31

Long Live the Party

Sydney, 1942–1943

WHY DID KATHARINE suddenly move to Sydney on 28 October 1942? She told Ric she was moving to be nearer to him.¹ She put it a little differently to Boris Sutckoff at the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘My only son is on active service in Guinea, and so my home has been broken-up and in these days of terrible anxiety there is no need to live here, when he is so far away’.² Ric was surely a factor, but at a politically crucial time when Katharine was so committed to the Communist Party, the move probably had something to do with the party as well. Perhaps the party leadership requested she move in order to be in the centre of things; her speaking tour the previous year had confirmed her usefulness as a national public figure.

She moved in the last months of illegality, with the federal government lifting the ban on the Communist Party in December. She lived at the Gwydir Flats on Forbes Road in the central Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, less than two kilometres from the party headquarters on Hay Street. Initially she shared a flat with woman named Glen Mills Fox, a journalist with communist connections, before finding her own flat in the complex in mid-1943.³ Her first months in Sydney were marked by bad migraine headaches, apparently brought on by the stress of Ric’s deployment overseas. Doon Stone remembers, ‘His letters revealed a mental depression and horror that terrified her and her suffering for his sensitivity exposed to the nakedness of jungle warfare was … a quivering, throbbing agony’.⁴ In early 1943, Katharine stayed in Leura in the Blue Mountains for some weeks to rest. She rang the writer Eleanor Dark, who lived nearby in Katoomba, to apologise for not visiting; she wasn’t feeling well enough.⁵ By June, she still hadn’t seen Miles Franklin either and wrote to say she was ‘just beginning to feel fit for human consumption. Trying to make up for lost time’.⁶

Katharine asked Miles in the same letter whether she would see her at the ceremony to mark Henry Lawson’s birthday later that month; Katharine had agreed to give a speech. The speech was probably the basis for an article she published on Lawson in Communist Review in October. Australians must not ‘forever live in his shadow. He had laid the basis of an Australian literature that was to be based on realism, hatred of injustices suffered under the capitalist system, and a desire for social progress, but he did not say the last word on these subjects’.⁷ After another Lawson ceremony the next year—held at his statue to mark twenty-one years since his death—Katharine described, ‘the usual eulogies, and extravagant claims for Lawson’s work. Queer isn’t it? The poor man never earned more than about £2 a week and lived in poverty all his life and became a boozing derelict in his last days. Why could not people have been more generous when he was alive?’⁸

Echoing this sentiment, soon afterwards Katharine made a broadcast about Miles Franklin on ABC radio: ‘Tributes to writers who are dead always sadden me. I know how much better it would have been to appreciate their work when they were alive. But, today, I am happy to be talking about Miles Franklin, whose novels are among the finest written in Australia, and who still lives and works among us—glory be’.⁹ Katharine said that Miles ‘has achieved by her work, a brilliant career, the success of esteem: never forfeited her fundamental honesty for financial gain or false values, and she has given us books about Australia which are sincere and beautiful’.¹⁰

Living in Sydney, Katharine and Miles saw each other enough to turn their epistolary friendship into a face to face one. There was genuine affection between them but also tensions; in July 1944 after having Miles to her house for dinner, Katharine reported to Ric, ‘Miles is annoying! Has such a way of ticking people off’.¹¹

IN JANUARY 1943, the attorney-general, Bert Evatt, announced a diplomatic cadets scheme. Ric heard about it in New Guinea and decided to apply. Without Ric’s knowledge, Katharine wrote to the Foreign Affairs department, ‘pleading’ for Ric to be appointed, invoking Hugo’s name ‘and every other argument she could muster’; she wanted him out of danger.¹² In June, the department announced Ric was one of the successful candidates and he began a diplomatic career.¹³ As the son of a prominent communist, intelligence services were to view his motivations with suspicion in the years which followed.

Released from the army, Ric was sent to enrol in a course at Sydney University for the rest of the year as part of the cadetship. When the troop train arrived in Sydney six hours late, Katharine was waiting on the platform in ‘a coat the colour of spring wattle’, Ric writes, ‘so that I should not miss her’. Troop movements were secret, but Katharine had heard rumours the train was coming and, according to Doon in a letter to Ric, ‘She waited on the station platform, from daylight to midnight, for three days. She had the most fanatical fixation that she must be there to meet you. So there she stayed, cold and exhausted and alone, until you arrived’.¹⁴

Ric stayed at St Andrew’s College near the university. When he visited Katharine on weekends, he was frustrated at the number of uninvited visitors who would turn up. ‘She always seemed to be available.’¹⁵ In their conversations about the war, Ric remembers commenting that Stalin seemed more of a dictator than ever. Katharine told him the Russian people needed a ‘figure-head’, like Churchill to the British, ‘to unite them in the effort to defeat fascism’; it would be different once the war was over. Her attitudes had hardened—Ric was shocked to hear her justify the torture of Nazi prisoners for information. ‘Katharine had boasted sometimes about her “communist steel”, but I had never heard her so openly ready to deny her own nature, her innate sensitivity to others’ suffering.’¹⁶ At the beginning of 1944, he moved to Canberra to continue his cadetship.

THE CHANGE IN Katharine which Ric noticed reflected her new role in the party, elected to the Central Committee for a two-year term in April 1943 at the 13th National Congress. At the congress she gave a speech as a foundation member of the party. Nearing her sixtieth birthday, she was feeling her age, lamenting, ‘I wish I could be young again to work as hard for the Communist Party of Australia in the next twenty years as I have done in the past’. She captured the mood of the party members at a momentous time as they had just passed through ‘the dark days of illegality’ and must now look to the future, which was in the hands of the ‘magnificent young Comrades here today’. She finished her speech with the acclamation:

Long live the Communist Party of Australia. Long live our beloved leader, Comrade [JB] Miles. Long live every individual member of the Communist Party that he may prove worthy of the work that lies before him in winning unity of the working class for the defeat of international fascism in this war, for the defeat of fascist tendencies which may arise in the period of reconstruction after the war, and for the building of a Socialist Australia.¹⁷

Her admiration of JB Miles seems to have been genuine; another time after hearing him speak she wrote to Ric, ‘the spirit & energy in that frail body! The intellectual rigour and clear brain!’¹⁸

Ric writes of Katharine’s Sydney years, ‘Paradoxically, being close to the centre of political activity meant that Katharine was relieved of many of the minor organizing chores which had come her way in Perth’.¹⁹ Party member Jack Beasley remembers that ‘Comrade Prichard’s jobs were to write The Roaring Nineties and to make a limited number of public speaking appearances’. He depicts the Central Committee as ‘very largely a consultative body, meeting periodically to hear reports, discuss aspects of politics … and the work of the party’. It only convened two to three times a year. The real power was in the committee’s secretariat—the president, secretary and assistant secretary—as well as the similarly named Central Control Commission. Many references to the Central Committee seem to have been shorthand for this arrangement and give the misleading perception that Katharine took a day-to-day leadership role.²⁰

Katharine’s articles for the communist newspaper, Tribune, show her as a wide-ranging ambassador for the party, commenting on the war and relaying cultural news from the Soviet Union which had been cabled directly to her. In one article she promoted workshops to learn the songs of the working class: ‘By singing at party meetings, at demonstrations in the open air, singing as we march and celebrate great occasions, we will give a vital impression of our vigor and what membership of the Party really means.’²¹

A MAN NAMED Wally Clayton was elected to the Central Committee at the same congress as Katharine. Decades later, soon before he died, he was to confess to historian Desmond Ball that he had been gathering information, some of it classified, for the Soviet Union under the code-name ‘Klod’. He told Ball he took the information to Feodor Nosov, a Sydney-based correspondent for TASS, the Soviet news agency. Ball, along with David Horner, write of what they call the ‘Klod spy ring’ in their 1998 book Breaking the Codes and allege Katharine was central to it. Other historians think ‘spy ring’ is an exaggerated descriptor for a network of contacts who may have thought their information was being used for domestic party purposes.²² ‘With one or two exceptions’, Ball and Horner write, ‘we have made little effort to indulge in speculation’, but there are many speculative elements to their case against Katharine.²³

In their account, Katharine’s part in the ‘spy ring’ dates back to September 1942. Now allies, Australia and the Soviet Union established direct diplomatic relations for the first time and the Soviet Union sent the journalist Vladimir Mikheev to Australia as a correspondent.²⁴ He stopped over in Perth for a few days before catching the train to Sydney to take up his role. Only learning of his visit at short notice, Katharine organised a reception for him by the Australia–Russia Relations committee at the Modern Women’s Club.²⁵ Ball and Horner write that Mikheev was ‘undoubtedly charged with scouting out the Australian scene for the Soviet foreign intelligence service and making preparations for NKGB and GRU [Soviet intelligence agencies’] activities in Australia in 1943’.²⁶ The Soviets were preparing to establish a legation in Canberra that year, upgraded to an embassy in 1945.

When another Soviet journalist, Feodor Nosov, arrived in Sydney in 1943, Katharine met him and introduced him to other Australian communists. With her appreciation of the Soviet Union and connection to the Union of Soviet Writers, it is an unsurprising thing for her to have done. However, Ball and Horner are certain she knew Nosov was sending sensitive information back to Moscow and believe she was the one who introduced Nosov to Wally Clayton, giving her ‘an important role in the establishment of the KLOD group’. They go on to allege Katharine herself was a spy:

in 1943–45 she was a source of material sent from the KGB Residency in Canberra to Moscow Centre. Most of the material was political gossip, which she would write up in longhand on foolscap paper and give to Clayton to pass to [Soviet diplomat Semyen] Makarov in Canberra. Much of it consisted of summarised accounts of what [Ric] Throssell (who had yet to formally join the department) had related to her about the structure, personnel, interests and policies of External Affairs.²⁷

Troublingly, Ball and Horner provide no source for this, the most specific of their allegations against Katharine, meaning there is no opportunity to consult the evidence they are relying on. Is Clayton himself the source, a man Ball and Horner say ‘has lied about all the key matters’?²⁸ Mark Aarons writes of another ‘confession’ Clayton made late in life that it was ‘punctuated by evasion. Passages directly contradict other passages and Clayton’s lies are exposed by what he says elsewhere on the tape’.²⁹ In recent years, journalist Pamela Burton has been refuting espionage allegations made by the now deceased Desmond Ball against her father, John Burton. She writes that when she confronted Ball with his lack of evidence he told her he had secret sources of information he would not reveal.³⁰ Another objection to what they allege is just what ‘political gossip’ Katharine could have known that would have been classified or useful to the Soviets. As they acknowledge, her alleged source of information, Ric, was still in the training program and yet to formally join the department.

Some of the radio transmissions Nosov sent back to Moscow were intercepted and decoded by American intelligence in the VENONA project. Publicly released in 1995, one of them contained a report by KLOD about Ric Throssell’s appointment as a junior diplomat to Moscow in 1945.³¹ Two 1948 transmissions refer to someone codenamed FERRO, one of them asking whether it was advisable to bring him ‘into our work in view of the fact that his mother is well-known in the Commonwealth [Australia] as an influential academician’. In their notes, the intelligence analysts identified FERRO as Ric Throssell, and ‘ACADEMICIAN’ to be a codename for Katharine. Yet in the decrypted sentence, the term seems to be used literally to mean a university academic or similar, not a codename. The ‘codename’ ACADEMICIAN does not appear again in the transmissions. In the words of the historian Phillip Deery, ‘Venona is fragmentary, raw and “one-way” intelligence data. The cable-senders could exaggerate and the cable-breakers could misinterpret’.³²

Even if Katharine did help Nosov and Clayton, the degree of her awareness is unknown and Ball and Horner don’t allow for her idealistic naïvete in assisting a wartime ally in the fight against fascism. In 1940, Clayton had been responsible for preparing the Communist Party to go underground in the case of illegality. Ball and Horner write of him, ‘It is not possible to separate his illegal party work from his espionage activities’.³³ For Australian communists, the lines of loyalty and legality had been distorted by the outlawing of the party. Katharine was proudly Australian and wanted her country to prosper. She saw that as compatible with her loyalty to communism, which she sincerely believed would reshape Australia and the world into a better place.

KATHARINE’S HARDLINE LOYALTY to the party seems to have contributed to the souring of her friendship with fellow communist writer Jean Devanny over the 1940s. New Zealand–born Jean came to Australia in 1929 after the banning of her first novel, The Butcher Shop (1926). ‘Viewed ambivalently by the party leadership, she was recognised and celebrated as an agitator and organiser by the rank and file …’³⁴

Underlining her connection to Katharine, Jean wrote of how they even looked like each other. ‘The facial resemblance Kathie and I bore to each other was constantly under remark. Jonathan Cape, Kathie’s London publisher … when introduced to me he exclaimed: “Oh, I took you for Katharine Prichard!”’³⁵ Jean envied Katharine’s literary accomplishments and was proud of being a better public speaker. Katharine’s ‘voice was suited only to small hall meetings and the microphone … she lacked the physical stamina to stand up to my scuffling outdoor work’.³⁶

The two first met in August 1931 when Jean, on her way to the Soviet Union, stayed with Katharine for two days at Greenmount. ‘Katharine’s personality I found to be in marked contrast with my own. Her manner was quiet and serene, her expression deeply thoughtful, if not grave. I saw at once that there was nothing of the jack-of-alltrades about her, such as was my bane.’³⁷ Jean had little money and remembered Katharine giving her £12, an astonishing amount, if true, given the dire financial situation Katharine and Hugo were in. Coming from a working-class background and insecure about her own writing, Jean had the wrong idea about Katharine, assuming she led an idyllic middle-class existence, with ‘that inward certitude that comes of a secure childhood, knit through with poise and balance derived from family and educational advantages’.³⁸ After visiting Greenmount, ‘I thought a lot about the conditions in which Kathie lived: a quiet home in lovely surroundings among the hills. For a writer, an ideal environment; while she is writing, at least’.³⁹

The pair consolidated their friendship in Sydney in January 1935, a few months after Jean’s son had died. ‘We had some grand talks together, Kathie and I, in her Kings Cross flat. In all things concerned with the conduct of life we were in agreement; our only differences, and they were amiable, were about literature.’ The differences in literary taste Jean noted include Katherine Mansfield (Jean liked her work; Katharine didn’t) and Henry Lawson (Katharine liked his work; Jean didn’t).⁴⁰

In 1941, Jean was living with four men, all party members, at a remote camp in Emuford in far-north Queensland. A dispute broke out between them, with both Jean and the men making complaints to the party. Jean’s account of the incident is ambiguous. She wrote that one of the men hit her face and, ‘My privacy was brutally invaded and some of my belongings destroyed’.⁴¹ The unreliable Wally Clayton told Jack Beasley in 1987 that Jean was gang raped by the men.⁴²

In her autobiography, Jean accused Katharine of not doing enough to help her. Jean saw Katharine in Brisbane in November 1941 and told her what had happened; Jean wrote that she knew ‘I could trust her’ to help. In Jean’s mistaken memory, Katharine was already on the Central Committee. A couple of weeks later when Jean came to Sydney to speak at the same peace conference as Katharine, Jean was told the party was expelling her for ‘political degeneracy’. In Jean’s mind, Katharine could have saved her and didn’t.⁴³ Jack Beasley writes that even if Katharine had already been on the Central Committee in 1941 her involvement with the case would have been limited; matters of party discipline were handled by the Control Commission, not the Central Committee. Although their friendship initially recovered, Jean’s bitterness towards Katharine was apparent years later in her autobiography and in a letter to Miles Franklin.⁴⁴

Jean challenged her expulsion from the party and threatened to write of her affair with JB Miles in an autobiography. It was probably this that prompted Katharine to say in a letter on 23 December 1944, ‘I can’t believe that you would ever write in a way damaging to the most vital interests of the working class … whatever disappointments and sorrows we have had to face, we can still serve, with our pens, the only cause on earth worth fighting for’.⁴⁵ As it happened, Jean’s gambit worked and her expulsion was reversed, though her relationship with the party continued to be stormy.

In that final surviving letter to Jean, Katharine goes on to write, ‘I often wear the little shell necklace you brought me, and think of you with affection—and grief, dear Jean—wishing that life had not been so difficult for you’.⁴⁶ Katharine’s opinion of Jean may have been similar to Hilda Esson’s; Hilda was fond of Jean ‘but her vanity is colossal. There’s no argument she’s simply right … She’s illogical, unsound … but with a native wit and intelligence that deserved a better expression than they ever had’.⁴⁷

HILDA CAME TO stay with Katharine in late November 1943. She was on one of her periodic visits to her estranged husband, Louis, who had been living in Sydney since 1939. His health had been bad for some time and now he had pneumonia. She called on their son Hugh to come and they were both with Louis when he died on 27 November at the age of sixty-five.⁴⁸ Years later, Hilda gave Katharine a sad account of her marriage, saying ‘the last thing I ever expected was that I would have abdicated from my dearly won freedom by marrying anyone as possessive as Louis … his dependence on me, his fascinating mind, and his real talent, so terribly frittered away, made it impossible for me to break away & find myself’.⁴⁹

There’s no record of how often Katharine had seen Louis since she moved to Sydney, but a party member named Harry Gould remembers her helping to nurse him at the end.⁵⁰ Their interests had diverged; Louis no longer had much sympathy for communism.⁵¹ She wrote a tribute to him for broadcast on ABC radio soon after his death. ‘Latterly’, she wrote, ‘Louis had become discouraged and disinclined to write at all. Of what use when there is no theatre for the production of plays by Australian dramatists?’⁵²

Hilda arranged a private cremation. Leslie Rees remembers, ‘I was at this funeral service in a wretched King’s Cross parlour, with crude music and blatant lighting effects—just a few people, including Katharine Susannah Prichard’.⁵³ Afterwards, Hilda and Hugh drove to The Gap with a small group of people who had cared about Louis—Katharine, Frank Davison and Miles Franklin—to scatter his ashes into the ocean.⁵⁴

A week later, Katharine turned sixty, suddenly at an age where her generation was passing.