally. Their arrangements for reviewing & placing the books are so bad & when an edition or rather supplies run out, they have to be replenished from England. No stocks here. So don’t publish with Cape, is my advice.
She believed part of the problem was trying to negotiate terms and edits with publishers by post. ‘Twixt ourselves Black Swan would never have got by but that Mollie Skinner was in London, & revised & revised on the spot. I don’t see any possible chance of going myself & just have to take any old terms the publishers offer.’23
Jonathan Cape managed to repair his relationship with Katharine, writing to her in 1928 asking ‘to let bygones be bygones’ and continue as her publisher.24 She was to maintain a warm correspondence with him over the years and finally met him in person on her trip to London in 1933.
The poor sales of Working Bullocks were at odds with its glowing reviews. Before publication, Katharine had left a copy of the manuscript with Hilda and Louis Esson when she visited them in Melbourne in early 1926. Louis read it aloud, slowly, to Hilda. Nearing the end, Hilda wrote effusively:
The prose is most beautiful—every individual strong and poetical, and the whole thing has an epic reality, a high remote beauty that makes it unquestionably the most important work probably that has ever been done here. One doesn’t simply read descriptions of that forest—one lives there, and breathes its air. The people are strong, simple, elemental—and the kinship of the life of nature, bird, beast and tree, and the life of man is most wonderfully expressed.25
Reviewing Working Bullocks for the Bulletin, Louis wrote that it was ‘probably the best novel ever written in Australia … a work of genius and a novel of which any country might be proud’.26 Louis’ close relationship with Katharine likely influenced his judgement but his praise was genuine.
The reviewer for the Mercury largely agreed with Louis, calling it ‘one of the finest novels which Australia has produced’ even though her ‘sympathies for what one imagines she would call the “down-trodden working classes” has led her into misrepresentation, which one might expect, perhaps, from a hired Labor pamphleteer’.27 Another reviewer wrote that Katharine ‘knows her bush, and the men and women in it and she has the dramatic understanding to make convincing not only the big incidents of the story but also the humdrum lives of the people who live in her pages’.28 Perhaps the only one who didn’t like it was the anonymous reviewer for Sydney’s Catholic Press who found that its structure was flawed—with several climaxes and anti-climaxes—and that its style ‘over reaches’ and ‘becomes dense and crowded’.29
In London, the Times Literary Supplement wrote, ‘There is something very courageous, surely, in calling a novel Working Bullocks … such a title being likely to put off nine women out of ten—and that is a large proportion of novel readers. In a way, it suits this vigorous uncompromising story of life on the land in Western Australia’.30 In 1927, Viking published an American edition which would have finally made Katharine some money on the book. The New York Times Book Review called it ‘a startling and unusual novel’.31 It had been more than a decade since Katharine had last been published in the United States, and despite the acclaim The Pioneers had received at the time, the reviewer assumed Working Bullocks was her first book.
Working Bullocks won Katharine a reputation as a major Australian novelist and critics and writers were to look back on it as a landmark in Australian literature. Years later Miles Franklin claimed ‘it marked the breaking of the drought in which the novels had merely taken a recess underground for a time like the inland rivers’.32 On the strength of it, John Sleeman wrote for Britain’s The Bookman in 1928 that Katharine ‘is, to my mind, Australia’s greatest living novelist’ and Working Bullocks ‘is the high-water mark of Australian literary achievement in the novel so far’.33 Hartley Grattan, an American critic, wrote in his 1928 survey of Australian literature, that ‘Miss Prichard is the hope of the Australian novel, and literally inexhaustible material lies waiting’.34
Katharine was writing far from the centres of literary activity, but that was quintessentially Australian in itself for a nation which saw its identity tied up to ‘the bush’ and the frontier. In Vance, Nettie and Louis, she was close friends with three of Australia’s eminent literary critics. If they inevitably read her work with much sympathy and took opportunities to promote it, they did so out of conviction of its merits. Brenda Niall writes of Nettie, ‘Few Australian critics, men or women, have wielded as much influence as she did. In partnership with Vance, but more often in her own right, she helped writers to shake off their colonial deference in the crucial decades that followed Federation’.35 Nettie wasn’t able to buy a copy of Working Bullocks in Brisbane—where she and Vance were now living—until April 1927 when she wrote in her diary, ‘What strikes me is the confidence Katharine has gained in recent years. She has now set any diffidence aside and writes out of her full self’.36 In October, Nettie wrote an article called ‘The Novel in Australia’ for the Brisbane Courier. She wrote astutely of the significance and achievements of Katharine’s fiction:
The books of Katharine Susannah Prichard, appearing at pretty wide intervals, are the fruit of an intense devotion to her subject matter. Her gifts are mainly two: first, that of brilliant impressionism, then a rare power of writing group-scenes. One thinks of the opal miners in her second book, Black Opal, standing about chaffing one another and discussing the universe, every man of them alive. Or, in her latest book, Working Bullocks, there are the groups of timber-getters camped by the road for a smoke-oh, or the unforgettable, hot, timeless Sunday evenings spent by a big bush family and its visitors on a veranda beside some trees of ripe loquats. Such scenes are too difficult for most novelists, who shirk them: yet they enrich a book immensely, and the reader feels that our everyday life is full of unsuspected charm.
So far, Katharine Prichard’s novels have been each set in a different spot of Australia—the tall timber of South-east Victoria, the opal fields in Western New South Wales, and the sawmilling country in the south of Western Australia. It is said that her next locale will be the northern inland of Western Australia, a place very wild, very remote, and yet, seen from within, quite a complex commonwealth.37