34

The Cold War Begins

Greenmount, 1947–1949

KATHARINE LEFT CANBERRA on the Murray Valley Coach to Adelaide before travelling on to Kalgoorlie by train. She stayed four weeks researching volume three of the trilogy—soon to be titled Winged Seeds. In a letter to Doon Stone, Katharine wrote that she spent some days at a station near the ghost town of Bulong, where some Aboriginal people told her they remembered ‘Kalgorla’ and ‘Meerie’—a tantalising revelation that Katharine’s Aboriginal characters Kalgoorla and Meeri had real-life counterparts.¹

She also stayed a night at Coolgardie with the writer Ernestine Hill. Ernestine and her son, Robert, were camped there with their truck and caravan. They’d been in Perth the previous year and Henrietta Drake-Brockman had introduced them to Katharine.² Like Katharine, Ernestine was a chronicler of the backblocks of Australia, but mainly in the form of popular non-fiction such as her travel memoir The Great Australian Loneliness (1937); she was also cheerily apolitical. At their Coolgardie camp, Katharine was uncomfortable with the ‘flies & red-backed spiders galore’ but they didn’t bother Ernestine. Katharine told Miles Franklin that Ernestine was ‘a strange, otherwhereish creature with big beautiful eyes, a hoarse voice & curious incapacity to argue logically about anything’.³

Ernestine was inseparable from Robert. She’d brought him up without a father and during World War II they’d moved to a cattle station in outback South Australia to avoid military service. Born in 1924, he was a similar age to Ric and served as his mother’s research assistant.⁴ Katharine inevitably compared their situation to her own, writing to Ric when she met them:

I felt it was rather a tragedy for him, that his mother had kept him out of the war: but that he realized life would have been impossible for her had he been on active service. He looks as if he has decided to devote himself to her. I couldn’t be satisfied to know that you were not leading your own life: being an independent person. Complete & sufficient in yourself … I like to believe that you can go on without me, not hampered in any way by our love for each other, my darling.

I daresay Ernestine feels like that too: but somehow the lad is being kept too close to her—without a job, or training of his own … Looks a little like you when he laughs, so I had a great sympathy for him.⁵

Katharine’s concern about the closeness between Ernestine and Robert seems mixed with her desire for a similar proximity to Ric.

KATHARINE ARRIVED BACK in Greenmount in November 1947 to find her house ‘looking so dilapidated & dishevelled’.⁶ Kal McIntyre and her extended family were living there and had eighteen months left on the lease but Kal let Katharine have her bedroom back and Katharine halved the rent until they moved out in May.⁷

With Ric making his own life on the other side of the country, Katharine felt more alone than ever. She had written from Kalgoorlie that she had a ‘sore sick heart … when no Sunday letter arrives. It’s the only thing I do ask of you, & necessary, if I am to be well & keep going. Need be only a scrap! It’s a lonely business wandering about by myself & feeling nobody cares’.⁸ After her sixty-fifth birthday on 4 December, she wrote, ‘Of course I felt rather forlorn, at first—that morning … You remember what a fete Daddy used to make of my birthday, Ric darling. And now I feel like something [the] tide’s left; but I didn’t let myself be sad: started work & forgot everything’.⁹

As she struggled with these feelings of loneliness she was aware she was passing into legend. ‘I believe—when the tourists cars go to [the neighbouring settlement of] Mundaring now, the house is pointed out to folks as one of the points of interest now.’¹⁰

GOLDEN MILES WAS published on 31 May 1948. She dedicated it to ‘DS’—Doon Stone—whose help on the goldfields trilogy had extended over many years. The novel spans 1914 to 1927—from the eve of the Great War to the eve of the Great Depression. The untidy narrative takes Sally Gough through a series of trials as her four sons come to adulthood, each representing a different way of living in the world against the backdrop of war and turmoil. Tom is a communist miner who reads political tracts in his spare time; Denny becomes a dairy farmer in the South-West; Lal and Dick enlist to fight in the Great War. The conscription debate divides the family as it divides the nation. Lal is killed, echoing the death of Katharine’s brother, Alan. Dick survives, but returns a broken, changed man, echoing Hugo’s experience; when he dies in a mining accident Sally is haunted by the possibility it might have been suicide. In the final chapter, Aboriginal people are banned from the town centre and Kalgoorla, Sally’s friend and helper, is moved along by the police. In Sally’s fury, she decides that Tom is right and the best hope for Aboriginal people is organised political resistance. The novel ends with Kalgoorla standing in the sunset, letting out a cry of defiance.

Katharine asked Ric not to lend his copy of Golden Miles around; ‘it’s v bad for trade—& I do want sales to be good. The reviews are bound to be sniffy because of the book’s political bias’.¹¹ Local communist paper the Workers Star summed up the ‘bias’ well:

Katharine Prichard exposes the ugly fruit of capitalism—one of the richest goldfields in the world, 25 million sterling paid out in dividends, most of it going to overseas speculators and investors, and for the miner and his wife and kids—a bag and tin humpy in the middle of the red dust. This is capitalism, raw and brutal, eating out men’s lungs for profit. But Tom Gough has the answer—give the gold to the people, fight for a Socialist Australia.¹²

Katharine wrote to Ric that the reviews were ‘the least enthusiastic I’ve ever had … though I feel this is probably the best book I’ve ever written. I’ll be very anxious to know what you & Dodie really think of it’.¹³ Some of the reviews were merely ‘sniffy’ while others were brutal, including one in the Bulletin which came to represent the consensus on Katharine’s work:

Katharine Prichard as a novelist, after the fine achievement of her early books, has been fighting a long and losing battle with Katharine Prichard as a propagandist. She has not remained the artist, giving her first loyalty to her art, but has divided herself, as it were, into two personalities, the novelist and the propagandist; and while these are at war, contradicting each other on every second page of Golden Miles, it is the propagandist who speaks the louder and the more often.¹⁴

Although there was truth to the Bulletin’s verdict, Golden Miles still had much to commend it as an engaging saga of the goldfields and an authentic account of the lives of miners and their families. The Western Mail called it ‘a colourful and entertaining tale, one of human courage and endurance and of those human qualities which helped to build Australia into a nation’.¹⁵

RIC AND DODIE’S baby was born in May 1948. They named her Karen Han Throssell, the middle name in tribute to Katharine’s alter ego in The Wild Oats of Han. Katharine wrote to say she had sympathetic pains on the bus at just the time she was born. ‘Hilda always says I have an uncanny prescience about things.’¹⁶ Katharine wrote to publishers, trying to have The Wild Oats of Han republished in tribute, but despite some interest the prospect fell through.

Andrei wrote to Katharine in July, saying he had lost a lot of money in business and he was living in a caravan, so he had to ‘ask’ about the loan. His letter came at the right time as Katharine had £400 from the royalties on The Roaring Nineties and was able to repay him. The house was still entangled in Hugo’s debts, but she’d been advised that if she subdivided the back of her property into three half-acre blocks and sold them, it would bring in enough money for her to own the house outright.¹⁷

She had wanted to finish Winged Seeds before travelling to Canberra to see Karen Han but in October, Ric learned he was to be posted to Brazil and Katharine dropped her work to visit before they left. She stayed from December 1948 to March 1949 and Ric remembers her becoming a ‘besotted’ grandmother to Karen.¹⁸ In other ways, it seems to have been an unhappy stay. Her strong opinions about child rearing caused tension with Dodie and Ric. ‘Truly, I didn’t want to inter-fere—ever: but there are times when one has to do what is necessary.’¹⁹ Another letter after her departure reveals further anguish: ‘I come over all miserable when I realise I can’t do any more to help you. You’ve all become strangers to me—so far away & our lives going in such different ways … I seem to have been thinking a lot of the old days & missing Daddy more than ever’.²⁰

At least some of the tension was about politics; she wrote the next month, ‘Of course, we agreed not to discuss political matters or to get into arguments about them which distress both of us. But so much is happening these days that I wd like to talk to you about’.²¹ The first mention of Katharine and Ric’s political differences had come a year earlier, after Katharine’s first stay with him in Canberra. ‘It does grieve me, of course, that you are not a communist, and don’t see eye to eye with me in political matters. Time, maybe, will broaden your outlook.’²² He had never been a member of the Communist Party, but as a teenager had agreed with its principles; after a long, difficult silence about politics—that most important of topics to Katharine—he seems to have finally told her on that first visit to Canberra that he was a Labor Party supporter and that he felt the best hope for Australia was a centre-left government like it currently had, rather than the radical changes Katharine wanted. After further upsetting conversations during this second stay in Canberra, they had agreed to not talk about politics any more.

THE COLD WAR had begun and Katharine was feeling the political tension. In July 1948, the influential Sydney Morning Herald carried a report titled ‘How Communist Party Plans Revolution’. ‘The Communist Party remains a legal organisation, though by doctrine and action it is dedicated to the destruction of democracy. It is well equipped in Australia for revolutionary action, open and secret. It is a sinister political conspiracy organised on a para-military basis.’ Katharine was named, erroneously, as still being a part of the ‘Politbureau’.²³ The article was alarmist and wrong; the party had long decided that ‘the Australian road to socialism ran through parliament’ and did not consider revolution possible or desirable.²⁴

The Labor government was distancing itself from communism. The communist-influenced Miners’ Federation called a national coalmining strike in the winter of 1949 which brought the economy to a halt. To the shock of many workers, Labor prime minister Ben Chifley jailed the union leaders and broke the strike in late July by sending in troops to work the mines. Then, in October, Communist Party leader Lance Sharkey was jailed for sedition for saying that Australian workers would welcome Soviet troops to Australia.

With a federal election looming, opposition leader Robert Menzies was campaigning with a policy of banning the Communist Party. He accused Labor of being communist in orientation, especially in its attempt to nationalise the banks. Showing the political contrasts in the wider Throssell family, Hugo’s nephew, George EL Throssell, was elected chairman of the Bank Employees Anti-Socialisation Committee, a lobby group campaigning against Labor in the lead-up to the election.²⁵ Stoking fears at a meeting in Kalgoorlie, he warned, ‘There are 15,000,000 Communists outside of Russia today. Their objective is world revolution—bloody revolution if necessary … Relying on the apathy of all Australians they have infiltrated into the country and have worked assiduously and quietly for the past 28 years’.²⁶

Katharine’s friend and doctor, Alec Jolly, was standing as the Communist Party candidate in the seat of Swan. He was a Midland councillor, but the council banned him from hiring the town hall for a rally. Instead, he held the rally on the large grassed area in front on his house on the night of Friday 9 April 1949. Katharine was one of the speakers. Alec claimed 1500 people came; some were anticommunist protestors trying to disrupt the meeting and others were police, protecting the protestors who tried to drown out the speakers by singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Why Was He Born So Beautiful?’.²⁷ The Daily News reported, ‘residents said today that but for the firm action taken by police an ugly riot could have developed’.²⁸ Katharine wrote, ‘It was a hot night, & speaking in the open air not easy for your little mother, darl—particularly as a bunch of drunken youths were trying to disrupt the meeting’.²⁹ The crowd cheered when she stood to speak. She said, ‘In this most critical period, of Australian history, it is up to all of us to use our courage and common sense to fight the gang of millionaires, warmongers, unscrupulous politicians and their henchmen in their attempt to stampede the people into war’.³⁰

When the Liberal Party lost the previous election in 1946, Katharine wrote to Miles Franklin, ‘Thanking all my stars that Menzies & Co are on the scrap heap! Had they got a second innings, there’d have been some very uncomfortable times for all of us’.³¹ She had written-off Menzies too soon; his Liberal–Country Party coalition won the election on 10 December 1949. Katharine wrote to Ric that the ‘present prosperity has made many forget past difficulties … but the fact must be faced, I think—that many workers had lost confidence in the Labor Party’.³²

IN JULY 1949, Katharine was ‘tinkering’ with the last chapters of Winged Seeds and still not happy. ‘Goodness knows whether Winged Seeds will have any wings, or [be] the worst flop I’ve ever conceived! Maybe, tis the atmosphere of these days that makes me so apprehensive.’³³ She posted the manuscript to Jonathan Cape in September 1949.³⁴ After reading the proofs in May 1950, she wrote to Ric, ‘Feel I can die in peace now. My work is done. Not that I’ve any intention of dying, darling. Am quite well, really. But the book does give, I think, something I’ve been working for all my life’.³⁵

It was published in London in September 1950, with the Australian edition coming out in November.³⁶ Katharine dedicated it to ‘Celia’—Cecilia Shelley, her unionist friend of decades who had grown up on the goldfields and shared her stories for Katharine to draw on. Since Katharine’s return to Greenmount, Celia had been helping her a lot, especially in times of sickness. Katharine signed her copy, ‘Celia dear—Her book—a slight appreciation of her great work over all the years—from her loving and devoted admirer Katharine Susannah’.³⁷

Winged Seeds follows the fates of Sally’s grandchildren. It begins in 1936, as Katharine brings the Spanish Civil War to the goldfields by having Sally’s communist grandson, Bill, make speeches trying to fire up the apathetic locals. Later, he leaves to fight in World War II and the focus returns to Sally, as she struggles with what to make of the war and relives the grief of the last war. Bill returns home from Greece injured, only to recover and be sent to New Guinea, where he goes missing, presumed killed. Katharine gave to Bill the fate she feared for her own son, Ric. The trilogy finishes wearily, with the two survivors, Sally and Dinny, burying Kalgoorla, the Aboriginal woman whom they have known from the beginning, and finding hope in the winged seeds blown out from her namesake, the ‘kalgoorluh’ (usually karlkurla or garlgulla) plant. Sally’s sons are dead, her grandson Bill is dead, but the ideas they lived for are immortal:

The life force strives towards perfection. What other imperative is there in living? The struggle had gone on through the ages. The vital germ in a seed attained its fine flowering and full fruit. How then could the great ideas and ideals of human progress be denied and annihilated? They could not. That was what Bill had believed, and what he tried to make people understand.³⁸

The reviews were even more negative than for Golden Miles and sales were poor.³⁹ The Bulletin was again the harshest. ‘Dutifully parroting Communist jargon, twisted into situations to justify political theories, Katharine Prichard’s characters become half-comic and half-repulsive, with the disquieting unreality of the tortured.’⁴⁰ Other reviewers were more nuanced. Gladys Hains wrote in the Argus that despite ‘the political turn of the conversations’ being ‘too suggestive of propaganda’ the novel still showed her ‘sense of the music of words, her lyrical gift for descriptions of natural phenomena, her deft way of etching a character’.⁴¹ In previous decades the somewhat intrusive political elements of Working Bullocks (1926) and Intimate Strangers (1937) had not been heavily scrutinised but now the Cold War made readers more sensitive to the communist themes in Winged Seeds. ‘To express Communist sympathies these days, of course, means that one must take the rap’, Katharine wrote to Miles Franklin.⁴² But Katharine was deluded in thinking the criticisms of Winged Seeds were purely political. The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer probably wrote in good faith when they declared, ‘a novelist can make a Communist a real and living person and treat him with the utmost sympathy if she so chooses. The objection is merely that Miss Prichard makes young Bill Gough a downright bore’.⁴³

Katharine’s trilogy has its defenders. The scholar Dale Spender writes in 1988, ‘With its combination of the family saga … and working conditions on the goldfields, the trilogy is a powerful and perceptive documentary on Australian political history. It provided me with one of the most illuminating experiences I have had in my life’.⁴⁴ Jack Lindsay saw the trilogy as central to Katharine’s literary achievement, the culmination of a career depicting men and women at work and grappling, after the pioneering era, with the disruption caused by industrial development as labour becomes something bought and sold:

The work is a social history, a record of the mines, and an epical novel. Inevitably there are points where the first two aspects threaten to swamp the third; but, taken as a whole, the plan comes off. The story of the mines is told in human terms. The endlessly crisscrossing lines of narrative fall into an easily recognisable pattern, so that a clear significance and an impression of swarming complexity are simultaneously conveyed.⁴⁵

THE BIGGEST PROJECT of her career finished, Katharine didn’t know what was next. She had turned sixty-six at the end of the 1940s just as Menzies was elected. Her son was in Brazil with a newly acknowledged political distance between them. Her prospects for the 1950s were not good.