PART 5

KATYA, 1950–1969

35

Legacy

Greenmount, Melbourne, Canberra 1950–1954

SINCE RETURNING TO Greenmount from Sydney in 1946, Katharine had been thinking about putting her affairs in order, ready for the end. A crucial task was sorting out her papers; it would take the rest of her life.

It’s a terrible business trying to clear up my literary outpourings of all the years. There are note books from the time I was twelve, & scores of unfinished m.s. [manuscripts]—which must be all burnt when I fade out. Meanwhile, I can’t destroy all of them, because maybe I’ll write ‘memoirs’ someday & then they’d be useful. But I don’t ever want any strangers to be delving into those old note books & rough scripts.¹

Katharine had been contemplating writing an autobiography of sorts for decades. Her original conception was an autobiographical novel in the style of The Wild Oats of Han. In the 1928 foreword to Wild Oats, Katharine mentions a planned sequel called ‘Cuckoo Oats’. At about this time she scrawled chapter titles for it on the back of an envelope; they correlate with incidents in the autobiography she would eventually publish, Child of the Hurricane (1963), including ‘Confirmation & doubts’; ‘Going on the stage opera & Henry V’; ‘Father’s illness’; ‘Speech Day’; and ‘The elderly lover’. The notes lay dormant; Katharine needed an excuse to write a book focused on herself and it came in the form of a research student’s thesis about her.

With Katharine’s mind already on her legacy and the hurt over the poor reception of The Golden Miles, she was flattered when a teacher named Cyril Cook visited in March 1950 to tell her he was writing his Master’s thesis at the University of Western Australia on her life and work.² She hoped it would begin her return to literary acclaim. He visited a second time in July, bearing a bouquet of pink carnations. Katharine told Ric, ‘He’s making a v. conscientious study of “the celebrated works” & concerned about all manner of biographical details. I feel responsible somehow for his getting through. Would hate him to lose because he had chosen your KS for a subject’.³ Cyril left a draft of a long chapter on Katharine’s biographical background in which he used Freud to explain aspects of her life and personality. Katharine reported to Ric, ‘Another quaint point in the thesis is that I’m supposed to have a maternal complex because I fell in love with your father “when he was ill in hospital”!’ This was ‘so remote from the truth’, Katharine wrote, because it wasn’t until Hugo came to Australia on sick leave a couple of years later that she fell in love with him. ‘This attempt at giving biographical details, so out of tune with the facts, has made me realize that I ought to write my own biography, in order to prevent such queer versions being concocted.’⁴ When Cyril returned the next week, Katharine ‘managed to persuade him that there was no basis for his psychological analysis of your KS’s complexes’.⁵ She later told him in a letter, ‘Freudian theory made a valuable contribution to psychological knowledge in its day; but the tendency to apply it wholesale to normal people has passed, or should have’.⁶

Cyril gave Katharine the gift of a copy of Nettie Palmer’s book about Henry Handel Richardson, who had died in 1946. Katharine’s letters to Nettie had become less frequent and less intimate. In the background was the mental breakdown of Nettie and Vance’s daughter, Aileen, who Katharine remained close to; Katharine felt Aileen was bound by Nettie’s ‘obsessive personality’.⁷ The fact of Nettie writing the Richardson book may have been painful for Katharine—Nettie had become more enthusiastic about Richardson’s work than Katharine’s. Remarking on the fact Cyril’s thesis was about her, Katharine wrote, ‘Rather painful & embarrassing to be present at one’s own vivisection! At least you spared H[enry] H[andel] that, though I feel sure she would have recognised the real value of your tribute to her work’.⁸

In late January 1951, Katharine noted that her ‘Boswell’ had stopped by—a reference to James Boswell, famously the biographer of Samuel Johnson. She was feeling positive about Cyril’s thesis. ‘Seems to know the works of your KS now better than she does herself … & it seems, Professor [Allan] Edwards is pleased with his work & suggested publication. I’m apprehensive of the final result of such a vivisection; but have been amiable & lent him notes & photographs.’⁹

She wrote Cyril a warm letter in June, saying, ‘I appreciate how conscientious you have been in your study of the subject for your thesis’.¹⁰ Later that month, he left the completed thesis for her to read. After her hopes his work might lead to an academic rejuvenation of her literary reputation, she was disappointed and angry. ‘To take all the information I could give him—which is the only valuable part of the thesis—and then set out to debunk the idea that my work is of any particular value, quoting all the adverse criticism, & not one critic who has given me high marks—from materials I gave him! An amazing performance!’¹¹

Two particular claims of Cyril’s which upset Katharine were that ‘KS depicts herself in all her heroines’ and that ‘the heroes are “defective males”’. ‘Do you see me in the Deb of Working Bullocks or Gina of Haxby’s, or Deidre of The Pioneers or Sophie of Black Opal?’ Katharine asked Ric. ‘These characters are all different & separate. He imagines that I am Elodie of Intimate Strangers—who of course was Rose A and recognised herself. How is Elodie like Deb or Gina? Yet, this bloke says all my women characters are uniform!’¹² If Katharine was right to claim these women characters are quite different to each other, it wasn’t far-fetched to find reflections of different aspects of Katharine in them. Sophie’s transition into adulthood fictionalised parts of Katharine’s own; a decade later, the world-weary Gina Haxby expressed Katharine’s confrontation with middle age. To read her work as completely un-autobiographical would be as much a mistake as to read it as simple autobiography.

Katharine countered Cyril’s other claim, about ‘defective males’, with examples of strong men in her novels—Michael in Black Opal, Tom in Golden Miles. But there are other male characters who bear out Cyril’s claim—notably the trilogy’s Morris Gough, Tom’s father, the misguided patriarch who can’t provide for his family and is only saved from poverty by Sally’s strength and hard work, as well as Greg from Intimate Strangers and Hugh from Coonardoo. The tragic struggles of Tom Prichard and Hugo Throssell in Katharine’s own life left their mark in a pattern of male protagonists who have trouble making their way in the world and depend on the support of resilient women.

After making these complaints to Ric, Katharine wrote a frosty letter to Cyril. ‘To have “lived with” my work for two years, & to have failed to realise some of its most significant aspects, surprises me.’¹³ Katharine didn’t notice Cyril’s praise for her work; he even wrote, ‘there is much in her novels that deserves the word “genius”’.¹⁴

In the decades which followed, Cyril taught Katharine’s novels in his role as a teachers’ college lecturer and followed in her footsteps on his holidays. ‘I have made a point of visiting Clovelly [inspiration for her first book of poems], Chelsea [where she lived in London], and Russia.’¹⁵ When Ric Throssell was writing his biography of Katharine in 1972, he wrote to Cyril asking permission to quote from his thesis. On request, Ric sent a draft of the harsh things he had to say about Cyril, explaining that although it was ‘unpalatable’, there was no getting around the ‘fact’ that the effect of Cyril’s thesis ‘was to divert Katharine from a novel on the half-castes to the auto-biography over which she laboured miserably for years’.¹⁶ Ric received back a telegram, ‘THESIS IS UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL AND LEGALLY RESTRICTED PERMISSION NOT REPEAT NOT GRANTED TO REFER TO THESIS OR MYSELF’.¹⁷ On the advice of his publisher, Ric removed references to Cyril’s name and the quotes from Cyril’s thesis, lending the incident an aura of mystery in his biography.¹⁸

IN DECEMBER 1949, the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA president, John Ewers, published an article calling for Australia to put forward a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature, believing it would do much to raise the profile of Australian literature. He approached Allan Edwards, professor of English at the University of Western Australia, seeking support to nominate the essayist Walter Murdoch; Edwards was only willing to endorse Katharine, to which Ewers agreed.¹⁹ At a meeting on 28 February 1950, Ewers formally proposed that the fellowship nominate her for the prize. Katharine was there to witness the motion carry unanimously, with cheers.²⁰ They had missed the cut-off for the 1950 prize, but gained support from other state writers’ groups for a 1951 nomination. Miles wrote that ‘no other candidate is mentioned’ in Sydney, although in truth her own name and Eleanor Dark’s were being mentioned.²¹

Katharine was thrilled about the nomination but she didn’t hold the prize winners of the period in high regard. ‘When I think of T. S. Elliot [sic] winning the last though—with his defeatist, antiprogressive line of thought, & realise present political apprehensions in Sweden I haven’t much hope of your KS winning approval, though someday there’s a feeling in my bones it may happen.’²² In June 1951 she was reading William Faulkner, the 1949 winner. ‘Don’t want to write like that—even if it means winning a Nobel Prize. Feel quite certain it won’t come my way—since Winged Seeds—and the recession in political affairs. However, as you know darl, I’ve always been more concerned about going my own wilful way, than anything else.’²³ In November 1951 the Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist was announced as the winner. She had read some of his stories and made the same comment about his work—‘I wouldn’t want to write like that’.²⁴

Katharine didn’t live to witness Patrick White become the first Australian to win the prize in 1973, but in 1957 she read White’s novel The Tree of Man (1955) and found it ‘powerful descriptive writing & characterisation—but tedious in parts, and the moronic types dealt with at great length, leaving one without any exhilaration. As a new writer though, of exceptional ability, I was quite excited to find him’.²⁵ As her opinions narrowed, she turned against him in the years which followed, writing in 1964, ‘Lost in the fog of their own delusions, writers like Patrick White believe they are uncommitted to any social purpose, while, as a matter of fact, they serve the causes of obfuscation and the defeat of human dignity in its demand for truth and justice’.²⁶

AFTER A BREAK from political activism caused by her relocations, her bad health and her literary work, Katharine was ready to return to the fray but had to find the right focus for her limited energy. To have returned to the tedium of backroom state branch work after the prestige of her Central Committee role wouldn’t have been attractive. Instead, the Australian Peace Council, formed in 1949 in response to the Cold War, became her focus. The council had a range of people involved, including many progressive Christians as well as communists. Historian Barbara Carter notes that the Communist Party supported the council although ‘at that stage peace did not take a central place in the party’s program’.²⁷ Peace had been at the heart of Katharine’s radicalisation in the Great War and she now chose to work for a communist-approved organisation dedicated to it, picking up from her involvement in the Movement Against War and Fascism in the 1930s.

She wrote to Miles in January 1950 that she was busy with Peace Council work, attending ‘two or three meetings a week, & in this sweltering heat, it’s been exhausting’.²⁸ In April, she travelled to Melbourne as a delegate to the Peace Congress. At the congress, Doon Stone remembers Katharine standing to give her speech before the packed Exhibition building looking ‘infinitely frail and indomitable’ and beginning with ‘the appealing halting words, “my beloved people”’. She went on to say, ‘The struggle for peace must have heroes and heroines as dauntless as those who fight in wars. The struggle for peace and social progress demands the highest patriotism’.²⁹ There was a crowd of ten thousand, with the most high-profile speaker the Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, nicknamed the ‘Red Dean’ for his support for the Soviet Union.

After the conference, Doon drove Katharine to Frankston to stay with Beatrice and her husband. ‘My first meeting with K’s sister’, Doon writes:

two people so utterly dissimilar that they could have emerged from different planets. B so … domesticated … utterly incapable of assessing the fire and grandeur of the flame that burned within K’s frail frame, yet filled with anxiety and affection for the ‘wayward’ sister! I saw a new Katharine there … consciously divesting herself of all thought and speech that might prove controversial or shattering to the family tie, preserved so carefully through the years. All of this I sensed, but confirmed with inward amusement, when Bee made the opportunity to thank me for my ‘kindness to her sister’, adding with her complete absence of insight that ‘Kathy had some funny ideas about things, but she was a dear clever little thing!’ It seemed quite incredible to me that her family could be so utterly unaware of K’s true mental & spiritual calibre, and of her position among the writers of the world.³⁰

AFTER COMPLAINING IN 1949 that men were no longer interested in her, Katharine mentioned having an unnamed boyfriend to dinner in the spring of 1950; she called him ‘an old flame’. ‘My small dinner party, with boyfriend, came off this week. But I can’t feel partyed [sic] during my working days; so although he was affable—& affectionate—wanted to stay the night, herself didn’t feel disposed. So it was the last bus in the rain for my guest!’³¹

By the end of 1950 Katharine had made a start on the autobiography and several other works: ‘facing the New Year with half a dozen designs brewing. Have sketched three. The Deakin play. Novel with half cast [sic] problem as subject to be called “Boronia”. Dramatic saga built on Aboriginal legends, biography of KS and several short stories. I’d like to do also a monograph on my father. How much of that lot will get done, I wonder?’³² Katharine was writing the Alfred Deakin play for the Jubilee stage play competition, marking fifty years since federation. With its supporting characters based on her own parents, the project complemented her return to the past in her autobiography. The eventual winner of the competition was Kylie Tennant with her own play about Deakin. When Tennant’s play was published, Katharine bought a copy and was gracious enough to conclude that it was probably better than hers and she’d have chosen it also if she was the judge.³³ She did little other work through 1951, writing in March 1952, ‘I haven’t done any creative writing for a long time, but am feeling I must soon. Perhaps I’ve been tired, & felt that to finish the trilogy was enough; but now the impulse is churning again, and maybe, soon, I’ll get to work’.³⁴

LIKE OTHER AUSTRALIAN communists in 1951, Katharine lived expecting illegality. In March 1951 the High Court ruled that the 1950 act to ban the Communist Party of Australia was unconstitutional. Menzies called a double dissolution election, promising a referendum to change the constitution and ban the Communist Party. He won a majority in both houses and announced the referendum would be held on 22 September 1951. At the beginning of the campaign, opinion polls showed the referendum would pass easily. But, helping the ‘no’ case, Bert Evatt had become Labor leader after the sudden death of Ben Chifley and set about speaking out against the proposal. A week before the poll, Katharine wrote, ‘Although the pace is not hectic—nothing like the excitement there was in the anti-conscription referendum of 1916–1917—it may quicken this week’.³⁵ Her assessment of it probably reflected her lack of active involvement; party member John McKenzie remembers the campaign as the ‘most intensive’ he had seen and that the ‘Australian people were never more politicised’.³⁶ In a surprise result, the referendum was narrowly defeated. Katharine wrote, ‘after the first promising results came through, I was hurried off to a party to celebrate’.³⁷ Menzies abandoned his attempt to outlaw the Communist Party and instead contented himself with strong surveillance by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—the new agency formed in 1949—and the controls offered by existing laws.

ON NEW YEAR’S Day 1952, Katharine’s brother Nigel died in his sleep. Nigel and her other brother Alan had been the close companions of her childhood—her sister being so much younger—and now they were both dead. She spent a day in tears. ‘Despite the political differences … there was a deep affection between us … I feel as if something of myself had died with Nigel.’³⁸

Ric had finished his posting in Brazil and he arrived in Greenmount with Dodie and Karen in June. ‘Of course’, she reassured him, ‘there won’t be any political arguments when you come home. We both have our points of view, and I wouldn’t dream of disturbing your[s] with mine’.³⁹ After they left six weeks later, she wrote, ‘I’m still feeling so bereft. As if the light has gone out of my world’.⁴⁰ At Ric’s suggestion, she had an indoor toilet installed that winter—‘it looks so grand, almost a throne’.⁴¹

IN SEPTEMBER 1952, government backbencher and Cold War warrior WC Wentworth was attacking the Commonwealth Literary Fund for directing grants to communists. T Inglis Moore wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald claiming this was untrue and not one communist had been funded. It was a strange mistake to make and Wentworth replied with a letter to the editor detailing support given to Katharine and insisting, ‘Katherine [sic] Susannah Prichard (alias Mrs. Thorssell [sic]) is not only a member of the Communist Party in the most exact sense. She is also one of its leading operatives’.⁴² Besides his spelling errors, and depending on how ‘alias’ is defined, his claims about Katharine were true. To Katharine’s supporters, his use of ‘alias’ was a calculated insult, implying a false identity. Bert Evatt’s secretary, Allan Dalziel, had a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald under a pseudonym claiming, ‘she is subjected to a cheap and sneering gibe which definitely suggests that she is using an alias in the honoured name of Throssell’.⁴³ Christian Jollie Smith wrote to Katharine to tell her about Wentworth’s letter, unwisely advising that it was actionable, and offering to represent her. Katharine told her to go ahead with a suit for libel, claiming damages of £10,000. Katharine wrote to Ric, ‘proud I am to have been the wife of my Jimmy, & I can’t let this imbecile create a doubt in the minds of many people that I was’.⁴⁴ In another letter, she wrote her motivations were to ‘discredit’ Wentworth and ‘make him realise that he can’t get away with making damaging statements’.⁴⁵ An apology would have been enough for Katharine to drop the action but Wentworth refused. Christian proceeded with the case, but there was a backlog at the Supreme Court of New South Wales and Christian warned Katharine it could be several years before there was a hearing.

On 24 September 1952, two weeks after Wentworth’s letter, Katharine opened the West Australian to read that her best friend, Hilda, and Hilda’s second husband, John Dale, had been in a car accident in Italy. John was dead and Hilda was injured in hospital. Katharine wrote to Ric, ‘she’s so frail, and I can’t believe she will survive. You will realise, darl, how broken-up I am. I had such a strong feeling that this going abroad was going to be disastrous for both of them: begged them not to go’.⁴⁶ After living in painful uncertainty for a couple of weeks, sending cables she didn’t think would reach Hilda, she received word that Hilda was recovering and expecting to leave hospital.⁴⁷ Hilda’s friend, Catherine Duncan, looked after her for a month in Paris until she was strong enough for the trip back to Melbourne. The doctor told Catherine that Hilda had terminal liver cancer, but no-one told Hilda.⁴⁸

Katharine travelled to Canberra for Christmas, staying with Ric and family until mid-February 1953. She then took a trip to Sydney to discuss the libel case with Christian. A doctor advised that her health was not up to a second journey from Perth to Sydney that year, so she decided to stay in Melbourne with Beatrice until the case could be heard. Christian applied for an expedited hearing because of Katharine’s health but the case dragged on.

Stalin died in March 1953 just as Katharine was settling in for a long stay at Kirinaran with Beatrice and her husband, the Menziessupporting ‘Pack’. Katharine wrote a tribute for the Union of Soviet Writers. ‘How wisely, how indefatigably, Stalin inspired the Soviet peoples to carry out their historic task of Socialist construction! … he was incorruptible, fearless and completely devoted to service of the Soviet peoples, and of the great purpose which seeks to free Humanity from a social system which breeds war, poverty, disease, and prostitution.’⁴⁹ Her devotion to him is disturbing to read today. Although some of his atrocities had been reported in 1953, his reputation was less settled. A mainstream newspaper like the Sun could carry an obituary which began ‘Stalin … will pass into history leaving a question mark behind him. Saviour or tyrant? Superman or ruthless despot? Man of war or man of peace?’⁵⁰

In April, Hilda wrote to say she hadn’t been worth visiting because she’d been too ill. ‘I wish the wretched doctors could give me some idea of what’s the matter.’⁵¹ Katharine came anyway, visiting regularly in May and June. ‘We both knew that she could not recover, but in our last days together, talked much as usual, trying to evade realisation.’⁵² On Friday 23 June she found Hilda ‘so wasted & knowing now that there is no hope’. Thinking it was the last time they would see each other, Hilda dropped the evasion and told Katharine how close they’d been for fifty years and that Katharine had always been there for her in a crisis. On Monday night, Katharine rang for an update and Hilda’s son Hugh said she was ‘very low’ and the doctor thought it would not be long. He rang back later to say she had died.⁵³

On Wednesday, Katharine attended the funeral at the Springvale Crematorium. ‘It was too harrowing really—I think of Hilda in that long polished box & afterwards committed to the fire—We had talked of it, which of us would survive the other.’⁵⁴

The year before Hilda died, a letter to Katharine evoked the ‘memories and dreams and the whole atmosphere and fragrance of our long association’:

Your first words to me at Ormond come back to me when you looked over the fence and we began to talk; your little study; Emerald, and the lovely days at Greenmount, full of sunlight and laughter and burning enthusiasms; our last days—both so tired, but you just as wonderful and charming and wise as ever—my darling, I am just overwhelmed with awe and wonder and admiration! Your spirit burns with even greater intensity than in those early days, when you were so beautiful, so gifted, so emotionally rich and sensitive. You have lived and suffered and rejoiced in a dozen lives, compared to the one humdrum existence most of us achieve.⁵⁵

KATHARINE SPENT A cold winter at Kirinaran, tinkering with things she’d already written—the Deakin play, a film treatment for the goldfields trilogy—but not getting much done as she waited, in limbo, for news of the libel case. ‘Here I am still!’ she wrote to Miles. ‘And feeling marooned! … it’s been an awful waste of time, sitting by the fire in the evening listening to murder mysteries on the radio.’⁵⁶ She returned to Canberra to stay from October until the new year, reporting to Miles, ‘Have been feeling better, here, mostly loafing & sleeping & playing with my grand-daughter—who thinks that was what ga-gas were made for’.⁵⁷

On 27 November 1953, Katharine had to visit Sydney on business relating to the libel case and she stayed with Miles for three nights. Katharine arrived on Friday evening, exhausted from carrying her case from the station; they went to bed at ten, but Miles didn’t sleep until 3 a.m., and then Katharine woke her by clearing her throat at 4.30 a.m. ‘I’m v. nervous & too lively’, Miles wrote in her diary. Katharine spent Saturday in the city; they had dinner together and then a quiet evening. ‘K says her work is finished & she wants to die. Very dismal—made me really depressed.’ Miles may not have been aware that Katharine was days away from turning seventy, the three score and ten then considered a full life span; it would have been playing on Katharine’s mind. In Katharine’s account, though, it was Miles’ fear of death which stood out. ‘I tried to make her feel that the end was not to be feared but anticipated with serenity when our work is done and time approaching for an exit. She, poor darling, however did not seem to be able to take the thought of “not being” philosophically.’⁵⁸

On Sunday, Miles recorded, ‘We talked, rested & read—a happy day except for K’s depressing manner & philosophy’. Intriguingly, Miles recorded that ‘K & Dal had some private business so he came at 2.30 & I did odds and ends’. Dal was Bert Evatt’s secretary, Allan Dalziel, who visited Miles regularly. Dalziel was interested enough in Katharine’s libel case to have written that pseudonymous letter to the editor, and had told Miles that Ric should punch Wentworth on the steps of parliament; it seems he was helping Katharine in order to cause problems for Wentworth, his political enemy.⁵⁹

Miles made a dinner of lamb chops and potatoes with a dessert of caramel custard and pear pudding. After listening to a feature about Mary Gilmore on the radio that night, they both went to bed and in the morning Katharine left early. Katharine wrote to Miles afterwards to say she was safely arrived ‘& chewing over my lovely time with you! Such a treat just to hear you talk. I do love the wit & play of your so original mind. Nobody makes me laugh so much’. She sent the letter with a bottle of perfume ‘to refresh you on hot days—& make you think of me’.⁶⁰

After an aimless year away from home, Katharine returned to Greenmount in January 1954 with the libel case unresolved. In March, Miles wrote the final surviving letter between the two of them, returning to their conversation on the second night of Katharine’s stay:

You made me so melancholy, dear, by talking about your life being finished—your big writing task done and Ric settled happily and securely, independent of you. It compelled me to face the hateful fact that I must face death without having accomplished one worthwhile thing and I’m not reconciled to death itself. I hope life has revived for you since your return to Greenmount and a controlled procedure and warmth, and things that you want to do.⁶¹

There was at least one more letter, now lost. Miles’ friend, Delys Cross, kept Katharine informed as Miles’ health deteriorated in the months which followed. Visiting Miles in hospital on 13 September 1954, Delys remembers ‘Miles would ask me to read the letter from “my darling Katharine” and “Ah read it again”’.⁶² After Delys told Katharine that Miles didn’t have long, Katharine extravagantly sent a box of wildflowers by air on the 17th. It was too late for Miles to see them; she was unconscious and died two days later. ‘I feel saddened at the thought of how little appreciation & recognition she received. She had an unusual quality: such grit & wit, & yet was defeated, I think, by failure to stand up to certain logical conclusions.’⁶³