37

‘A Personal Thing’

Greenmount, 1960–1964

KATHARINE MADE A substantial start on a new novel, Subtle Flame, in 1960, sending off five handwritten chapters for typing in late July and then another six chapters three weeks later.¹ She described the work-in-progress in a letter to Mikhail Apletin:

My new novel will present a man, face to face with the realities of his time and trying to persuade people for peace, not war. It is a tremendous theme, and will take all my strength to deal with it effectively … Perhaps inference is more effective artistically; but I am more concerned ‘to put on brass knuckles’ … and convince people of the need for united action, to defeat the intrigues of the war-makers and those who profit by war.²

The letter was one of her last to Apletin. They’d grown close; she’d been calling him ‘Mik’ and he’d been calling her ‘Katya’ at her request, but then he stopped writing back. ‘We had such a warm and friendly correspondence’, Katharine wrote to his colleague at the Foreign Commission, Oksana Krugerskaya, ‘but now I never hear from him. Tell him, please, I feel thoroughly jilted—and am very sad to lose so good a friend, at seventy-five!’³ He wrote a final letter, explaining he’d had heart trouble and been immersed in writing his memoirs.

Katharine’s progress on the novel came to a halt with two significant international visits. First were two Soviet writers in September 1960, the poet Alexey Surkov with Katharine’s pen-friend Oksana as translator, invited by the Fellowship of Australian Writers as a cultural exchange. In anticipation of their visit, Katharine painted the bath, in case Oksana took up her invitation to stay at her house.⁴ Katharine met them at the airport with wildflowers. ‘Both of them very sincere, simple & yet charming people.’⁵ Oksana stayed at a hotel, but Katharine had them to dinner the third night of their stay with thirty guests coming afterwards, ‘cushions on the floor of the lounge & the room … packed’. ASIO were very interested in the Soviet writers’ movements, and an informant—perhaps one of Katharine’s neighbours—wrote down the numberplates of all the vehicles parked near her house that night, including Dorothy Hewett’s Ford Zephyr.⁶

It was a rare opportunity for Katharine to see Soviet writers and she spent a long time ruminating afterwards:

I’ve been regretting, since, that I asked so many people to meet you on that occasion. I would have liked so much just a quiet talk. There was so much I wanted to ask you about. But I felt I had to share you with the others—all friends and young writers—to whom it was most valuable and important that they should have some discussion with you. So forgive me, dear Oksana, if I erred by spoiling our evening. I can scarcely forgive myself, but the sharing seemed a duty.⁷

They left Katharine with the gift of a model Sputnik which played the Soviet anthem and beeped like the original. The visit meant so much to Katharine that she wrote to Oksana a year later, ‘Can still feel your warm and generous personality as you came into this room … If I were a theosophist I could believe you left something of yourself with me’.⁸

The second international visit was by the African-American singer and left-wing activist, Paul Robeson, and his anthropologist wife, Eslanda, who arrived on 30 November 1960. Robeson’s Cold War had been even harder than Katharine’s; the government deprived him of his passport in 1950 because of his communist sympathies. ‘Trapped within the United States in a hostile atmosphere, he found his performance opportunities drying up, with concerts cancelled and recordings withdrawn from sale.’⁹ Finally able to travel again, Perth was the last stop on what would be his only tour of Australia. Such was Robeson’s status in left-wing circles that the previous year the Peace Council in Perth celebrated his birthday in his absence, playing his records, with Katharine cooking sausage rolls for the party.¹⁰ When the Robesons arrived at the Perth airport, a crowd of two hundred greeted them with banners and bouquets. Katharine was giving a welcome speech on behalf of the Peace Council when a woman ‘dashed between’ her and Robeson ‘& hurled herself against Mrs Robeson in a huge embrace’ before Robeson removed her so Katharine could continue. ‘Amongst the crowd was a group of Aborigines, greeted by the singer with the words: “I hope that soon they will treat you as well as they treat me.”’¹¹ ‘No man I’ve ever met has so impressed me with his personal greatness’, Katharine told Ric. ‘He’s so simple & unaffected in his manner, so dignified, yet straight forward & uncompromising in what he says. The voice—even when he speaks is deeply moving, but it’s the man himself, I think, who demonstrates the greatness of the human spirit.’ Katharine attended a concert he gave at the Capitol and then a reception at the Palace Hotel, before farewelling him at the airport.¹²

‘CELIA [SHELLEY] HAS been so good to me’, Katharine wrote to Ric in 1961, ‘& I want to do something that will give her a little stand-by in her old age. The block of land I bought from her, when she wanted to go abroad, I’m transferring to her now’.¹³ But soon after the gift, Celia turned against Katharine. She broke off all contact and ‘said she didn’t want to see me or discuss the matter’.¹⁴ Katharine was mystified and shocked at the loss of a friendship of forty years. ‘I had thought if I died suddenly & someone needed to take charge here, and arrange for disposal of my belongings, Celia wd do gladly … Now, however, I wd not ask her to do anything.’¹⁵

After Katharine’s death, Ric tried to get to the bottom of the rift between Katharine and Celia and asked various people who knew them both. There were several theories, but finally he interviewed Celia herself and heard her account. His notes read:

Katharine was sick towards the end. Mentally sick. You know. It wasn’t K … ‘I don’t have to dress. I’m the celebrated authoress,’ with her arms stretched up like this. ‘It’s not the time for lying down,’ in that haughty voice …

The last straw was the weeding … It has to be cleared right around the house. ‘Oh no I can’t do that I’m the celebrated authoress. I’m not a peasant.’ She ordered me to pull up all the grass all round the house. That was enough. I got on the bus and didn’t come back.¹⁶

Even Joan Williams, an admirer of Katharine’s, described her as ‘difficult’ in her last years, but Celia’s accusations don’t fit with other accounts of Katharine.¹⁷ She was still mentally sharp in her seventies and eighties and no-one else records her acting haughtily. Yet Celia’s falling out with Katharine suggests a similar dynamic to the unspoken hurts Doon Stone felt. It was complicated being the friend of a ‘celebrated authoress’ and if both Celia and Doon thought they were ready to do anything for her and accepted a degree of subservience, it may have come at a price they couldn’t really afford.

Celia told Ric:

She wrote to me and rang up often. ‘What have I done Celia. Tell me what I’ve done.’ I told her in the end.

She said, ‘I don’t accept that as a reason.’ She asked me to lunch but I didn’t go. She said, ‘You know you’re always welcome here whenever you want to come.’ She was sick. It wasn’t Katharine.

When I heard she died I had a dream. All the trees and shrubs … were all cleared … And K had a box of beautiful materials. She was wearing this beautiful soft pink fluffy thing. Something I have seen sometime.¹⁸

AILEEN PALMER, NETTIE’S elder daughter, wrote autobiographical pieces with changed names. In a fragment dated 28 January 1961, she wrote about a ‘Karin’ whom historian Adam Carr identifies as Katharine. ‘Karin … has been the most continuous real friend of my life … if anyone makes me think and feel more than another, it’s Karin, rather than any of the members of my own family.’¹⁹ Aileen’s relationships with her sister, Helen, and mother had become strained. Helen had moved to Sydney in 1952 and was expelled from the Communist Party after starting a journal in 1957 called Outlook which had been giving a platform to dissenting ex-party members.²⁰ Meanwhile, after Vance’s death in 1959, a frail Nettie and mentally fragile Aileen were left living together ‘trapped in each other’s company … in a relationship of mutual dependence and increasing resentment’.²¹ Katharine’s support for Aileen’s poetry meant a lot to her. In 1957, Katharine offered to pay for the publication of a volume of Aileen’s poems called Dear Life. ‘But the darling sent me only a bill for the roneoed version of them—thinking I cd not afford to pay more.’²² Katharine sent a copy to Oksana Krugerskaya at the Union of Soviet Writers, saying, ‘There is not only high poetic quality in her work, but her mind moves to the themes which are of vital importance to us’.²³ Aileen remained a committed Stalinist like Katharine, and as the two exchanged letters Katharine’s ‘isolation from political reality’ in Greenmount reinforced Aileen’s.²⁴

KATHARINE CONTINUED HER involvement with the Peace Council. In March 1963, as an early celebration of her eightieth birthday and a fundraiser, the council held a ‘Jolly Jumbuck’ barbeque in the grounds of her house with a lamb on a spit. The guests ‘streamed down to the [amphi]theatre which was beside the big bougainvillea, with a stage on the side verandah. There were over 200 visitors, & lots of fun over the barbecue fires. Boys & girls dancing to the accordion played by a typical Australian stockman’.²⁵ It was also a launch for a 7-inch record of Katharine reading her stories ‘Josephina Anna Maria’ and ‘The Cooboo’.²⁶ In September 1963, the council celebrated the Nuclear Test Ban treaty with a supper and speeches. Katharine gave a brief speech. Afterwards, one of her friends said her voice had trembled and she decided to give up public speaking.²⁷

Katharine’s Communist Party involvement had lessened. One party member recalls it was a ‘ritual’ of the state conference that on the first night an apology from Katharine was read out ‘and a suitable message of greetings agreed to. By this time, Katharine … didn’t attend Party meetings any more. I suppose she was nominally a member of the Midland branch, closest to her home in Greenmount … She was a revered figure, seldom seen by most Party members by then’.²⁸

IN JULY 1961, Katharine had a heart attack. She downplayed it to Ric, telling him she had a ‘nasty heart twang’ and she was being looked after well by her friends.²⁹ In a letter to Beatrice Davis at Angus and Robertson her tone was different. ‘A nasty heart attack, last month, made me realise that time is running out for me, and that I must try to put my affairs in order.’ She was sending a draft manuscript of Child of the Hurricane. ‘I regret having given so much time to a personal thing’, Katharine wrote in her covering letter, ‘but was urged to write these reminiscences when a man here wrote a very distorted version of my youth and childhood in a thesis for his degree’. The manuscript only covered up to her first trip to London in 1908–1909; she was trying to finish another section telling of her work on the Herald and wanted to know whether there was a prospect of publication.³⁰

After an initial reply thanking Katharine for the submission, it took Beatrice eight months to respond fully, offering publication and encouraging her to extend the story to when she won the Hodder & Stoughton competition to ‘make a nicely rounded picture of a young writer up to her first major success’. Beatrice also suggested there was too much about Tom Prichard’s adventures in Fiji, that she shouldn’t refer to herself in the third person, that the title might be reconsidered for such a ‘gentle’ book, and asked if Katharine would reveal the name of the Preux Chevalier.³¹ A red pen note added to one of Katharine’s letters reads: ‘BD [Beatrice Davis] minute to DS [Douglas Stewart—her fellow publisher] refers to disappointment over “ordinariness” of C of H. Reader’s report suggests careful editing by author or publisher’.³²

Katharine wrote back to Beatrice to say how heartening it was that Angus and Robertson wanted to publish the book. During the long wait for Beatrice’s verdict, Wren Howard at Jonathan Cape Ltd had told her they wouldn’t be interested in her autobiography, although they would consider Subtle Flame when it was finished. Cape himself, her old champion, had died in 1960. She had concluded that Angus and Robertson wasn’t interested in Child of the Hurricane either and had been tempted to burn the section she’d been working on. ‘Only my typist says “don’t you dare!” She said she found it “fascinating”, so I held my hand, for the time being.’ Meanwhile, her ‘damned’ heart was playing up, ‘one angina attack after another and the end of the road in sight, though I don’t tell anyone this, and particularly don’t want Ric to know I feel like it is’.³³ Her letters to Ric seem so candid that it’s a jolt to learn of something so important she was suppressing, presumably because she didn’t want to worry him. A few years earlier, Beatrice had arranged with Katharine for Angus and Robertson to reprint Working Bullocks and Coonardoo and, knowing Katharine was often short of money, she had gone the extra mile to try to sell broadcast and serial rights too. ‘I like to think of you as one of my friends now’, Katharine had written.³⁴

Worried Katharine would die and the remaining chapters of Child of the Hurricane would be destroyed, Beatrice replied, ‘I would not wish you to worry too much about the revision. Just let us have the MS [manuscript] back as soon as you can: and mark it “not to be burnt” just in case’.³⁵

Katharine approached the writing of her autobiography without thinking of it as a literary work; she had no apparent strategy or conscious perspective from which to tell her story. She followed the conventions of autobiography as she subconsciously understood them. She recounted anecdotes from her childhood uncritically, preserving a mix of her own memories and the folklore of her family. A notable example is the story of her birth in the middle of a hurricane. Struggling to finish the book, Katharine took a shortcut, inserting the text of a series of radio broadcasts she’d written in 1941 about her encounters with celebrities while in London.³⁶ She did little editing to make them fit the narrative, adding to the anecdotal tone. According to one scholar, Child of the Hurricane is an ‘altogether evasive account … with much detail omitted or glossed over, important information dissipated by family trivia and anecdotal pieces with little apparent significance’.³⁷ It is all of these things, yet it also reveals as much as it hides. It has the charm of a polite rebel looking back over her early life to recite her best dinner-party stories and settle several scores.

Katharine sent off the last chapters in the middle of 1962 and then, over the next year, agreed to a number of editorial suggestions, including an epilogue with a brief account of her marriage to Hugo. When Beatrice said she was happy with the manuscript, Katharine wrote, ‘You know, I feel so much better because you like the Child. The psychological effect seems to have been marvellous in relaxation of tension’.³⁸

Child of the Hurricane was published in November 1963, a month before Katharine’s eightieth birthday. Reviewers were grateful Katharine had recorded something of her life for posterity but most of them were underwhelmed. The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer wrote, ‘Perhaps she has left it too late. If it only partly succeeds it is because the valuable passages in it are surrounded and diluted by less interesting chatter … we might expect a livelier and more richly populated saga of soil and people’.³⁹ It had the misfortune of being published the same year as Hal Porter’s highly praised and more artful autobiography, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony. Katharine wrote to Ric, in the third person, ‘I suppose she does seem “sadly old fashioned”, when you compare the KS biography with Hal Porter’.⁴⁰ She misunderstood the difference between her work and Porter’s, thinking that she was being penalised by reviewers for a lack of sexual candour. She wrote to Catherine Duncan, ‘It seemed to me that the intellectual development was more important than the sex aspects of that development: other recent autobiographies, Hal Porter’s & Xavier Herbert’s go into all the details of this, and it’s a fashionable tendency these days’.⁴¹

Although the reviews were lukewarm, readers liked it. Angus and Robertson printed 2305 copies—560 of them for British distribution—and a year later they had just 59 copies left.⁴² ‘Strangely’, Katharine wrote to Oksana Krugerskaya, ‘I’ve had more letters from Australian readers who liked it, too, than I’ve had for any other of my books’.⁴³ Relatives and old acquaintances wrote to her in appreciation, including her family’s maid, Jessie, dismissed in 1904 for having a lover in her bed, still alive at ninety and not disputing that detail but correcting Katharine’s claim she was Irish.⁴⁴

THE COMMUNIST WRITER Dorothy Hewett penned a letter to Katharine at 1.30 in the morning after she had just finished a review of Child of the Hurricane: ‘I had tears in my eyes not really because of sadness but because of the exaltation of the human spirit that comes through the pages’.⁴⁵ The review was reverential. ‘In this book she has transmitted the measure of her own heart, the rhythm of her own mind, so that Kattie the child, and Katharine the girl, became living presences. We enter the world of this delightful, tender, iron-willed girl, with her enormous ambitions to be a great writer.’⁴⁶

Dorothy had first met Katharine in 1946 as an undergraduate when she came to interview her for the student newspaper the Black Swan. Dorothy revered Katharine not just for her politics but her independence and cultured life. ‘I must have been the most utopian starry-eyed convert who ever took out a party card … I approached that interview with Katharine with awe and trepidation.’⁴⁷

Returning to Perth after a decade interstate, Dorothy sometimes visited Katharine in the early 1960s with husband Merv Lilley and ‘innumerable children’, one of them named Katharine Susannah. Katharine looked forward to these visits as a rare chance to speak to a fellow writer whose opinions she valued.⁴⁸ By this time, although still a communist, Dorothy was no longer idealistic about the party. She remembers Katharine questioning her about what was happening over in Sydney at the party headquarters, and particularly what she knew about the expulsion of Helen Palmer. Katharine wanted to know Helen had been treated fairly, and Dorothy, to her later regret, reassured her she had.⁴⁹ Dorothy was emerging as a major voice in the next generation of Australian writers, a successor to Katharine, but the cracks in Dorothy’s reverence for Katharine were beginning to appear.

JOAN WILLIAMS INTERVIEWED Katharine for an eightieth birthday tribute article in the September 1963 issue of the communist magazine, Our Women. Katharine was ‘very much aware of a deadly enemy—time … a threat to her plans for work and yet more work’. Joan noted the changes the years had brought to Greenmount; once an isolated spot, now ‘there is always in the background the dull roar of traffic thundering eastwards on the road to the Goldfields and beyond’.⁵⁰

The article features the first appearance in print of ‘red witch’ as a moniker for Katharine. Joan wrote of Katharine’s early years in Western Australia, ‘She had many friends, especially among the workers, who loved and respected her, but there were others who pointed out her home as if a terrible red witch lived there’.⁵¹ Decades later, in her eighties, Joan complained, ‘this witch tag … is one of the myths that has been perpetuated’ and she remembered:

I saw the exact way it occurred, which is a bit different to what people think … My grandmother liked to go out for a Sunday drive. Once when we drove past Katharine’s my grandmother said, as we passed her place—my grandma was very much into witchcraft and fortune telling & she said, ‘A red witch lives there,’ and I repeated this in an interview, and it has grown and grown … ⁵²

The irony is that it was Joan who devised the ‘myth’ with her ambiguous wording about the term’s usage in the 1963 article. Having read the article, Dymphna Cusack spread it further, saying in a speech to the Sydney Realist Writers for Katharine’s eightieth birthday in December 1963, ‘her flower-embowered house was pointed out as the abode of a Red witch’.⁵³ Dorothy Hewett then cemented the name with her centenary tribute to Katharine in 1983 titled ‘Happy Birthday, Brave Red Witch’.

In late November, Katharine was basking in the publication of Child of the Hurricane and preparing for her eightieth birthday, taking the bus into Perth to look for a new dress. It was the week John F Kennedy was shot dead. ‘How appalling the assassination of Kennedy is! Naturally, one asks what forces were opposed to his policies of racial equality and friendship, or at least friendly relations, with the SU [Soviet Union].’⁵⁴ A week later, Robert Menzies’ Coalition government won the federal election convincingly, increasing its majority over Labor.

Katharine turned eighty on Wednesday 4 December 1963 and friends held a cocktail party for her at the Savoy in Perth. A photograph shows her with brow-line glasses, a large flower pinned to her dress, bouquets on the table next to her. A friend named Bert Vickers is standing to give his speech, already on his third page. In Moscow, at a function held at the House of Friendship, Irene Golovnaya ‘said that Katharine was a pioneer not only in Australian literature, but also for the Soviet people’; it was proclaimed that she had sold two million copies of her books in the Soviet Union.⁵⁵ In Dymphna Cusack’s speech at the Sydney celebration she declared, ‘Ridiculous to speak of 80 years where Katharine Susannah is concerned. She is timeless and ageless. A great woman and a great writer, who has become a legend in her own time’.⁵⁶