2
Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania, 1887–1895
The Wild Oats of Han (1928) is a memoir of Katharine’s childhood in the form of a children’s novel. In dreamy prose it captures the wonder of the world through a child’s eyes. In the foreword, Katharine invited an autobiographical reading of the work: ‘The first thing children ask about a story is usually: “But is it true?” And this one, it can be said, is a truly, really story. Katharine Susannah would stake her breath on it. Just here and there a few details stray from the strict path’. Even the name, Hannah Frances, is autobiographical, taken from Katharine’s aunt, Hannah Frances Davies, who married the widower of her late sister, Katherine Susan, for whom Katharine was named.
Casting herself as a fictional character, Han, seems to have made it easier for Katharine to write about her life. As autobiography shaped into fiction, Wild Oats is an amalgam of childhood experiences, incidents from throughout her childhood added to Katharine’s actual nineteen months in Launceston from 1893 to 1895. She depicts her childhood as a painful gaining of understanding and responsibility. Han begins with ‘no conscience, any more than the birds or possums who lived in the great silver gum-trees’ but as a 12-year-old, ‘the weight of the world’ descends on her shoulders and she must go ‘down into the great mysterious world they had talked so much of, to take her part in the joy and the labour and the sorrow of it’.1 This trajectory that Katharine compressed into the Launceston years for Wild Oats stretched in life from her early childhood in Melbourne to the sacrifice of her university ambitions at the age of nineteen in order to help her family.
KATHARINE HAD JUST turned three when she arrived in Melbourne with her mother and two brothers in January 1887. They lived for several years in Caulfield with her grandparents, Simon and Susan Fraser, in their Caulfield house, Clareville, along with two unmarried aunts.2
In Wild Oats, Han’s parents are backgrounded characters, ‘absorbed in each other’.3 Her mother, Rosamund Mary in the novel, ‘had never been required to consider domestic affairs’ and it is Grandmother Sarahy, based on Susan, who keeps the household running. She ‘dusted the mantelpieces, ordered the meals, mended, darned, made jam and the children’s clothes, except when Rosamund Mary had what she called “twinges of conscience”’. Katharine called her grandmother ‘the first person I became really interested in, perhaps because she was interested in me’.4 The implication is that her parents were not interested enough in her.
The era of her grandmother and the Victorian era were one. Melbourne and the rest of the British empire was celebrating Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, with over 125,000 people converging on the Melbourne city-centre to witness its illumination on 21 June. ‘As I remember her, Grandmother looked like the pictures of Queen Victoria. She wore her hair in silver wings over her forehead, and a little lisse cap on her head. Her dress was usually dull black silk, with a tight bodice and voluminous skirts.’5 Her grandmother and the queen were to die within months of each other in 1901 when Katharine was seventeen, entwining them further. On the day of her grandmother’s funeral she ‘stood under the row of dark pines on the edge of the garden at Clareville, and watched the long train of vehicles file slowly away down the road, furious, yet grieving desperately about it all’.6
REJOINING THE FAMILY later in 1887, Tom was unable to find a job in Melbourne and in May 1888 he left the family at Clareville while he moved to Tasmania to take the position of editor at Launceston’s Daily Telegraph.7 He lasted less than six months before he resigned due to ‘ill health’, which, in view of what came later, could have been depression.8
In April 1889, Tom was appointed editor of a new Melbourne weekly, the Sun, and the family moved to the seaside suburb of Brighton.9 He was in his element at the Sun, composing the satirical column ‘Madcap Rhymes’ each week. However, in late 1892, he lost his job just as Edith was pregnant with their fourth child.10 In Wild Oats Han’s mother tells her, ‘We’ve no money … we don’t know when father will get any more work to do. We haven’t even a house to live in … and a little sister is coming to you soon … and there will be no home, no food—’11 Beatrice was born on 2 November 1892, nine years younger than Katharine, the fourth and final of the Prichard children born after a gap of six years.
The economic woes of the 1890s were deepening and Victoria was at the epicentre; in 1893 its property bubble burst and the banks were in crisis. In July 1893, Tom was fortunate enough to find a new job as the associate editor back at the Daily Telegraph in Launceston.
‘After a dark and troubled time that was like the memory of a storm, Peter Barry had climbed the hill which rose from the sleepy old township of Launceston and had chosen the house built right at the top of the hill.’12 Peter’s real-life counterpart, Tom, called that house ‘Korovuna’, even though he was only renting it. According to Katharine, the name means ‘place of peace’, but it actually combines the Fijian words for ‘village’ and ‘for a reason’.13 Tom would later give the same name to the family home in Melbourne. They lived next door to Tom’s brother, Frederick, and his family; Frederick had taken up a role as editor of the town’s rival newspaper, the Launceston Examiner.14
Tom and Edith were determined to establish themselves as pillars of the community, involving themselves in myriad committees and causes. Early impressions would have counted in the town, and they wanted to appear better-off than they were. They hired a ‘general’ to do the housework and they borrowed money to set their house up with quality furniture.15
Their house was in Trevallyn, backing onto the bush around the scenic Cataract Gorge. ‘The hills which rose in misty, timbered brakes and ledges behind her home, were Han’s happy hunting-ground.’16 Katharine was enchanted by the trees and the flowers and the birds and the lizards, an enchantment which was to flow through her writing in the years that followed. ‘She scarcely knew the world of the real from the world of the unreal; both were blended in the crystal of her mind.’17
ON 17 NOVEMBER 1893, Fillis’s Mammoth Circus and Menagerie, a South African troupe, arrived in Launceston for five days of shows. ‘Tier upon tier’ of ‘delighted spectators’ watched a lion, a tiger, five elephants, ‘Lilliputian marvels’, a woman shot from a cannon, and acrobats.18 In Wild Oats, Han ‘was living in a world of enchantment, and could not think or talk of anything but the circus’; she hears the lions roaring in their cages and the music drifted up to her house on top of the hill.19 She decides her great ambition in life is to be an acrobat, and she rehearses in her backyard, until she jumps from the tree before her watching family and falls hard to the ground. The visit of Fillis’s Circus was the beginning of an ongoing fascination with the circus for Katharine, culminating in her 1930 novel Haxby’s Circus.
In Wild Oats, the circus is paired with Han’s brief attraction to another romantic vocation—the life of a missionary. She listens to a visiting missionary’s stories of horror and martyrdom in ‘darkest China’ and decides she wants to ‘convert the heathen from his blindness … I want to carry the light of the gospel to far Lao Tzu … I want to die by the sword of the Pig-Tailed Barbarian’.20 In life, two missionaries visited Launceston three months before the circus in August 1893 and spoke of martyrdom. Perhaps Katharine was momentarily taken by their vision: ‘To every land, the preacher urged, must the standard of Christianity be borne, every country invaded’.21 For a 9-year-old girl working out her place in the world, the life of a missionary momentarily offered both adventure and a great cause.
In this period of trying on vocations in Launceston, she found her true calling. She remembered announcing to Tom that she wanted to be a writer:
I can still see him as he used to stand on the verandah, in the evening, smoking his peace pipe as he called it, and looking out over the shining river, or away to the mountains in the distance. Before that, the family had been disturbed by my ambitions to be a circus rider, or a missionary. So my father took my announcement about becoming a writer with an indulgent smile.
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘you’ll need plenty of patience and plenty of postage stamps.’22
She wanted to follow in his footsteps. Tom’s first and only novel, Retaliation: A Tale of Early Melbourne, appeared in May 1893 from the publishing arm of the Sun, just as the Prichards prepared to leave for Launceston. 23 Retaliation is a popular romance about an orphan girl’s rescue by a wealthy widow and her revenge on a scoundrel. While competent and representative, it is not especially memorable. Many of Katharine’s early works are also romances, bearing some resemblance to Retaliation in their coincidence-driven plots of beautiful damsels under threat from scoundrels.
KATHARINE WAS TO look back on her early teachers as benignly inept. Before the Prichards left Melbourne, she had started attending a school ‘run by a gentle spinster’ in Brighton, and then a private school run by her Aunt Lil.24 By her own reckoning, she was the late age of eight when she started, but she had already learned to read and write and had been taking French lessons with her grandmother. She made her first known newspaper appearance on 23 December 1893 as ‘Katty Prichard’, the most awarded student at Miss Littler’s private school in Trevallyn.25 In contrast to the rebellious Han, Katharine was voted by her fellow students ‘Best Conduct’ for the entire school.
In August 1894, Katharine made her second newspaper appearance as one of the organisers of a children’s bazaar, held at her family’s house to raise funds for the poor. She and her friends made crafts and toys, selling them for a penny each. The event raised over a pound and the journalist—presumably Tom—held it up as an example to the rest of the community.26 The charitable, community-spirited Prichard family living at Korovuna on top of the hill looked so assured of their place in Launceston society in 1894, seemingly unaware they were about to tumble.
IN KATHARINE’S ACCOUNT, the Daily Telegraph was ‘on its last legs, and it was hoped Father would revive it’, only for the paper to cease publication.27 In reality, the newspaper kept going without Tom right up to 1928, but ructions did shake it in late 1894. The owner was in financial trouble and declared bankruptcy at Christmas. Two weeks later, the new owner sacked Tom.28
Six months after the bazaar at the Prichard house to raise money for the poor, almost everything they owned was auctioned onsite as they prepared to return to Melbourne. The advertisement placed on behalf of Tom in the Launceston Examiner for an auction of ‘the whole of his household furniture’ is a comprehensive and sad list: ‘comprising walnut sideboard (mirror back), mahogany telescope table, dining room suite, new Brussells carpet, oil paintings (superior), mahogany wardrobe, cedar chest drawers, bedsteads and bedding, commode, dressing tables, washstands, fenders, curtains, poles and rings, kitchen utensils, dresser, garden tools, and sundries’.29 They kept their piano and their books, but little else.
When Katharine gave a testimony of her conversion to communism sixty years later, the auction stood out as a landmark, her awakening to injustice in the world. She and her brothers had been sent out to play in the bush all day. On their return, they ‘saw the family furniture piled on carts driving along the road, and a red auctioneer’s flag over the gate’.30 Her mother’s grief stirred her to the realisation of ‘some dark mysterious trouble’ which she must prevent hurting her family.
Soon after the auction, on 7 March 1895, the Prichards returned to Melbourne. Despite their money troubles, they travelled not in steerage but saloon class.31
COMPARED TO THE plots fiction demands, lives are too repetitive. In writing about her life in the form of a children’s novel, Katharine shaped the events of early 1895 into the decisive crisis of her childhood. In life, this crisis in the Prichard family was one of many, the circularity suggested by the ‘memory of a storm’ right at the start of Wild Oats as the family arrive in Launceston. Katharine lived her childhood with the memory of storms. Tom’s difficulty finding work when he moved back to Australia from Fiji in 1887 was one; the loss of his job at the Sun in 1892 was another. This time, in 1895, Katharine understood some of what was happening to her family and the knowledge was bitter. In her memory, leaving Launceston became an exile from paradise, cast out from a carefree existence playing in the bush and forced back to suburban Melbourne with a new sense of responsibility.