29

On All Fronts

Greenmount, 1935–1939

KATHARINE WAS THE first communist Norman Bartlett had met, and the experience of interviewing her changed him. He became her ‘faithful follower’ for the next few years as Katharine spearheaded a host of organisations which were fronts for the Communist Party. Looking back, he remembers:

I have no knowledge how far Katharine Susannah’s new role stemmed from her own re-animated enthusiasm and how far she acted under direction. Something of both, in all probability. Certainly, she was not a reluctant or unskilful propagandist. She became the Grey Eminence behind the Workers’ Art Guild, the Spanish Relief Committee, the Modern Women’s Club and left-wing prompting for more active political commitment on the part of the Western Australian Fellowship of Writers. We, her faithful followers, packed union meetings, sponsored slanted resolutions, provided cheer-leaders at crowded Spanish Relief rallies in the Town Hall, gave a proper kick-off to the collection by waving £5 notes (afterwards recoverable) as tangible tokens of our sympathy for the victims of civil war.¹

At a May Day celebration in 1935, Katharine announced she was proud to have been a member of the Communist Party since its inception in Australia. Although she was known to have radical views, it was her first public declaration of her membership. Ironically, a few days later her name was included in a list of prominent Western Australians who had been sent a medal to be worn on 6 May for the commemoration of King George V’s silver jubilee.² Twenty-five years earlier, Katharine had been in London on the fringes of the suffragette movement, a participant in the march to mark the coronation of George V; now she was in the thick of activism as Western Australia’s leading communist.

The Comintern in Moscow disapproved of her declaration. It wrote to the Communist Party of Australia in July 1935:

It has been decided that Comrade Prichard is to devote her energies to antiwar and anti-fascist activities, and to the Writers’ League. Being one of the foremost writers in Australia, with also a world reputation, a fact even admitted by bourgeois critics, Comrade Prichard should be prominently used to conduct work among the intellectuals, petty-bourgeoisie, etc., and should not be brought to the forefront as a Party member and activist …³

On 2 October 1935 a memo in her surveillance file noted, ‘She has been quiet since May of this year’.⁴ In reality, she was busier than ever, continuing her work with the Movement Against War and Fascism and helping to start the Perth Workers’ Art Guild.

The Comintern was directing the communist parties around the world to change their approach. The new policy was the Popular Front. Instead of taking a hard line against potential allies in the middle class and union movements, communists were now to try to work with them for common goals and take a united stand against the fascist governments who had seized power in Europe. Communist Arthur Rudkin wrote of the strategy that it was so successful in recruiting ‘progressive middle class people’ that ‘for a while the Party was in danger of becoming top heavy with imperfectly assimilated petty bourgeois radicals’.⁵

The Perth Workers’ Art Guild was ‘to serve as a social hub for the unemployed and the political Left. It was to offer practical opportunities to those traditionally excluded from participation in the arts. It publicly declared its somewhat utopian design as “a non-party organisation dedicated to working class culture”’.⁶ Its most important activity was the Workers’ Theatre. For several years Katharine had been friends with a theatre director named Keith George; she recruited him to lead the theatre. Then in his thirties, Keith was ‘flamboyant’ with a ‘sparkling intellect’, and a distinctive appearance, a ‘portly, short and balding’ gourmand.⁷ His politics were left wing but he wasn’t a party member. He and Katharine had different approaches to theatre too—Keith ‘has an idea’, Katharine wrote to Louis Esson, ‘that when he’s producing, a play belongs to him, and the author is an unpleasant accident’.⁸ Despite their differences, she admired his work immensely.

Building on the approach she’d taken in her suffrage ‘playlets’ in 1914 and her observations of Russian theatre, Katharine wrote several agitprop plays for the guild to perform. The guild presented three short plays for its inaugural performance on 7 December 1935, including Katharine’s rather simple Forward One, in which three shop assistants in a Perth dress shop rally together to assert their right to sit down between customers. The Red Star reviewed it solely from its propaganda potential, writing, ‘With improvements in the content and better presentation this play will become a vital force for the organisation of the shop girls for militant unionism’.⁹

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR broke out in 1936 when soldiers led by the fascist General Franco fought to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government. The war was a rallying point for the left in English-speaking countries. Katharine was an organiser of the Spanish War Relief Committee and wrote a play called Women of Spain to promote the cause. It was produced by the Workers’ Art Guild, first on 31 May 1938 at a small venue, the Myola Club in Claremont, and then as part of a rally at the Perth Town Hall on 27 July. It was the first time the young communist journalist Joan Williams had encountered Katharine and she remembers, ‘She spoke slowly and simply, avoiding the padding and circumlocutions that wore out reporters, giving an impression of emotional commitment on a carefully reasoned basis. When the applause died down, she took up her cigarette in its ivory holder and calmly answered questions’.¹⁰ Historian Dylan Hyde writes, ‘The Guild toured Women of Spain around Perth between June and August 1938 to assist Spanish Relief Committee appeals, perhaps as a fixed-stage performance at some rallies but almost certainly on the back of a truck at others’.¹¹

ON SATURDAY 6 November 1937, the Communist Party celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution at the Rechabite Hall in the city. The advertisement in the Workers Star promised ‘short, snappy, and inspiring speeches’ from Katharine and two others, one of them an Australian who had just returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Katharine wore a Russian shawl and said, ‘If all of you could only see the happy peace-loving Russian people as I have seen them; the women and girls wearing shawls like this one I am wearing to-night, I know that every one of you would devote the rest of your lives in the struggle for Peace and Socialism’. At the end of her speech, she called for ‘cheers for the Soviet Union, for Stalin and the Communist Party, which were given with gusto and enthusiasm’.¹² Afterwards there was dancing ‘to specially engaged music’ and a supper in which ‘coffee à la Stalin’ was served with ‘Marx Meringues’ and ‘Lenin Lamingtons’.¹³

Katharine didn’t believe the reports that were now appearing in the newspapers about the show trials and disappearances under Stalin. Ironically, her firsthand experience of the Soviet Union would have made it harder for her to believe the truth—she had spent months on the ground, witnessing the reality of life under Stalin, and she was sure she knew better than journalists working for the capitalist press.

Katharine was back out in public as a party member and her involvement with the day-to-day operations increased too. Perhaps the Comintern had changed its mind about what her role should be. According to Dylan Hyde, the state conference in January 1938 was held at Katharine’s house in Greenmount.¹⁴ She was one of seventeen members elected to the district committee. In a change of tactic, the conference was reported in-depth in the Workers Star. Bill Mountjoy, who was re-elected district secretary, was quoted as saying, ‘mankind was realising the terrible danger of fascist reaction. But the people, led by the workers, were fighting back’.¹⁵

Mountjoy’s drinking was out of control in 1938. One of his drinking partners was Ron Richards, a detective nicknamed the ‘Black Snake’, who was lulling Mountjoy into a false sense of security while soliciting information. Charming and ‘conversant with party theory’, Richards was ‘highly intelligent, slick and duplicitous’.¹⁶ Some party members approached Katharine and asked her to intervene. In the only surviving letter from Mountjoy to Katharine, he told her he didn’t have time to meet with her about the issue, dismissing the unhappy members as ‘ethereal individuals’ with ‘middle-class ballast’. ‘It grieves me’, he wrote, ‘to see such a brilliant representative of the working class taking the side—even if unconsciously—with those who would wreck the Party’. He flattered Katharine at the same time as putting her in her place: ‘there are a number of capable Party leaders in Australia but only one Katharine, whose national prestige is extremely important’. The real leaders of the party were proletarians like Mountjoy. ‘I stand guard for the proletarian purity of the Party.’¹⁷ Mountjoy was good at making enemies; Joan Williams wrote, ‘Inclined to be a petty dictator, he caused many expulsions and bitterness as he axed possible rivals for leadership … He resented Mrs Throssell’s wide influence, possibly because she was a woman, but mostly because she frankly expressed disapproval of his drinking’.¹⁸

Ric remembers that after Katharine confronted Mountjoy in private, he summoned her before the disciplinary committee and accused her of deviating from the party line.¹⁹ On 6 November 1938 she wrote to Guido Baracchi that the ‘situation is rotten … A letter to the CC [Central Committee] which you may hear more [about]. Wish I needn’t barge in—but somebody’s got to be the scape goat, & I can stand it better than most’. The confrontation was highly stressful; she told Guido she had a ‘head-ache—& heart flopping about like a flea on hot bricks’.²⁰

The conclusion of the dispute is unknown, but at the state conference in early 1939, Katharine requested permission to refuse the nomination to continue on the district committee and it was granted.²¹ She couldn’t escape Mountjoy altogether; they were the two most prominent communist speakers in Western Australia and often had to share a platform throughout 1939.

RIC TURNED SIXTEEN in 1938 and Katharine’s words about him in that letter to Guido about Mountjoy are revealing: ‘My lad’s been born & bred for the Party; I know it would be a terrible shock to him to find that Communists were capable of sacrificing party interests for beer. Have got to try & clear things up for his sake’. She was vehemently hoping that she’d raised a communist, even as she sent him to board at Wesley College among the wealthy. Ric remembers, ‘I learned to live in both worlds. On my weekends at home … I listened while the grave-faced men of the International Brigade, with the memories of death still hidden behind their eyes, told their stories of Spain’.²²

Ric insists he wasn’t pressed to join the party. ‘She told me the way that she saw the issues of the day when I asked, satisfied that the logic of her position would be persuasion enough.’ In these teenage years he was intellectually convinced by the ‘goals of Marxism’, a society ‘where all co-operated for the common good’, but he was content enough with life that he didn’t become politically active.²³ Despite her words to Guido, Ric sensed an ambivalence in her attitude, writing, ‘Perhaps she hoped to save me from the rigorous life of self-sacrifice that her own adherence to the Communist Party had come to mean. She wanted success for me without compromising her own ideals’.²⁴

KATHARINE WROTE TO Timofey Rokotov at the Union of Soviet Writers in September 1938 apologising for not sending him a requested article, blaming it on a ‘weary and over worked brain’. ‘I belong to twelve organisations and have to take an active part in their doings: am responsible for many, as well as somehow trying to earn a living.’²⁵ She was terribly over-committed and realised it, but pushed on. It was partly the urgency of the times, partly her reaction to grief. Perpetual organisational busyness was also a way of life she had learned from both her father and Colonel Reay.

One of the new organisations she helped establish was the Modern Women’s Club. According to Katharine, it was begun because the Labor Party had banned its women members from joining the Council Against War and Fascism. At the executive meeting of the council, Katharine said, ‘we should have a women’s club where the members would be free to discuss any subject which concerned them’; others agreed with her.²⁶ The club rented premises in the city and had a weekly lunch with a lecture by a visiting speaker. At the official opening in April 1938 the president said, ‘We stand for progress especially in the betterment of women’s conditions in regard to work, recreation and housing’.²⁷ Dorothy Irwin remembers the ‘chief value’ of the club was that ‘it provided a meeting place for progressives during a period that was difficult for us all. The weekly luncheons brought people together and gave them a feeling of solidarity that was stimulating’. Echoing how Katharine may have felt, she adds, ‘I remember chiefly the crushing work’.²⁸

Probably the only non-political organisation Katharine belonged to at this time was the WA branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. It was formed after a gathering of eleven Western Australian writers in Perth for dinner with visiting American literary critic, Hartley Grattan, in June 1938.²⁹ When the branch first met in October, Katharine, Walter Murdoch and historian Jesse Hammond were made honorary life members in recognition of their literary achievements.³⁰

KATHARINE WAS OUTWARDLY content to be pouring her life into politics but revealed her unhappiness to old literary friends. ‘One day a month is all I get [to write] sometimes and working 18 hours a day sometimes on Party affairs’, she wrote to Vance Palmer in October 1935. ‘It’s devastating—quite impossible to get any concentration. And I’ll be stoney [sic], motherless broke if I don’t earn something soon.’³¹ In August 1936, she wrote what would be her final letter to Hugh McCrae for many years, saying, ‘It’s been a woeful year—living alone & working so hard. To-day, it’s raining & raining, & the wind yelps round the house. I say I’m too busy to be lonely. But you know what that means. There’s nobody I want to come into my mind, anymore’.³² When Nettie visited her a couple of months later on the way back from Europe, she wrote to Vance that Katharine looked ‘pretty ill—haggard and a bad colour—but game and energetic: She does odd literary jobs when she can find time, but does four furious days’ work a week for the party, organising, holding meetings, building up movements that will be spearheads, including a very flourishing Workers’ Theatre’.³³

Her money problems continued through the second half of the 1930s; in April 1939, the shire council advertised in the local newspaper that it would auction off two of Hugo’s properties unless Katharine paid more than £20 of rates which were in arrears. Perhaps it prompted her to advertise her ‘genuine English Rosewood piano’ for £20 two months later.³⁴

In Katharine’s words, ‘by a miracle’ she finally finished Intimate Strangers in mid-1936 and sent it off to Jonathan Cape.³⁵ ‘I’ve been in the black depths over it’, she told Hugh McCrae in that last letter. ‘But Hilda and Louis are pleased … So perhaps it’s not as bad as I thought.’³⁶ The novel would have felt like it came from her distant past; she’d begun it before her political re-awakening in the Depression and finished the first draft while Hugo was still alive.

Katharine’s ambivalence towards Intimate Strangers was echoed in the mixed reviews after its publication in April 1937. The Bulletin gave a harsh assessment, calling it ‘disappointing’ and arguing that ‘the characters are working for the author, not living for themselves’; the reviewer had the feeling that Katharine ‘herself has not been happy with it’.³⁷ The strongest praise came from Perth’s Daily News, where communists Joan Williams and Bill Irwin were both working. Calling it ‘perhaps the finest modern novel written by an Australian’, the reviewer wrote it was ‘rich in character and understanding: intensely moving, gripping and sincere … It adds immeasurably to our understanding of life and of one another’.³⁸ The communist newspaper the Workers’ Weekly praised it for depicting ‘the road traversed by many middle class people on their way to the revolutionary ranks of the working class’.³⁹ A longer review in the same newspaper by Katharine’s friend, Jean Devanny, went further:

It has done for me what personal contact with KSP herself always does for me: it has belted me more firmly for the struggle. It will do the same for you. Read it, comrade, and see how Australia’s finest writer, foundation member of our Party, has linked us all together; writer, canecutter, miner, unemployed, seaman—in the enchanted castle of our Party, which cannot be separated from the workers of the world.⁴⁰

Intimate Strangers sold poorly. Jonathan Cape wrote to Katharine in October 1938, ‘The reason would seem to be that it was an essential drama of human beings in a modern society, but the setting being ever so slightly different was confusing to the average reader of novels, and was not strongly different to attract people who like books with a definite local colour’.⁴¹ If Katharine needed any encouragement to stay out of the suburbs in her writing and return to the ‘backblocks’ where she had made her reputation she now had it.

Henry Handel Richardson didn’t like the novel and she gossiped from London that she had asked William Norton ‘if he was going to publish it in America. He said “My hat, no!” It has fallen like a stone here, & Cape has lost heavily on it. Norton saw C. & inquired why he had handled such a book & Cape said he was “sorry for her!”’⁴²

With the limited writing time she had, Katharine was focusing on short fiction, which paid more reliably and quickly. Reflecting this focus, in May 1937 she gave a lecture on the craft of the short story to the Workers’ Art Guild. She advised her audience not to let themselves be ruined by the formulas of popular fiction magazines but to try to write about incidents which were ‘real and vital’ to them.⁴³ She was to broadcast a version of the same lecture three years later on ABC radio. She finished with a stirring vision for the genre: ‘the great short stories … have been written … to snatch from oblivion fragments of tragedy and heroism, of joy and comedy for others to laugh over, wonder and weep over, or be exalted and stirred by, to some clearer understanding of our common humanity and the purpose of existence’.⁴⁴

There’s a generosity of spirit in Katharine’s lecture which is also apparent in her published stories of the time. Even though politics had taken over her life and she was promoting socialist realism, when she wrote short fiction she did so with flashes of humour and diversity of theme. Holidays on Rottnest Island inspired ‘The Buccaneers’, published in The Bulletin in 1935. It’s a story of three men who return to the island each year; seemingly lighthearted, it captures the disappointments of ageing. ‘Life had never been quite what they imagined it would be, so they lived in their exploits of their youth, sucking from adventurous dreams the rapture and thrills that had never quite materialised.’⁴⁵ In 1938 she had one of the best stories of her career, ‘Flight’, published in Home. The story is an early critique of the Stolen Generations policy under which Aboriginal children were being forcibly removed from their families. A constable in the north of Western Australia is unhappy about having to take three Aboriginal girls from their mothers, but he’s more worried about looking foolish than about the injustice of it. In the last pages, the point of view shifts to the girls themselves and their devastating inability to snatch a chance for freedom.

Katharine’s perspective on Aboriginal issues had been developing since she’d written Coonardoo a decade earlier. In February 1939 she attended a conference discussing the Native Administration Act and wrote an article complaining, ‘In the wrangle between the Department and the missionary organisations, the right of the natives to dispose of their own souls and bodies is lost sight of’. She urged the state government to convene a conference of Aboriginal people and ask them what should be done to further their interests. ‘These people, at least, should be given representation on any board assuming control of their lives and children.’⁴⁶ Katharine also wrote an essay in 1939 for the British Annual of Literature, ‘The Aborigine in Australian Literature’. The essay assumes many racist ideas of the time but it at least begins with an acknowledgement of genocide: ‘The early history of our country reeks with the massacre of these people and with the crimes committed against them by ruthless men who would even leave poisoned flour in their huts in order to exterminate men, women, and children’.⁴⁷ The next year, when Brumby Innes was published, she wrote in a letter, ‘If I were writing the play now, I would emphasise their [i.e. Aboriginal people’s] right to an independent existence. As it is, the play leaves you with a sense only of the degradation of the natives and the brutality of their over-lords’.⁴⁸

IN 1935, KATHARINE wrote a recruitment pamphlet for the Movement Against War and Fascism called Who Wants War?. She warned that weapon makers and fascists wanted another war and that ‘Fascism is the last resort of Capitalism to force its will on the people’. The Soviet Union, however, stood for peace and was the one force the fascists feared.⁴⁹ Four years later, as the threat from Nazi Germany had grown even clearer, she gave a speech titled ‘Peace and War’, probably for International Women’s Day in March. ‘Apathy, credulity and stup[e]fying illusions have brought us to the stage in our history when we must be prepared to defend democracy … or surrender to the cruel and barbarous forces of fascism which have demonstrated their rapacious ambition in Europe and in China during the last year.’⁵⁰

After Katharine and other communists in Australia had spent years speaking out against the danger of fascism, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Australian communists suffered ‘the shock of such a sudden and cynical change. The Soviet Union, which had insisted that fascism was the overriding danger to world peace, now stood back to allow Nazi Germany to go to war’.⁵¹ Katharine blamed the British and French governments for rejecting the Soviet Union’s overtures for an alliance against Germany. ‘A nonaggression pact is not a measure of appeasement. It gives nothing away.’⁵²

Ric was in his final year of school and remembers listening to the radio at Greenmount on 3 September 1939 when prime minister Robert Menzies declared that Australia was at war. Katharine was doing something in the next room and Ric wasn’t sure if she had heard. When he went in to tell her, ‘her eyes filled with tears’.⁵³