33
Greenmount and Canberra, 1946–1947
‘HOME AGAIN!’ KATHARINE wrote to Ric on 5 April 1946. ‘And you’ve no idea how heavenly it feels to be in our little kipsey again.’1 She had reconciled herself to losing the Greenmount cottage but now, having a reprieve for at least three years, she fell back in love with it. Later in the month she described the state of the garden. ‘Most of the fruit trees look the worse for wear. But the fig & mulberry tree quite healthy, also the plums & the apricot near my workroom … The vine has grown all over the side verandah & lots of clusters of black grapes have delighted the birds.’ Waiting for the weather to cool down so she could rake up leaves and burn them, she concluded, ‘I’m a peasant, at heart, I suppose. I do like it here. Feel my roots are being nourished, somehow. And in Sydney, get that transplanted sort of feeling’. She was ‘healthier’ in Greenmount and it was cheaper to live, though there were less opportunities to earn a living.2
There was a postwar tobacco shortage and in late April Katharine was running out of cigarettes. Hearing the supplies were likely to be interrupted for some months, she decided that if she did have to give up for a time she wouldn’t begin again. ‘It’s such a damned nuisance to be held up in your work & to feel nervy & irritable because there’s not a blasted cigarette handy.’ But two days later, she managed to buy more and her ‘cigarette famine was relieved. I really disapprove of myself thoroughly for missing the little brutes so much. One ought not be dependent on anything like that. I’m going to try reducing the number of my smokes—so as never again to have my work interfered with if I haven’t any’.3
KATHARINE WAS WRITING to her daughter-in-law Bea as well as Ric. In one letter in April she expressed how glad she was that the two had such a perfect reunion when they met in Stockholm for a week’s honeymoon. Echoing her words over the decades about the Furies chasing her through life, Katharine wrote, ‘The ancients used to say the gods were jealous of human happiness—& were always trying to prevent mere mortals having something that only the immortals were supposed to enjoy. So it’s very rare & precious to have what you & Ric have had together—I’m full of joy for you both’.4
Two months later, in July, Bea was taken to a Moscow hospital with paralysis. She fell into a coma and died about a week later, with Ric not even knowing the cause of her illness.5 Katharine wrote a flurry of letters to Ric, trying in turn to find consolations and explanations. ‘I was afraid all the time. It’s almost too good to be true, I kept feeling. Always when I’ve been very happy about anything, something disastrous has happened & I’ve remembered that saying of the Greeks: “The gods punish those who presume to love or suffer like themselves.”’ ‘When she was with me and I took in her cup of early morning tea, she looked so ill and frail, my heart would contract with pain. I knew somehow she was not going to live long; and after she went, for nearly a week, I just cried and cried.’6 ‘At least your love dream was spared the disappointments & disillusionments most married people know.’7 ‘Don’t try to put your grief from you. You must hold it as something sacred and precious you are entitled to. Face the reality of it, I mean; but with the understanding that we don’t live for ourselves alone.’8 ‘The way ahead will seem dreary, for a long time, perhaps, darling. One can only hold fast to those objective things that matter. And somehow, in the end, new strength and confidence will come to you.’9
At the end of her life, Katharine remembered Bea’s death affecting her even more than the other tragedies she had endured. ‘Nothing has ever quite so devastated me as the news about her’, she wrote to Ric, ‘on your account, I suppose, lovey. In the shock over Daddy, I had you to think of living for, but this news which struck at you completely prostrated me’.10
BEA’S DEATH IN July 1946 coincided with the publication of The Roaring Nineties. The Australasian Publishing Company released an Australian edition simultaneously with Jonathan Cape’s British edition, making it more easily available in Katharine’s home country than any of her previous books. The novel was met with excitement by Katharine’s many friends and admirers in both the Australian literary community and the Communist Party. On 8 August, the Modern Women’s Club held a party in Perth to celebrate the novel’s publication, with old-timers from the goldfields coming dressed in period costume; extracts were read from the novel, followed by musical items and supper. But Katharine wasn’t there and seemed to find no consolation in the publication of a book she had been working on for years. In November, she wrote to Miles Franklin, ‘I haven’t been to town for months, & see few people. Try not to, because talking even tires me out these days’.11
Katharine missed another tribute to her held in Sydney in October. It was a ceremony at Marx House held by the Communist Party to mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of its founding and to honour Katharine. Although not a communist, Miles was invited to speak. Praising Katharine’s writing, Miles said, ‘She is Australia’s most distinguished tragedian. She is uncompromising and relentless, and lets us off nothing’.12 In the statement Katharine sent to be read out, she gave an account of her conversion to communism and declared, ‘How marvellous it is to see the power of Marxism demonstrated in one’s lifetime!’13 She had passed the baton and now saw her party work as largely complete; her role from the time she left Sydney was to write articles and have an occasional ceremonial presence.
Katharine dedicated The Roaring Nineties to ‘BS’—Bob Saunders. Joan Williams describes him as an ‘anti-conscription veteran and socialist … a Kalgoorlie businessman who had gone to the Soviet Union under his own steam in 1924’.14 Katharine probably came to know him in his role as patron of the Australia–Russia Relations Committee; ‘he lived in Kalgoorlie and helped with queries on life on the fields … answering her questionnaires’.15
The Roaring Nineties tells of the initial Western Australian gold rush in the 1890s and the establishment of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie– Boulder. The novel uses a frame narrative, presenting itself as the yarns of prospector Dinny Quinn about the early days. The historical background is never far from the story, forming a spine which moves the story through a series of incidents with a large cast of characters. Sally Gough is the protagonist, a woman who earns money running a boarding house to the shame of her ineffectual husband, Morrie, a fallen aristocrat and a gambler. The struggle between them is an ongoing aspect of the plot, as he gradually accepts her egalitarian ethos in class and gender. Sally’s insistence that she and Morrie should not elevate themselves above the others contrasts with their friends Alf and Laura’s move up the class rankings, as mining becomes commercialised and Alf betrays his prospector roots to become a mine manager.
Reviews of The Roaring Nineties tended to praise Katharine’s research and her picture of Australian life, while finding that it has suffered as fiction for her attempt to depict so much history. The Argus review—by ‘ARC’, most likely AR Chisholm—was typical, noting that despite some ‘excellent’ passages ‘occasionally the style sags, as if the author had so much to tell that she did not have time to repolish. The author, however, makes up for these lapses by some magnificent close-ups of the bush … She has it in her blood and thinks Australian’.16
Miles Franklin reviewed The Roaring Nineties enthusiastically, highlighting its depiction of Aboriginal people and women, two aspects of the novel most contemporaneous reviewers glossed over. ‘The Aborigines are made to shine like a vein of gold in a quartz reef through the story.’ ‘The mining industry … is carried along by an interesting, well-differentiated gallery of men, but it is the women who give most character to the story … Sally’s genius for friendship transcends differences of colour, race and religion.’17
Joan Williams reviewed the novel from a communist perspective for the Workers Star. She praised the way the individual struggles of the prospectors give way to an ‘intense class struggle around the rights of alluvial diggers, who had pioneered the fields, against the predatory mining companies’; this aspect ‘shows KSP at her best, as a Marxist interpreting history with clarity and vision’. However, Joan found the novel inadequate in its depiction of the solution to unemployment among the miners by not showing ‘the organised struggle of the working class’. ‘Though this book is the first of a trilogy, the novelist should have found some means of bringing forward this perspective. Its lack is the only flaw in a notable book.’18 It seems to be this review that Joan misremembers as being for its sequel, Golden Miles, writing, ‘Bitterly hurt, Katharine appealed to CP general secretary J. B. Miles, who for this and other reasons came roaring over to the West’. It seems unlikely that a generally favourable review would be a primary factor in him visiting Perth, but Katharine’s reaction sounds plausible. According to Joan, Katharine defended her book at a meeting, saying she couldn’t ‘falsify reality’ and Joan was reprimanded by JB Miles. ‘Deeply ashamed, I hoped that one day Katharine would forgive my arrogance. When I mentioned the episode to her many years later she said with true nobility, “I don’t remember anything about it”.’19
The Roaring Nineties was a commercial success—the first Australian printing of 10,000 copies had sold out by September 1946.20 It was also an international success, particularly in communist countries, eventually translated into nine languages.
RIC CAME TO stay with Katharine in November 1946 before taking up a post in Canberra for two years from January 1947. Katharine decided she would move to Canberra to be with him for the duration of the posting. She wrote to Miles, ‘It’s a terrible wrench to leave my quiet & lovely place here … but Ric needs me. So I must be on the move again—though feeling so tired; & not equal to the journey, really’.21 In Ric’s memory, he was guilty about leaving her alone in Greenmount, ‘frail and ill’, and persuaded her to move so he could look after her.22
Katharine’s departure was delayed. Her doctor insisted on removing her appendix before she travelled and she was in hospital for weeks afterwards.23 She had a lot to organise, packing up her belongings and making arrangements for the house. A friend named Kal McIntyre rented it for £2 a week, with the option of buying it for £900 after two years when Andrei’s loan would expire.24 Katharine prepared herself once more to give up her cottage and finally left for Canberra in late April 1947.
She was unsettled in Canberra. She and Ric were initially boarding with a Mrs D’Arcy in Braddon. ‘In the midst of unpackings & radio blaring, small boy asking questions, & mine hostess, an old dear really, being amiably polite and making conversation.’25 Katharine was preparing three meals a day for Ric. ‘Cooking meals, and finding food in Canberra seems to occupy all my time.’ Without heating in their bedrooms, it was freezing in the evenings ‘so we must sit with the family & be polite, in order to keep warm’.26
Back in March, Katharine had written to Ric ‘you should hold your horses’ after he expressed interest in a woman named Barbara; ‘just now, when you’re lonely … it’s a dangerous time, darling. You’re likely to attach yourself to almost anything friendly & charming’.27 Now Ric was spending his weekends with a woman from his office named Dorothy Jordan—known as Dodie—taking her out to the countryside in ‘Natalya’, the yellow 1930 Austin 7 he’d bought. Mrs D’Arcy the landlady ‘pointed out gently that it was less than a year since Bea had died’ but Ric felt no ‘obligation to … convention’.28
By July, Katharine had found the time to finish Golden Miles and send the manuscript to Jonathan Cape.29 In August, she and Ric finally found their own flat to live in. Katharine told Mikhail Apletin at the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘Living at Canberra is very strange after having been in close contact always with the workers in various industries, and the intellectual life of our cities. Canberra is like a garden suburb, thoroughly bourgeois, and remote from the sturm und drang of the struggle of existence’. She added her disappointment that The Roaring Nineties—‘the most important book I have written’—had not yet been translated into Russian. ‘I have dreamt that someday, perhaps, in a leisure moment, our great Stalin might read it.’30
With a baby due in May, Ric and Dodie married on 3 October. They had a traditional wedding at the historic St John’s church and a reception at the Gloucester, Canberra’s only licensed restaurant. Katharine wrote, ‘I am pleased that the lad has found someone with whom he can be happy and have a normal life. She’s a shy, quiet girl, very like his first wife, but intelligent … so there’s much to be thankful for … They want me to live with them, but I won’t do that’.31 Her account to Doon Stone hinted at unhappiness: ‘When Ric decided to marry a girl he’s been seeing a good deal of all the year, I thought it better to leave the flat to them’.32 She moved out while they were on honeymoon.33 She’d proved to be unnecessary in Canberra and her two-year stint had finished after five frustrating months.