30

Underground

Greenmount and Kalgoorlie 1940–1942

IN FEBRUARY 1940 Guido Baracchi sent Katharine a telegram to say he’d been expelled from the party:

Stalinism [is a] betrayal of Leninism … [I am] continuing full Leninist fight against war and for proletarian revolution and Soviet Union somehow will try to make communist of you love … Guido¹

His expulsion came after the party’s Control Commission demanded he account for not reporting the ‘Trotskyist tendencies’ of his friend James Rawling. Guido responded, ‘I can only admit knowing that Rawling was returning to revolutionary Marxism, to Leninism’.² It was a Trotskyist answer in itself. Leon Trotsky, an architect of the Russian Revolution turned dissident, had been criticising Stalin while in exile and was to be assassinated a few months later.

Guido saw his own expulsion as the culmination of a ‘long struggle’. One key moment in his disillusionment was learning in 1938 that his friend in the Soviet Union, Arcadi Berdichevsky, had been missing since the secret police took him away two years earlier. Berdichevsky was interrogated—and later executed—for being part of a supposed Trotskyist group operating out of the apartment Guido had also been living in until 1935. For Guido, it gave ‘the Terror—a dizzying 1.8 million people arrested between 1935 and 1940—a name and a face’. Guido’s biographer Jeff Sparrow thinks it likely he would have been arrested too had he stayed in the Soviet Union much longer.³

Katharine expressed no sympathy with these deviations from the party line. She told Rawling she was appalled by his conduct. ‘At this critical period’, she wrote, ‘to permit oneself Trotskyist divagations strikes me as intellectual dilettantism, incapable of adjusting to the needs of the working-class movement’.⁴ When Guido next saw Katharine, she wouldn’t speak to him.⁵ She had forgiven him sexual and romantic betrayals two decades earlier but not this political one.

Loyalty to the party meant that if Katharine had any doubts of her own, any hesitations, she suppressed them, leaving nothing on the historical record but her hardline support for Stalinism.

ANTI-COMMUNIST SENTIMENT was growing stronger. In early 1940, Katharine was preparing to deliver a series of guest lectures at the University of Western Australia on Australian literature under an arrangement with the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA. Four days before the first lecture, she was barred from speaking after university management learned a notorious communist would be temporarily on the payroll. The fellowship’s protests were not enough to have her reinstated but they did secure full payment for her.⁶ Katharine wrote to the professorial board, ‘To prostitute your power to the service of hysterical obfuscation, at a time like this, in my opinion is servile and cowardly’.⁷

On 15 June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, the Menzies government declared the Communist Party of Australia illegal. That same day, warrants were issued giving police the authority to search houses of prominent communists, including Katharine’s.⁸ The detectives came the next day. Ric remembers the embarrassment of one of them finding a sex toy:

‘What’s this?’ he asked, showing me a rubber gadget that he had fished out from the back of one of the drawers.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, honestly enough, though I had been fascinated by the device and suspected what it was.

‘I think it’s my mother’s,’ I said.

‘Filthy young bastard!’ he sneered, with every appearance of utter contempt. ‘How’d you like me to tell her what you’re up to?’⁹

Katharine had hidden her illegal publications and party papers in a trunk under the plumbago hedge near her writing cabin. However, the detectives still confiscated many other papers, including one of her notebooks and a letter Miles Franklin had just sent her. Katharine wrote to the Ministry of Information, protesting ‘the foolish attack which has been made on members of the Communist Party in Western Australia. Communists have always been the most active opponents of Fascism and Hitlerism. They still are’.¹⁰

The repression of communists was greater in Western Australia than any other state, partly due to Ron Richards’ crusade. His long game of gathering intelligence from Mountjoy had paid off and he orchestrated the arrest of a dozen party members, many of them convicted and jailed.¹¹ Katharine wrote about the prosecutions and the prospect of imprisonment to an editor in Moscow:

No one, of course, is intimidated by these tactics; no one who attached any importance to his convictions and personal courage, at any rate. It would be giving you a wrong impression, however, to imply that the position is not very difficult, both for me and many others whose sympathies are well-known. I am not in the least concerned about going to gaol at any time. The experiences will naturally provide interesting material to write about some day. But if you do [not] hear from me, now and then, you will understand I am sure what has happened.¹²

As it happened, Katharine escaped arrest. Perhaps Richards believed her prominence as a writer would have brought too much public attention and turned her into a martyr. Party member John McKenzie remembers that in response to the prosecutions, a number of his comrades left their jobs and moved to Sydney, where they would be safer.¹³

Mountjoy was not arrested either. He went into hiding ‘somewhere in North Beach’ until the party arranged for the Seamen’s Union to smuggle him aboard a ship heading east. The committee sent a Gallipoli veteran named Jack Simpson to be his replacement. He stayed in Cottesloe, posing as a retired farmer until he was caught by Ron Richards, prosecuted by Nathaniel Lappin, and sentenced to nine months in jail in May 1941.¹⁴

In response to illegality, Katharine gave the impression that she was withdrawing from political activity. Suspecting with good reason her mail was being read, she wrote to Hilda, ‘For the present, I’m not engaged in any political activity’.¹⁵ It wasn’t true, of course. In the days of illegality, Katharine’s activities became opaque, her letters and public utterances deliberately misleading. Joan Williams writes that Katharine ‘continued on the State committee throughout the illegal period … in conditions which of necessity gave the membership little idea of the official functioning of the apparatus and suspended many of their rights. Despite defects and bureaucracy, the underground organization functioned well, [and] the underground paper was produced regularly and widely distributed’.¹⁶ John McKenzie remembers it more negatively, writing of ‘rather futile clandestine meetings’ and frustration about the leadership’s acceptance of the Soviet line on the war.¹⁷

Katharine was heavily involved in supporting her comrades through their trials into early 1941, leaving her ‘thoroughly exhausted’. She wrote to Hilda, ‘Remand, appeal, and interviewing counsel for the defence. It was really a very strenuous time’.¹⁸

IN THE MIDST of these battles, Katharine was also short of money. She decided to write a novel purely for money, a ‘potboiler’ Hollywood might be interested in turning into a movie.¹⁹ Calling it Moon of Desire, she drew on her notes about Broome and Singapore from her trip in 1929 and constructed an adventure plot about the titular pearl. A pearler, Alec, obsessively shadows Matsu, the Japanese diver he believes has stolen the pearl, leading to a confrontation on the beach which leaves two dead. Alec had hoped the pearl would enable him to marry his fiancée, Ann, but instead it causes their separation, another death, and a recovery mission in Singapore before they are finally reunited. After a passable opening it becomes contrived and tedious. Katharine had finished a draft by May 1940, and wrote to Mikhail Apletin at the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘Tragic isn’t it to have to write rubbish at the end of one’s days in order to live. I have to leave my home soon. Foreclosure of the mortgage’.²⁰ The foreclosure was somehow averted and she was able to stay in her home for the time being, but the threat remained. In December, after sending Moon of Desire to Jonathan Cape, she wrote to Louis Esson, ‘Have been so utterly weary of this damned book’.²¹

Katharine held Moon of Desire in lower regard than her other novels, conscious of writing it to sell. However, it still has some recognisably Prichardian elements. The romance tropes come from her early fiction; the mystical allure of pearls recalls that of opals in Black Opal. The account of the pearling industry, the interweaving of the folklore of Broome, and the colour of Singapore reflect her signature method. Ann’s lament echoes that of women throughout Katharine’s fiction:

Ann brooded over every phase of the pearling industry and the sinister undertow it generated in the life of the town … She began to hate pearls and mother-of-pearl: to realize their cost to women like herself and Nell McIntyre, in fear and anxiety about their men, and to the men themselves in fierce and bitter rivalry with each other. Many crimes had been committed for a pearl!²²

Sandra Burchill notes that the novel ‘turns away from a deeper exploration of racism, social inequality and poverty’, but one point of interest is the section of sympathetic narration through the eyes of Matsu the Japanese diver: ‘He had risked his life often enough for the white masters who made a handsome profit on his labour’.²³

The Bulletin reviewer read it as Katharine intended:

The story is straightforward, bristling with revolvers and knives, and warm with tropic coloring. Those who like the excitements of this sort of novel will find it far better, on this particular ground, than nine out of ten of its kind. Those who look to this author for contributions to Australian literature will possibly read it with some astonishment. Every now and then, when the doings are at their wildest and everything, from a literary standpoint, seems to be getting out of hand, the author will come in with a splendid splash of writing in her best style.²⁴

The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer wrote, ‘Against an exotic, tropical background, this competent writer presents in her latest novel a group of characters and a set of circumstances which are as convincing as they are absorbing’.²⁵ If luck had gone Katharine’s way, it might have been the bestseller she hoped but the difficulties of wartime distribution and publicity were against her and it did not sell well. She’d hoped for a lucrative movie deal, especially after the American publisher, Greenberg, offered her a publishing contract in November 1941. She spent more than a year waiting for copies of the published book and news from Hollywood only to discover a letter from Greenberg had gone astray; in it, they had informed her that they weren’t proceeding with a US edition.²⁶

IN SEPTEMBER 1940, the Workers’ Art Guild staged Katharine’s play, Penalty Clause, for three nights as part of the Perth drama festival. In it, a group of gold miners go on strike over unsafe conditions after a fatality; when they return to work, they find their time on strike has been deducted from their holidays. Katharine was proud of the play and claimed she had inside information that the judges believed it was the best entry but ‘were afraid to award the prize to a play with so definite a political content under present circumstances’. She insisted she wasn’t concerned with prizes or the praise of ‘bourgeois critics’; she was just ‘happy to have done something which may be of service to the working class … The response of the people who heard the play was what mattered, and that was—tears, cheers and an overwhelming enthusiasm’.²⁷ It was a foretaste of what would happen with her goldfields trilogy after the war. From this point onwards, Katharine was quick to ascribe literary setbacks to politics, reacting to criticism with a complacent confidence in her writing.

She sent a copy of the play to Mikhail Apletin in the hope he might arrange for it to be produced in the Soviet Union. While she was certain it was too left wing to find critical favour in Australia, she was also concerned that it might not be politically palatable for the Soviets. ‘In many ways, it may fall short of what you consider it should be. But I was working on actual conditions of a strike which occurred on the goldfields, and anxious not to go beyond the framework of these conditions.’²⁸

AN EPISTOLARY FRIENDSHIP had been developing in the 1930s between Katharine and Miles Franklin, the Australian writer who was both a nationalist and a feminist. After the precocious success of My Brilliant Career (1901), Miles had spent decades abroad in the United States and Britain accumulating unpublished manuscripts and devoting herself to progressive causes. Returning to live in Sydney, her literary career had revived, with All That Swagger winning the SH Prior Memorial Prize in 1936. In Miles’s devotion to Australian literature as a writer, advocate and mentor she had common cause with Katharine, while Miles’s political ambiguity was a source of tension in their friendship.

In October 1940, Katharine wrote to Miles of her struggles, working hard ‘at so many different sorts of jobs—keeping house for my beautiful son who is grown-up now, cooking, sweeping, washing, mending etc, organisational work and lectures, and somewhere in between, I’ve got to find time to write and earn my living’.²⁹ Miles encouraged Katharine to apply for one of the new Commonwealth Literary Fund grants and Katharine decided to follow her advice. Asking for financial help did not come easily to her; she wrote in her covering letter in December, ‘I am reluctant to apply for a Fellowship … but circumstances at present force me to’. She didn’t mention, of course, the heavy toll her political commitments were taking, but wrote of how she had been ‘living on much less than the basic wage’ for years, and that ‘hard work and ill health are making it almost impossible for me to write well. This book of the goldfields which I am anxious to do next year, I should like to make something of real value. With relief from pressing financial anxiety, I think that it may be’.³⁰

As part of her application, she detailed her income in 1940. Haxby’s Circus (1930) and Intimate Strangers (1937) were her only novels in print and the royalties paid on them didn’t amount to £1. Her military pension of £109 formed the bulk of her income; she supplemented it with £24 from short stories and articles, and £62 from radio broadcasts and a radio play, making a total of £195. The fellowship would be worth £250 over twelve months—about the same as the basic wage for men.³¹

Her application form provided details of her goldfields project, showing it was already well advanced:

It will probably be of three book length—although my publisher may prefer to print in one volume. Part I deals with the discovery of gold & the prospecting period. Part II growth of the mining industry & the rise of towns. Part III with the slump & return to prosperity in present conditions. I have been working on this book for some time, & Part I is almost completed, having been built on the yarns of original prospectors & personal experiences on the fields … As the subject of this novel has never been thoroughly dealt with, I want to make it both historically accurate & a good picture of the life of the periods through which the story moves.³²

The goldfields saga would eventually be published as a trilogy exactly as she envisioned in the application—The Roaring Nineties in 1946, Golden Miles in 1948, and Winged Seeds in 1950.

After Katharine spent months waiting in limbo, the fund wrote in April 1941 to say she had been successful. The awarding of the fellowship was not publicly announced and the security service only found out about it a couple of months later when an intelligence officer read it in one of Katharine’s letters to Russia. The officer filed a report saying, ‘it seems strange that one so intimately associated with the Communist Party should in any way be recognised’. The security service issued a report recommending that the Commonwealth Literary Fund discreetly submit the names of any writers they were considering for a fellowship for ‘comment’ to prevent further cases like this.³³

To start her fellowship, Katharine arranged a ten-week research trip to Kalgoorlie, arriving in late May 1941. More than the heat, it was the noise which struck her, the ‘drone of the mine batteries’ in her ear, day and night.³⁴ For the first week, she stayed in the middle of town at the Palace Hotel, ‘which is supposed to be the historic & swank hotel of Kal. Not so historic & swank as some of the less reputable pubs where I sometimes go for a pot with old girls’.³⁵

A woman named Doon Doyle invited Katharine to stay at her house. Although not a party member, Doon was sympathetic to communism; she was a teacher in her thirties who acted in Repertory Club productions and was married without children to an Irish miner. Doon had met Katharine on a previous trip and idolised her. Doon wrote of Katharine, ‘Her conversation is even more exhilarating than her writing. She can deliver a piece of frank feeling with utmost delicacy and gentleness that transmutes it to gem purity’.³⁶

‘They let me do as I like, work & read’, Katharine wrote. ‘Marvellous to have no dish-washing & cooking for awhile!’ Although Katharine was relaxed Doon wasn’t. ‘I had an unshakable conviction in her creative art, that amounted to fervour, and the routine of my days revolved around her needs.’³⁷ Doon arranged trips for Katharine to the mines at Broad Arrow, Ora Banda and Siberia and introduced her to locals for her research.³⁸ The friendship between the two women was to be an enduring one, even though it was troubled by Doon’s tendency to stew bitterly for years over hurts Katharine knew nothing about. Golden Miles is dedicated to her.

The three goldfields novels are the only ones of Katharine’s to have a strong historical background. The Pioneers is set in the nineteenth century but its historical basis is loose; her other novels are set in the present or recent past. Katharine took the research task seriously and had read through the first five years of the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper in Perth. Now for two weeks in Kalgoorlie she spent five hours a day reading the Miner from 1897 to 1919. To this research, she added readings in ‘mining law, geology and the processes of gold extraction’. Once her research was done, she settled into a routine of writing from half-past seven to noon. In the afternoon, she yarned ‘with prospectors, miners, mine-managers, and interesting folks of all sorts’, which she felt ‘added a good deal to the material I’ve been gathering for years’.³⁹ This combination of library research and interviews is reflected in the trilogy in its mix of verifiable historical events and goldfields yarns.

Katharine had always woven folklore into her novels and now she extended that to include her other forms of research. Sandra Burchill writes, ‘The three novels are loaded with prospectors’ yarns, old miners’ tales, anecdotes and ruminations, authentic speeches, real incidents from the period, extracts from official reports, royal commissions and enquiries, commentary from newspapers and technical descriptions of mining processes’.⁴⁰ Burchill sees this as Katharine’s adoption of the techniques of reportage, a style of writing pioneered by Egon Kisch. The inaugural Writers’ League conference in 1935 featured a lecture by Julian Smith on reportage, published as a pamphlet with a message from Katharine. Smith defined reportage as ‘the art of setting down observation or chronicling events accurately and in an artistically effective manner’, relying on firsthand experience, thorough research, and—in the case of historical writing—seeking out survivors to interview.⁴¹ Burchill notes the ‘overall result of this transcription of information is the reduction of human interest’, and assigns some of the negative reaction to the trilogy to it.⁴² Katharine was conveying a contentious political perspective with a contentious technique.

AFTER YEARS OF limited literary activity, Katharine does seem to have been genuinely focused on her research and writing while she was in Kalgoorlie. Yet in this period of illegality, with the political stakes so high, it seems unlikely she would take ten weeks away from all political activity. Kalgoorlie–Boulder had a party branch, with several members living together on Piesse Street in Boulder in a miner’s hut ‘affectionately known as the “Kremlin”’ which ‘national CPA leaders often visited’.⁴³ She may have justified her trip to herself and to the party by secretly working with the goldfields branch while she was there.

Nathaniel Lappin, the public prosecutor, was staying at the Palace Hotel while he visited Kalgoorlie to prosecute a Yugoslavian named Francis Legeny who had been arrested with several copies of the banned publication Communist Review. When Katharine collected her mail from the hotel on 29 May, he cornered her in the dining room, wanting to know why she was in Kalgoorlie. She told him it wasn’t the same reason he was here. He criticised her for allowing others to pay her son’s school fees and told her, ‘You’ve been shown a great deal of toleration’, which she took as a veiled threat. Doon remembers finding Katharine ‘white and shaken and barely able to keep the tears from her voice’.⁴⁴

Lappin was the same lawyer who had raised suspicions about the fire that burned down the historic cottage on Hugo and Katharine’s land in 1933.⁴⁵ During Legeny’s trial, Lappin read extracts from one of the publications and declared, ‘It reeks throughout its pages of propaganda’.⁴⁶ The accused man claimed to not be a communist nor to have ever distributed the material, but he was found guilty and sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment with hard labour. It’s understandable that Lappin found it suspicious that Katharine’s visit coincided with Francis Legeny’s arrest and trial. Oddly, intelligence officers didn’t even realise she was in Kalgoorlie until Inspector Ron Richards himself spotted her on 30 June 1941, five weeks after she arrived.⁴⁷ Despite Lappin’s hostility and involvement in prosecuting communists, he hadn’t filed a report on her.

THE WAR SITUATION changed dramatically on 22 June 1941, halfway through Katharine’s stay in Kalgoorlie, when German forces invaded the Soviet Union. Suddenly the Soviets joined the Allies in the fight against the Axis powers. In late July, Katharine was asked by the Union of Soviet Writers to cable a 1000-word article ‘on the Australian people’s reaction to Fascist aggression’. After two muddled years, Katharine was free again to unambiguously oppose fascism. She declared, ‘Fascism outrages humanity’s instinct for progress. It destroys every right the people have won in struggle through the ages against despotic power’. She praised the Soviet Union while criticising the oppressive wartime measures on the Australian home front; since the outbreak of war, ‘the workers of Australia have been subjected to more oppressive taxation and more repressive legislation than ever before in their history’.⁴⁸

Katharine was in a strident mood and it led to a temporary breach in her friendship with the Perth writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman. Henrietta wrote a conciliatory letter to her in Kalgoorlie wanting to move past their ‘misunderstandings’ about the Soviet Union’s role in the war, but instead of agreeing to disagree, Katharine replied, ‘Am coming home soon: but while you’re on the other side of the fence there is little for us to say to each other. I belong entirely to the people who are suffering for their convictions & service to the great ideals of Humanity. Socialism is the only real defence against Fascism’.⁴⁹ Somehow the breach had been healed by the time of the next surviving letter from Katharine to Henrietta a year later.

IN AUGUST 1941 Katharine was glad to be back home in Greenmount, seeing Ric at the weekends while he studied at teachers’ college. His dream was to work in film production; Katharine had hoped Moon of Desire would make enough money to pay for him to study it in Russia or the United States. ‘He has a marvellous sense of the theatre’, she wrote to Timofey Rokotov at the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘better than mine—and a quite modern and original approach. It does distress me that there are practically no opportunities for him to obtain a broad culture here’.⁵⁰

In early October, two independents withdrew their support for the minority conservative government and Labor took office with John Curtin as prime minister. The Communist Party was still illegal but the atmosphere changed for Australian communists—a friendlier government coincided with public sympathy for the heavy Soviet casualties on the eastern front. Communists became involved with committees fundraising to send aid to Russia.

Katharine wrote to the Commonwealth Literature Fund on 12 October, saying that despite ‘wanting nothing more than to bring the thing to birth’ she would have to stop work on the goldfields trilogy and suspend her scholarship as she was embarking on a speaking tour for Medical Aid to Russia. ‘In the suffering and sorrow of our times, I feel … that one is not entitled to put personal inclination before any service that can be given to relieve this tragic pressure.’ She said she was ‘anxious to do anything I can to aid the Soviet peoples in their magnificent resistance to Nazi aggression’.⁵¹ The Perth branch of Medical Aid to Russia met at the Modern Women’s Club. One of its members was an informant to the intelligence agency, and they reported that at a meeting on 9 October, Katharine said the tour was ‘in response to a long-distance telephone call’ and ‘her fare [was] being paid by The Central Cttee’.⁵² The report suggests how involved the underground Communist Party was in the aid to Russia campaign.

Her speaking tour took her first to Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane where she spoke in front of audiences of three thousand and more.⁵³ ‘Was not supposed to speak the first night in Brisbane, but the people called for me, and there was a roar when I stood up, which made me realise that after all, perhaps, I do count for something with my own people.’⁵⁴ She told audiences that ‘the ruthlessness of the German campaign, combined with Stalin’s scorched earth policy, would leave the country in ruins. The Russian people would need not only military aid, but also food and clothes’.⁵⁵ At the conclusion of a speech, she would implore the audience, ‘Let us do the fair and sporting thing’, with ushers collecting donations and placing them in her Russian shawl she had laid out on the platform.⁵⁶

Katharine travelled down the east coast from Brisbane to Wollongong and then to Canberra. When she visited the House of Representatives unannounced, prime minister John Curtin noticed her and sent a steward to invite her to sit on the floor of the chamber. Afterwards, the attorney-general, Bert Evatt, asked Katharine to have dinner with him and his wife. Evatt told her the intelligence officers had been giving him ‘an almost hourly report’ on her speaking tour; he requested they focus on fascists instead. The esteem Curtin and Evatt showed her meant much to her—she called her Canberra visit a ‘thrilling occasion’ when writing about it at the end of her life.⁵⁷ The federal Labor governments of the 1940s were to be the last of her lifetime, sandwiched by the hostile Menzies governments. After Curtin’s death in 1945, Katharine wrote to Ric, ‘Glad I saw him that last time. He had many fine qualities—& they will be remembered more than the weaknesses. His life as a model for leading character in play wd be very interesting’.⁵⁸

The months of speaking had exacted a toll on Katharine, and she was a ‘wreck’ when she reached Melbourne in time to spend Christmas with her sister Beatrice and rest for two weeks.⁵⁹ Afterwards, stopping in Adelaide on the way home, a journalist reported, ‘Despite her fragility this grey-haired, dark-eyed writer has intense vitality’.⁶⁰

AT THE END OF 1941, Ric and his classmates sat their final teaching exams before reporting at Claremont Showgrounds for medical checks, the first stage of compulsory military training. He followed the rest of his class into the signals unit.⁶¹ Katharine was still interstate; when she returned she wrote, ‘it breaks my heart to see him in uniform, knowing what may happen. He is the loveliest specimen of young manhood, brown and handsome, only nineteen, but mature for his years … What a fate to have brought him to! Do you wonder I curse the system …?’⁶²

In February 1942, after the fall of Singapore to Japan and the bombing of Darwin, the conscripts in Ric’s camp were pressured to volunteer for the AIF so they could be sent overseas. Ric was still under twenty-one and needed Katharine’s permission; although terrified he would die, she gave it.⁶³ ‘She was concerned that I would think I had to live up to my father’s name,’ writes Ric, ‘chase honours by rash heroics’. A few months later, he was sent to New Guinea. ‘[S]he fought my imagined battles in the nightmare memories of the First World War, while I bludged and sweated.’⁶⁴ She wrote to Doon Doyle about Ric’s posting, ‘the bottom has fallen out of my world!’⁶⁵

IN A RESPONSE to an unhappy letter from Miles Franklin, Katharine wrote back in June 1942, ‘Don’t rust out, Miles darling! You’ve got too much fire & guts for that. The big fight for a better world is on. Let’s make our dying worthwhile. You can’t be just melancholy—when there’s so much to do. The individual—our individual selves, I mean—matters so little in the mass misery & slaughter’. Katharine was approaching sixty and Miles was four years ahead of her; neither of them were confident of living much longer, but in the midst of the war and with high hopes for the communist cause, Katharine had a strong sense of purpose.

She suggested Miles come to Perth and stay with her for a holiday. ‘It’s quiet here, beautiful country … I’m the world’s untidiest person too, & haven’t much time to even talk. But I’d love you to come.’⁶⁶ As it turned out, a few months later Katharine moved instead to Sydney where Miles lived.