36
Greenmount, 1954–1959
THE SUMMER OF 1954 ended with one hundred and fifty people attending the official opening of a memorial to Hugo on 24 February. ‘At last’, Katharine wrote to Ric, ‘some tribute is paid to your father’s memory’.1 Back in 1939 Katharine had donated to the road board the triangle of land formed between what had become ‘Old’ York Road and the new Great Eastern Highway so that a memorial could be built. The long-delayed memorial was a stone rotunda which would serve as a bus stop, metres from her house. A tablet inscribed to Hugo was unveiled by Major General Bierworth. Hugo had been dead twenty years and his generation of veterans had now reached old age; his one living sibling was too ill to attend. Katharine gave a speech, calling for the people of the district to remember Hugo ‘not only for his courage … but for his kindliness and friendliness’ and his hope that ‘negotiation would displace war, because he felt so deeply the sorrow & suffering caused by war’.2
In April, junior Russian diplomat Vladimir Petrov defected, revealing he was a KGB agent operating out of the Russian embassy in Canberra. As an ally of Stalin’s executed security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, he feared being recalled and purged. The old nemesis of Western Australian communists, Ron Richards, was now deputy director-general of ASIO and negotiated the defection. Katharine wrote to Ric about Petrov. ‘At any rate I’m very glad I never met the bloke, or had anything to do with him. My associations with the SU [Soviet Union] have been purely literary—I can’t imagine what revelations he would have to make, except in self defence.’3
Menzies announced a Royal Commission on Espionage which was to run until August 1955. The Soviet Union recalled all of its embassy staff. Katharine wrote to Mikhail Apletin at the Union of Soviet Writers in June 1954: ‘I am sure you will understand how distressed I have been because of the break in friendly relations between our countries … Certain it is however that the treachery and self-serving of an individual cannot change the feeling of warm friendship which many Australians have towards the Soviet Union’.4
In one of the ASIO interviews, Petrov, with some help from Ron Richards, named Ric as part of a spy ring operated by Wally Clayton, alias KLOD. Petrov had never met Ric, but claimed his codename was FERRO.5 Ric was summoned to Melbourne for an interview with Ron Richards. When Katharine heard, she warned, ‘He has no love at all for your mother, darling’.6 While Ric was away, agents turned up and questioned his wife Dodie at home; she was under suspicion too. Katharine wrote, ‘How stupid these people are! As if, with a mother known to be friendly towards the Soviet Union, you would do anything in your official capacity to bring you under suspicion even. It would be too obvious!’7 Ric and Dodie awaited their turn to be called before the royal commission, but they still hadn’t heard anything at the end of the year. They came to Greenmount for four weeks at Christmas and spent a lot of time going over the affair with Katharine. ‘Katharine blamed herself for everything. She was quite sure it was her reputation that had attracted attention to me.’8
In February 1955 Ric and Dodie were called to Sydney to testify before the commission. They were questioned over two weeks about claims made by Petrov and others and about their associations with communists. ‘You can’t imagine what I am feeling for you!’ Katharine wrote to them in the midst of it. ‘All on the say-so of a treacherous rat like Petrov, concerned only to save himself from the results of his own misdeeds.’9 She was anxiously checking the newspapers and turning on the radio for each news bulletin. Hearing their legal costs had run to £600, she sent them a cheque. ‘I suppose they will call it “Moscow gold”.’10 Money from Russia was unpredictable; after not receiving anything for the translations of her earlier books, in July 1954 she had been cabled the largest sum of her career—£5835—for royalties on 30,000 copies of one of the goldfields novels.11
Ric and Dodie had to wait until September 1955 for the commission’s report, which cleared them both, finding that the charges Ric had given information to Soviets ‘were only hearsay’ and the ‘reason that the Moscow centre was so interested in Throssell was probably because of his association with persons who were or had been Communists’.12 To the family’s perpetual frustration, the taint of the accusations would not lift in the decades which followed.
MEANWHILE, THERE WAS finally progress in Katharine’s libel case in May 1955 when the court ordered Katharine pay £2500 security before the proceedings began. Frustrated and incredulous, she decided to withdraw.13 She expected to have to pay the newspaper’s costs but to her relief, the final ruling in February 1956 did not require her to.14 The case caused a rift between Katharine and Christian Jollie Smith; she told Ric ‘my legal advisors have both been very remiss in [their] handling of the case’.15 In 1959 Christian was surprised to finally hear from Katharine after ‘years of silence and disapproval at something I did here in connection with her case. I thought [taking legal action] would please her but it didn’t’.16
TWO ECCENTRIC ARTISTS, Betsey Linton and Kitch Currie, brother and sister, were building a house opposite Katharine’s on Old York Road. Once in the 1950s they asked if they could rent her house while she was away for some months. Kitch remembers that although there was electricity and a telephone, ‘Otherwise it was in a deplorable condition. The white ants were living a life of Riley and there were no such things as drains’. Betsey remembers, ‘if you pulled the plug out [of the kitchen sink] it went down a pipe and straight on the dirt underneath’. Kitch fixed the dry rot in the doors while he was there. When Katharine returned, they were invited to a ‘graceful’ dinner party with bent forks; another time they remember Katharine setting up armchairs on the front verandah for an event ‘and some of the damned armchairs only had three legs’.17
Judy Inveen, Blanche Hunter’s granddaughter, grew up at Wandu on Old York Road. Her mother, Iris, was a friend of Katharine’s and always cut her hair—usually in a 1920s bob. Judy remembers Katharine from the 1950s and 1960s:
I knew her as a dignified woman who kept to a circle of friends she trusted. If one was there in the late afternoon she always offered sherry and black olives. She spoke softly and had a quiet sense of humour. Life wasn’t easy for her in a small hills settlement like Greenmount. Hugo’s heroic ghost pervaded the hills and people were very judgemental of her. In retrospect I admire her so much for keeping her dignity.18
IN MARCH 1956, the Western world learned of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called ‘secret speech’ in which he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and the Great Purge which had seen so many killed. Communists in Australia were reacting in different ways. ‘For rankand-file communists, 1956 forced a re-evaluation of their faith in the communist project and their loyalty to the Party. They had to decide whether that faith and loyalty outweighed their sense of disillusionment and betrayal.’19 The already depleted party faced further resignations. Katharine, however, was not shaken. In April, in the midst of the crisis, the party published a long article by Katharine in Tribune, ‘Why I am a Communist’, ‘a gesture of loyalty to the Stalinist regime, at a time when the faith of many loyal Communist Party members was being shaken to the core’.20 Later in the year, the party published an expanded version of the article as a booklet.
On 6 May, Katharine wrote to Mikhail Apletin at the Union of Soviet Writers, ‘Recent criticism of Comrade Stalin has been much exaggerated and distorted in our press … Whatever the causes for it, the achievements of this illustrious comrade, during times of great stress and difficulty, cannot be forgotten. If he made mistakes—well, “to err is human”’.21
She began that same letter by writing, ‘To-day, I am sad, because I wanted to go to the celebrations of May Day in Fremantle, but friends who were to drive me could not go, and so I have spent the day alone in my wild hills. Writing to you and Oksana is a consolation’.22 The words of loyalty to Stalin were written by an old woman stuck in the rain in her lonely cabin, not only far from Moscow but separated from the dwindling local faithful gathering 50 kilometres away at Fremantle.
Katharine was more affected by the suicide of Alexander Fadeyev on 16 May. She had corresponded with him when he had worked for the Union of Soviet Writers and regarded him as ‘one of the most outstanding of modern writers’.
How could such a thing happen to a Soviet writer? Has there been too much criticism? Of course a writer should stand up to criticism and fight for his or her personal point of view. But there are some temperaments on which hostile criticism acts like a blight creating distrust, lack of self confidence …
It seems to me there are too many critics anxious to be critical, rather than appreciate with generous enthusiasm what is fine and of value in the creative work of present day writers. Drastic criticism can destroy a sensitive mind …23
Katharine was trying to make sense of his death in terms of the hostile reception her own recent work had received. She hadn’t seen his suicide note, in which he denounced the Soviet leaders for betraying communism and killing so many writers. ‘The art to which I have given my life has been destroyed by the self-confident, ignorant leadership of the Party and can no longer be corrected.’24
In February 1957, she wrote to Apletin, ‘The stresses of the past year, I suppose have left their mark on those of us who have been in the struggle for a long time. My faith has never wavered, and I am grateful to an understanding of Marxism which has enabled me to see clearly through difficult times’.25 Karl Marx’s vision of the world sustained her like the teachings of Jesus sustain many Christians. The Soviet Union was to Katharine what the church is to devout Roman Catholics—the bearer of the good news with leaders who should be revered; an institution requiring loyalty even and especially when it seems to have gone wrong.
Then, in October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, and Katharine’s joyous response was that of a believer who thought a revival was now at hand:
Last night the Soviet star came out of the sky and passed over my garden. What a thrill it was to see that small golden orb and know what it meant! A demonstration to the world of the success and power of Socialism. Triumphs beyond the attainment of scientists in capitalist countries fettered by the system of profit and private enterprise … This Soviet star was a herald of peace …
The reaction of people here to the Soviet ‘moon’ or ‘satellite’, as they call it, has been remarkable. Everywhere they have been out watching for its appearance just after sun set.26
ASIO’S SURVEILLANCE OF Katharine continued; she was in her seventies but apparently still dangerous. Sometimes their sources were egregiously wrong, like the memo stating that ‘according to reliable information’ Katharine was at the international peace congress held in Sweden in July 1958. ASIO cleared that up, with another officer noting that she had not left her home except to go to hospital in the period alleged.27 ASIO sources reported on Katharine’s occasional attendance at Midland branch meetings of the Communist Party, her brief speeches at May Day rallies, her attendance at meetings of the Peace Council, and a lunch with Victorian party leader Ted Hill when she was in Melbourne. She gave a lecture to a meeting of the Australasian Book Society on 18 February 1960 in Canberra with historian Manning Clark; according to the memo, ‘The meeting was said to be dull, uninteresting and purely literary’.28
There was at least some invisible sabotage. The department of immigration published a monthly magazine for New Australians called Good Neighbour. An article in the August 1958 issue, ‘Some Books That Tell of Life in Your New Land’, was to include a photograph of Katharine and discussion of her work. But after someone in the department asked ASIO’s advice, they were told the director-general ‘considers it undesirable that any Communist authors should be recommended to New Australians in an official publication’. A memo advised that ‘all reference’ to Katharine ‘would be excluded’ and the published article included only ‘safe’ writers like Henry Lawson, Eleanor Dark and Patrick White.29
KATHARINE WAS MEANT to visit the Soviet Union in 1957 and invited Doon Stone to come as her secretary. The plan was to leave in March, arriving in London and then continuing to a meeting for the World Council for Peace in Vienna before the International Writers Congress in Moscow. But in January Katharine decided she could not handle the trip. She wrote to Ric, ‘My beastly heart played up again & I feel that I haven’t got the strength for all the journeys & excitement. The least exertion makes me utterly weary’.30
Katharine expected the worst part would be Doon’s disappointment, but she didn’t realise just how hard Doon would take it. Doon had just had her travel vaccinations when she received the letter. ‘Before I opened it,’ Doon wrote in her unpublished memoir, ‘I knew it contained death to the “dream”. Between the pathetic lines of the little story of further heart trouble, I read the complete ruthlessness that made K the artist that she is—the determination to carry out her will, cost what it may’. Doon felt ‘the last remnants of human feeling in my heart died that night of bitter disappointment and broken faith. I was alone, ill and more desolate than at any time in my life—and tempted, indeed, to add to the tragic suicide pattern of her life’.31
Katharine’s heart troubles were genuine enough, but Doon also blamed the cancellation on the baby Ric and Dodie were expecting, which has an element of truth. Katharine had told Ric, ‘I can’t feel happy about going when I’d like to be with you & Dodie for the new babe’s arrival’.32 In April 1957, Dodie gave birth to a boy, and they named him Hugo Alan after his grandfather and great-uncle. ‘While we rejoice at the coming of this small person’, Katharine wrote to Mikhail Apletin, ‘my heart quails to think of the world he will inherit. Maybe it will be better than the one his two dear namesakes had to face’.33 Ignoring her son’s differing political convictions, Katharine embroidered a Soviet jacket for the baby, with a wheat sheath and a hammer and sickle.34
The British government was preparing to test nuclear weapons on Kiritimati, an isolated atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Peace activists proposed a bold new protest strategy—sailing a peace fleet into the test area. Two hundred and fifty people volunteered, including Katharine and Aileen Palmer, Nettie and Vance’s daughter. They risked a slow death from radiation sickness; Katharine expected there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive but wrote, ‘I thought I may as well make my dying worth while’.35 Announcing her intention in a public statement in May, she travelled to the east coast, ready to join the protest. It would have been an appropriate way to finish a life she claimed had begun in the middle of a hurricane. However, sailing a fleet to the middle of the Pacific Ocean proved too difficult to organise, and the protest did not eventuate. The thwarted campaign still came to be seen by some activists as a key moment in the development of the anti-nuclear protest movement, the ‘bodies on the line’ tactic an inspiration for similar actions in the decades which followed.36
Instead of sailing into a nuclear test zone, Katharine spent two months with Ric and family. She wrote that baby Hugo ‘already has a lovable personality. He will be good-natured and placid, I think; but his sister … and I have a special bond of affinity’.37
She had more time with the family over the first half of 1958 when they came to stay with her for Ric’s long service leave. She wanted to give him ‘undisturbed time to work on his plays’ which ‘meant devoting all my time to making domestic affairs run smoothly, cooking nice meals for my beloveds, and being available to look after the children. It was rather strenuous, but I kept fairly well—only twice the tiresome heart behaved badly’.38 Giving up her own writing and activism to make time for Ric to write was one of a number of ways Katharine helped Ric’s literary career over the decades.
Baby Hugo wasn’t developing well and on their return to the east, Ric and Dodie learned he had Down syndrome. They decided to put him in a children’s home. Katharine said she was with them in their grief. ‘If only I were younger & cd depend on my health, I wd have liked to take charge of him for you. But, then, too, my days are numbered & there seems no other way.’39 He died a couple of months later in September 1958 and Katharine tried to find comfort in the difficulties he had been spared. ‘So much love & hope greeted him, and there cd only have been tragedy for him & for all of us’ if he had lived.40 There were happier times ahead for Ric and Dodie with two more children born in the years that followed—Querida in 1959 and then James in 1962.
THE UNFINISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHY hung over Katharine through the decade. In January 1956 she was making progress on it in the midst of the summer heat. She liked writing about her father’s time in Fiji but ‘I’m still not very interested in writing about myself. Dislike the personal pronoun—the “I … I …” constantly creeping in. It all seems quite puerile and useless!’41 Her solution was to write the draft with some scenes in the third person, explaining:
I have always found it difficult to write in the first person, so that in this biography it has been easier to refer to Katharine Susannah as a person about whom I have heard & to whom certain things have happened. Thinking back over the years, I feel quite aloof from her—as if she were someone I had met & known slightly but can scarcely realise as myself.42
The switching between first and third person had no literary purpose; she just adopted the viewpoint which came more easily to her as she wrote particular scenes. The autobiography stalled again. She wrote later to Ric, ‘must get on with the new novel when I come home & dump these wretched memoirs—which aren’t sufficiently important to have spent time on’.43
She redeemed an unproductive literary decade with the publication of N’goola and Other Stories in March 1959. She had sent off the manuscript in November 1957 saying, ‘Am making a gift of them to the ABS because some of the stories wdn’t appeal to my usual publishers’.44 ABS—Australasian Book Society—had been founded in 1952 as a left-wing cooperative publishing society, funded by subscriptions and releasing four books annually.
Vance Palmer wrote a brief foreword for the collection. It’s a tribute to Katharine’s work, set in the past tense, even though she had another decade of living and writing while he did not:
Young people today may not be fully aware of the flood of new life Katharine Prichard poured into our writing … [Her novels] brought indisputable evidence that a new writer had arisen, one of lyric freshness, of original vision, of dramatic power … She wrote easily in the Australian idiom, weaving a lively and poetic language from images of the natural world around her, from [A]boriginal names, from the talk of blacks, bushmen, or men working on their jobs.
The foreword was Vance’s last word about Katharine; he died suddenly of a heart attack a few months later in July 1959.
Although Ric lamented that writing her autobiography diverted Katharine from the planned novel ‘Boronia’, the project wasn’t actually lost altogether—it turned into the titular short story, ‘N’goola’, which means ‘wild boronia’. The story is about Mary, a woman taken from her Aboriginal mother as a child and now trying to live like a white person, yet kept on the fringes of society. An old Aboriginal man who has been searching for his daughter for years comes to town. He tells his story to Mary. When N’goola was born to his wife, she was pale-skinned and rejected by the tribe, but he accepted her as his own daughter, only for her to be removed from the family by the government. N’goola is, of course, Mary, and the story ends happily with a reunion between the two. There’s potential in the story for expansion, but it works fine at its existing length, and perhaps Katharine simply decided against turning it into a novel.
Many of the eighteen stories are set in familiar Prichardian territory—a coalmine, the goldfields, a quarry, a station. Some feel incomplete, sketches; others are yarns which work well as entertainments for their time; and several—‘Yoirimba’, ‘The Buccaneers’ and ‘The Elopement’—are accomplished short stories among Katharine’s best. There’s an appropriateness in the uneven diversity of all three of Katharine’s short story collections. They show a writer at her best and also at her most workmanlike. They show the breadth of her concerns and the range of styles influencing her. They show a working writer, who wrote to change the world but also to entertain and make a living.
THE LIFE KATHARINE had settled into in old age was marked by contrasts. She was a revered literary figure in communist countries but lived an austere life as an eccentric in the hills of Perth. The Soviet Union was her spiritual home, but she wasn’t able to visit, which helped maintain her illusions. She had many friends but, with her family all in the eastern states, she was lonely. ‘Sometimes I feel a very un-hugged person, & long for the warmth & physical nearness of my beloveds. I’ve travelled a lonely road for so long, & yet it’s the only one for me to travel, I suppose.’45
Returning to Melbourne for the Peace Congress in November 1959, Katharine was presented with the Joliot-Curie Medal for service in the cause of peace, an honour that she said meant more to her than any other.46 Writing of the congress in her novel Subtle Flame, Katharine has her character Sharn describe one international speaker, scientist Linus Pauling, as ‘standing out … by the fearless integrity of his personality’, while the British author JB Priestly was ‘an overgrown wombat’ and ‘rather a boor’. The opening night, with its reading of the Charter of Hope, was, for Sharn, ‘the most thrilling experience of my life’.47
After the congress and the public adulation, Katharine went for a ‘few days’ rest’ with Beatrice and Pack and found herself forced to watch television with them. She hated it. She wrote on 22 November 1959 to Ric, ‘Have come to the conclusion TV & radio are stealing people’s lives from them … Surely TV will die out unless greatly improved. It’s like the “canned” music that was popular for a while’.48 It was a fitting end to the decade, public honour and private frustration, alienated by the new world of the 1950s, on the road, and kept once again from her work. It was also to be her last trip out of Western Australia.