25

Red Star

Greenmount, 1930–1933

IN JANUARY 1932, Victoria Cross recipient Albert Jacka died in Melbourne from nephritis at the age of thirty-nine and the Daily News wrote that it

brings home to Western Australians the question of what has happened, or what is happening to this State’s eight VC heroes … Upon their return from the Great War they were lionised and feted, and, to use the words of one of them, ‘were promised the world’. Since those far-away days, however, some of them have experienced what the Diggers call ‘a rough spin’.¹

The newspaper profiled Western Australia’s eight Great War Victoria Cross recipients, and, ironically, Hugo was written up as one of those enjoying success since the war.

On a visit to Katharine and Hugo in May 1930, Vance Palmer observed to Nettie, ‘Jimmy’s got “land” on the brain. He puts all the money they have into land, consequently they’re always short … Of course he takes it half humorously but it’s the sort of humour that must be a bit wearing’.²

It was a bad time to be in real estate. The final advertisement for W Thomas & Co with Hugo as the manager of the land department appeared on 2 April. After that, Hugo kept placing real estate advertisements in the West Australian under his own name, houses and blocks in Greenmount with prices decreasing over the months as he grew more desperate; a lot of them were his own and he was deeply in debt.

In July 1930, a prospector named Mick Larkin found gold south of Kalgoorlie. According to Katharine, ‘For a long time my husband and I had been promising ourselves to rush to the first rush which looked like being the real thing’.³ In November 1930, they travelled 600 kilometres into the desert and spent a week at the newly named Larkinville. For Katharine, it was material for future writing; for Hugo it was a chance to make a quick fortune.

‘Within the last month or so’, Katharine reported, ‘two hundred men have swarmed to the rush … The pegs of mining leases and prospecting areas are scattered through thorn bush, snap-and-rattle, sandalwood and camel bush, for a mile or so on either side of the main camp’. She enjoyed her time on the goldfields, working as camp ‘slushie’ (kitchen hand) and hearing yarns around the campfire at night. When an old prospector ‘red with dust, unfolds a sock, or dingy piece of flannel, to show the twisted effigies of pre-historic pancakes and wild pigs in bright gold … you understand why his hand trembles and his eyes are bright’.⁴

The trip was the beginning of Katharine’s chronicling of the goldfields, the biggest literary project of her career. ‘Old prospectors … used to come up from the alluvial claims and sit round the camp-fire yarning for hours. I gathered many stories from their reminiscences, and, of course, invaluable material for the goldfields trilogy.’⁵ One of the first goldfields stories she wrote, ‘Mrs Jinny’s Shroud’, was published in the Bulletin in December 1931. A miniature version of her later novel, The Roaring Nineties, it is the story of colourful, tough prospectors looking for gold, resisting pressure to sell out to a mining company, and blowing a fortune only to return to the simple, hard prospecting life they find most meaningful.

On 15 January 1931, two months after Katharine and Hugo’s trip, a 17-year-old boy at Larkinville unearthed the biggest nugget ever found in Western Australia. Nicknamed the Golden Eagle, it weighted 1135 ounces and was worth in the order of £6000. Hugo caught the renewed gold fever and returned to Larkinville in February. With the Depression hitting hard, there were now more than one thousand prospectors hoping to make their fortune. This time, Hugo paid £100 to buy Mick Larkin’s original claim. Six weeks later, the Kalgoorlie Miner reported, ‘Only a few men are on gold … There have been no large finds recently although Mr Hugo Throssell secured about £50 worth of gold a few days ago. Most of the men are unearthing a few weights and are battling on hopefully’.⁶ Hugo also claimed land on the road to Larkinville at the same time as another applicant, and the dispute ended up in court.⁷ Both men withdrew their claims and Hugo returned home to Greenmount.

On the back of Hugo’s disappointment at Larkinville, a clash he was having with the RSL over his role on the Soldiers’ Settlement Board intensified. Back in 1919, he’d been appointed by the government as the soldiers’ representative, albeit with the approval of the nascent RSL. Some members of the RSL had grown dissatisfied with Hugo’s performance and in 1930, a conference of soldier settlers unanimously resolved that the RSL should appoint its own representative to the board, a motion that was then supported by the state congress of the RSL. Hugo wrote to the RSL Land Committee, trying to find out why they were unhappy, but they didn’t respond. A deputation from the RSL met with premier James Mitchell and ‘complained about Captain Throssell’s lack of interest in the Soldier Settlement’.⁸ Hugo resigned, dating it Anzac Day, and then spent months demanding explanations.

Katharine would later name Hugo’s loss of his job on the Soldier Settlement Board as a major factor in the beginning of his depression. According to her, depression had begun to affect him when the role was reduced to a part-time one and was intensified by the RSL executive’s ‘contemptible action’ in manoeuvring him out altogether.⁹ While their dealings with Hugo do seem duplicitous, it’s also plausible Hugo hadn’t been performing well as the RSL representative, caught up as he had been in his own financial schemes and often away on business.

Katharine wrote to Hugh McCrae, ‘The summer was so long & dry this year, that I nearly died of it—what with over-drafts, sleepless nights, & not being able to work … But I revived with the rains, and am working again to be the support of my family & pay off a mortgage of £12,000’.¹⁰ It was a massive debt to have accumulated. In the middle of 1930, Katharine wrote ‘the crops have been bad & we’ve lost our car’; in 1931 they had to let go of their maid.¹¹ Finally, painfully, in October 1932 Katharine sold off her beloved cottage in Emerald.

Years later, Katharine would write to Ric that ‘Daddy’s weakness, & the cause of so much suffering & sorrow to me, was a tendency to spend more than he had or could afford. And so all our troubles began, & mounted until the end—you know’.¹² His problem with money was, in another letter, ‘his desire to give me all that he thought I should have—and, of course, those extras of living didn’t matter to me. I could be quite content with old clo[thes] and our home at Greenmount’.¹³

In November 1932 Hugo had a mental breakdown; after his suicide a year later, Katharine called it ‘an incident which foreshadowed what has happened’.¹⁴ The doctor who saw him recorded, ‘Worried about his health. Unable to sleep lately. Gets headaches … Everything is a worry and he is a nuisance to himself and his friends. Brain will not seem to work properly. Has lost weight and feels flabby—disinclined for exertion’.¹⁵ Hugo had friends looking out for him and, hearing of his breakdown, one named Jonah Jones arranged a temporary appointment as an inspector of fertilisers with the Agricultural Department. Katharine wrote ‘immediately his health improved’.¹⁶

Hugo’s struggles took their toll on Katharine and her severe migraines were back. There’s a possible echo of her experience in Intimate Strangers:

All day, Elodie had flogged herself against unfathomable weariness, a headache that frayed every nerve. She fought desperately to do what was necessary … following a blind impulse to take Greg away from anything that reminded him of his trouble. She could keep her legs moving only by an effort of will: the blood barked in her ears: she could not see clearly. An insidious faintness ebbed and flowed through her limbs.¹⁷

JUST BEFORE THE financial troubles hit the Throssells hard, they spent money building a workroom for Katharine. In May 1930, she wrote to Hugh McCrae, ‘A work-room is being built for me in the orchard which you will consecrate by your presence’. As it happened, McCrae’s trip to Perth didn’t eventuate and so the workroom was not consecrated, but for the first time Katharine had a dedicated writing space. A journalist described it a few years later. ‘Dingo pelts were mats; a kangaroo skin rug covered the couch, and the pictures on the walls were the work of Australian artists. The stone fireplace occupied most of one wall, and there were book shelves in the corners. A small jarrah table held a portable typewriter and books and papers were scattered about.’¹⁸ The workroom was ‘down past the lemon and orange trees on the hill slope’, the window ‘overlooking a bank of silver wattle’.¹⁹

In 1931, Katharine was working on a selection of her stories with Jonathan Cape. Cape insisted on taking the title from one of the weaker stories, ‘Kiss on the Lips’, based on her observations of impoverished newspaper boys as a journalist in 1909. ²⁰ Advance copies had been printed by January 1932 when Henry Handel Richardson complained to her friend:

People have now dropped into the horrid habit of sending me books & asking for a par[agraph] or an opinion they can quote! Cape for one sent me KS Prichard’s Vol of short stories that they are just about to issue, with a request for an article of 7 or 800 words on her work. As I think some of her books very good, I would have stretched a point in her favour; but alas! when I came to read the stories, I found she had collected the most heterogeneous mass of bits & scraps—some fit only to be the bare bones or pencil jottings of what might ultimately have made a story; & the more finished ones monotonous & hastily written. I couldn’t do it—wldn’t put my name to that kind of thing.

Don’t mention this to NP [Nettie] though, whose pet KSP is.²¹

Richardson failed to see the good in many of the stories, but her ‘heterogeneous’ comment is fair, the collection spanning two decades across genres, landscapes, readerships and quality. ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Treason’ were both published in newspapers in 1917 and 1919 and the former isn’t really a short story at all, but a journalistic sketch from Katharine’s epic journey along the east coast in 1916. A second group of stories are literary fiction, including some of Katharine’s finest stories like ‘The Grey Horse’, ‘The Cooboo’, ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Cow’. A third group of stories are ‘yarns’ from the Australian countryside like ‘The Dark Horse of Darran’, ‘Two Men’ and ‘The Swop’, which attempt nothing more than to entertain. ‘White Kid Gloves’—first published in The Bulletin in 1928—is somewhere between the popular and literary, a sentimental, romantic story, with some depth, notable for its depiction of shell shock and other effects of the war. Some of the reviewers came to similar judgements as Richardson, but many others were positive. The Times Literary Supplement was full of praise, writing ‘violent, sentimental, kind, brutal, humorous, her men are alive’ and that ‘she can bring bush scents and colours and lovely daylight from “down under” into London town, and there is scarcely a convict or kangaroo in her pages’.²² The Sydney Morning Herald gave an appreciative review, summing up, ‘There is beauty in these stories and a rare understanding of the people of the outback and the conditions under which they work’.²³

AFTER RIC’S BIRTH, Katharine had put writing, family and her social life ahead of politics. Things changed during the Depression. In June 1931 she wrote to McCrae, ‘I’d like to pitch into [the] work of the Communist Movement again. It is the supreme reality for me. But I can’t just now …’²⁴ However, even as she wrote this, she was already recommitting to the work of the party.

Around this time Katharine apparently contacted the party headquarters in Sydney. The way Jean Devanny told it—her memories coloured by her jealousy of Katharine—it had been so long since Katharine had been connected to the party that the incumbent leaders didn’t know who she was. Jean was having an affair with the party leader, JB Miles, and he told her that Katharine was claiming to be a foundation member, but they had no record of it. What did Jean know of her? A reader of thrillers, Miles ‘refused to accept my statement that Kathie was regarded as the then leading Australian writer—till shortly afterwards he saw it stated in a Sydney daily paper’.²⁵

Perhaps related to Katharine making contact, the party sent the experienced organiser Jack Stevens to Perth to regroup the movement. Katharine remembered him as

a man of the working class, simple and straight-forward, honest and earnest … When he came to the West as an organiser, there was no Communist Party. There was a group of confused militant workers. Comrade Stevens set himself the task of creating order and Communist methods of organisation in this group and of rallying the unemployed about it. Shabby and hungry, he struggled against tremendous difficulties in the work he had undertaken. Very little money could be raised for it, in those days; and he spent every available penny on organisational work and propaganda.²⁶

Stevens incited crowds of the unemployed on the Esplanade, collected party subscriptions and sold pamphlets. He was having enough success to worry the authorities. In June 1931 plainclothes detectives arrested him on charges of being a person of evil fame and vagrancy; they said he was ‘in this State for the sole purpose of stirring up strife and revolution’. Searching his room in a city boarding house, they claimed he had a formula for starting fires.²⁷

At his trial on 2 July 1931, Katharine testified that she’d been assisting Stevens for three months and ‘she knew him as a man of the highest moral character, and found it impossible to regard him as a man of evil fame. She had never heard him advocate violence. She regarded his character as similar to that of Jesus Christ, and considered that he was being similarly persecuted’.²⁸ Her comparison of a communist with Jesus had a whiff of blasphemy and made headlines around the country. The magistrate ruled her evidence had been given in good faith but that she did not know Stevens well, seemingly unaware of how thoroughly Katharine shared his objectives. Stevens was fined, put on a bond and sentenced to fourteen days imprisonment; he ended up serving six weeks because he refused to pay the fine. ‘I went to see him there and he had to stand in a horrible barred cage, in the prison uniform, to talk to me, with a warder on guard. I remember that he was very distressed that he had not been allowed to shave.’²⁹

As the number of communists around Australia grew, the crackdown on the party’s activities continued. In February 1932, the postmaster-general declared he was banning six communist periodicals, including the Workers’ Weekly, from being carried by post.³⁰ The ban particularly affected Western Australia, cutting off party members and potential recruits from the main source of news and propaganda.

Western Australian communists responded by founding their own newspaper, the Red Star, ‘official organ of No. 6 District Committee CP of A’. The first four-page roneoed issue appeared on 18 April 1932, selling for one penny. Bill Mountjoy was the editor; one of their comrades remembers, ‘Katharine not only corrected the English but taught Bill how to write’.³¹ Mountjoy, the new state organiser, wrote that ‘a friendly typiste cut the stencils and Jack [Stevens] was the machinist’.³² It ran in this format for sixty-nine issues until July 1933 when the party bought a printing press.

On 12 September 1932 Katharine joined a protest in Perth’s city centre of unemployed men who had walked off their work camps at Frankland River in the south of the state and come to the city to demand better conditions. Police arrested eighteen of the demonstrators as they tried to address the public from verandahs along Barrack Street. The demonstrators reconvened on the grass at the Esplanade and addressed a gathered crowd of several thousand. Four of these speakers were arrested after criticising the police. Katharine was shrewd enough to avoid arrest. ‘In fact, almost the only person who did not attack the police from the platform was Mrs Hugo Throssell who informed the gathering of her sympathy for the strikers in the demands they were making.’³³ Bill Mountjoy’s wife, Jane, was the only woman arrested. According to Ric, Katharine sold a brooch her father had given her to raise the bail and free Jane the next day.³⁴

Probably in response to this clash, at eight thirty in the morning on 30 September 1932, detectives with search warrants simultaneously raided the houses of Katharine, the Mountjoys and George Whitbread. She wrote to Hugh McCrae:

Can you see the criminal, sitting up in bed, to interview the female of the species; and later, passing the time of day with the inspector in charge of the job, herself in yellow silk pyjamas & a black silk gown embroidered with golden dragons? It looked like the first act of a play—the verandah hung round with wisteria, & long sprays of dog roses. The only protest I made was that none of your letters, or Hilda’s, should be read, as they were entirely personal.³⁵

The detectives took communist pamphlets and books, private letters, and anything else which seemed suspicious—including Katharine’s copy of Bernard O’Dowd’s The Poet Militant—and then proceeded to the rooms of the Friends of the Soviet Union, stripping them bare, even taking away a photo of Lenin. They confiscated all the copies of the new issue of the Red Star, which hadn’t yet been distributed. The Red Star team—probably including Katharine—refused to be intimidated, setting up a new two-page issue of the newspaper that same day.³⁶ She told McCrae she expected to be arrested any day. ‘But so long as I fight the good fight, what does that matter?’

With the rise of Hitler in 1933, the Comintern had been helping set up anti-war groups which would also serve as a communist front, hoping to bring people into the party. Katharine was asked to establish a Western Australian anti-war committee. Two hundred attended a meeting she organised on 13 May 1933.³⁷ One of the motions on the agenda read, in part, ‘We declare that a new world war would be a monstrous crime against civilisation, and must be prevented at all costs’ and that all elected to the committee pledged to fight against ‘imperialist capitalism, that purveyor to the slaughter house’. Moderates at the meeting, including the League of Nations’ representative, academic Fred Alexander, objected to the anti-capitalist elements of the motion and called for amendments which would allow a broader coalition to be formed against war. The moderates were outvoted and the motion passed.³⁸ The meeting came just before Katharine left on a six-month trip, but on her return she was heavily involved with the organisation, which was to become the Movement Against War and Fascism.

Katharine had placed ads in the newspaper calling specifically on returned soldiers to attend the meeting and register their protest against war.³⁹ Hugo came, and he was one of two Victoria Cross recipients elected to the committee of forty-five.⁴⁰ He spoke at the meeting, saying ‘he had seen enough of the horrors of war, and that he would do his utmost to prevent his own boy from going to war’.⁴¹ In her autobiography, Katharine highlighted Hugo’s support for the organisation as evidence of his ongoing political commitment.⁴² It was a consolation to her, a sign of where he was headed if he had lived. It is, perhaps, woven into Greg’s conversion at the end of Intimate Strangers after he decides against suicide.

MANY LEFT-WING WRITERS and intellectuals from around the world were making a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union to see the ‘workers’ paradise’ for themselves. Two events in 1933 further fanned the flames of Katharine’s desire to go herself. The first was seeing Guido Baracchi. Docked at Fremantle for a day while on the way to the Soviet Union, he came to have lunch at Greenmount on 27 February 1933 with his new lover, Betty Roland. Betty wrote that Katharine ‘is gentle and her voice is soft and sweet and I seemed to see a hint of sadness in her eyes. No one could call her beautiful but her face is sensitive and strong’.⁴³ The visit would have been difficult for Hugo, who knew of Katharine’s relationship with Guido. Katharine told Guido that Hugo used to ‘humorously’ call him her ‘greasy, handkissing dago’.⁴⁴

The second push towards Katharine seeing the Soviet Union for herself came on 18 April when she gave an address on the development of communism to the University Historical and Economic Society. She praised the achievements of Soviet Russia and ‘deprecated the apathy which existed among University students in connection with social problems’. The respected economics lecturer, Edward Shann, responded:

He did not want to question the many beautiful pictures of Russia which Mrs Throssell had painted, but others had held different views. He had spoken with one American economist whose recurring comment on Russia was ‘Never was human spirit so in bondage’. They must keep an open mind on the question.⁴⁵

Katharine felt she would be able to counter comments like Shann’s once she had seen the Soviet Union for herself.

Beatrice, probably aware of her sister’s financial and health troubles, wrote saying she was headed to Europe and wanted Katharine to show her around Paris, enclosing the cost of the fare to join her. It would be a chance for Katharine to meet her publishers in London—communication by post had long been a frustration—and secretly journey on to the Soviet Union.⁴⁶

‘Too much everything: financial burden, domestic fracas, work & weariness!’ Katharine wrote to Hugh McCrae, making a rare reference to tensions in her marriage. ‘Miraculously, as soon as I decided to throw in my towel … they withdrew. Every difficulty was straightened out, devotion & sweetness reigned again. Fracas is incidental to domesticity, I suppose. We suppress it, & then don’t, and then the status quo ante blooms again. I must be an aggravating woman to live with!’⁴⁷

Ric was now eleven. ‘Katharine and my father were talking in the garden when I first heard that she was going away. She leaned against him with her head resting on his chest, his arm around her. There was a gravity in their voices, and a sense of parting.’⁴⁸ Hugo insisted she go, Katharine claimed, and so she did, on the understanding he ‘would do nothing while I was away to make me regret leaving him’.⁴⁹