38

Hardliner

Greenmount, 1964–1968

IN KATHARINE’S WEEKLY letter on 20 July 1964, she told Ric she hadn’t been well and was in bed with a hot water bottle. But it was ‘just the beastly BP [blood pressure] playing up’ and she was sure she would be all right by the time he received the letter.¹ However, her friend John Gilchrist was concerned enough to write Ric a letter the same day saying she had collapsed during the week and had taken a ‘very bad turn’ since.² On 26 July, John picked Katharine up and brought her to his house. He made her a cup of tea at 4.30 the next morning and she held his hand, saying, ‘Gil, I’m dying’.³ A doctor visited, but it wasn’t until evening that she was in hospital. She suffered a stroke which nearly killed her. ‘I am haunted by the memory of a night of horror … I had lost control of my mental processes. They whirled turbulently in utter disorder—the spate of thought disconnected, and flying in all directions, without rhyme or reason.’⁴

Katharine’s doctor, Alec Jolly, and John sent telegrams to Ric telling him to fly over as soon as he could. When Ric arrived at Midland Hospital, she was conscious but only able to speak a few words.⁵ Joan Williams remembers Katharine’s ‘right hand lay paralysed on the white quilt, her voice dragged painfully from some far distance. She seemed too overcome with weariness of life to fight any longer’.⁶ Joan was in the midst of editing a selection of Katharine’s writings, On Strenuous Wings, for the East German publisher Seven Seas Books. She told Katharine there were questions from Germany but Katharine ‘turned her face away’ and said she was too tired to talk. ‘Katharine, so dedicated, disciplined, too tired to talk about writing? We were indeed losing her, I thought, as I stroked her high white brow. Little did I guess the battle she would wage, the willpower that would bring her back from the edge of darkness.’⁷

Katharine spent two months in hospital, finally returning home at the end of September 1964. Her friend Amy Barrett was able to stay with her for a time. ‘The sweet peace of home enfolding me again and Amy, like a fussy mother bird, looking after me.’⁸

In October, the communist writer Frank Hardy was in Perth and came to visit. Katharine wore a pink robe and her ‘right hand was trembling and withered’. Seeing her workroom, he ‘had a feeling about the great labour that had gone on there and felt ashamed of my own recent lack of creative output’. Back at the house, she stoked the fire and ‘began to speak of the distant past, as old people will, wandering from subject to subject. I noticed that her voice now seemed to take on the mellow-sweetness I remembered from our first meeting in Melbourne twenty-five years before, educated but not mannered or affected’. When he said he had to leave, she offered him sherry, ‘as if reluctant to let me go’. As he looked back, the ‘dull light of late afternoon played tricks … she looked like a slim young girl instead of a frail old woman’. ‘“Blessings,” she said, and it seemed a strange word for her to use. At the door, I turned again. She was still standing there, tears in her eyes … I stepped towards her … and kissed her … I hurried away. We each knew we would never meet again.’ She had become the ailing old writer that George Meredith had been in her youth.⁹

Amy stayed until November when Joan Williams’ mother, Marge Allen, took over. Marge didn’t like Katharine’s piano and brought over her own; they had to move the spare bed onto the verandah to fit it in.¹⁰ At Christmas, Katharine didn’t want to go anywhere so Marge missed her family celebration to be with her.¹¹ Katharine didn’t approve of Marge’s weekly round of golf—holding it and bridge to be the self-indulgent pastimes of the apolitical middle class—but otherwise loved having Marge. Marge confided in her daughter that the spartan lifestyle was difficult—the rundown cottage was hot in summer, cold in winter and lacking in modern conveniences.¹² Marge remained Katharine’s housekeeper until March 1966, when she was killed in a car accident. ‘I’ll miss her terribly’, Katharine wrote.¹³ She was never to have a housekeeper as suited to her; none of the others lasted long and finding replacements became an ongoing problem. Joan Williams, despite her admiration for Katharine, said she was ‘domineering and … involved in personal lives of house keeper/companions’.¹⁴

Katharine was practising writing with her right hand, but it was a great effort. Her handwriting had changed, unsteady and the letters larger. She had recovered well, but six months after the stroke, ‘I still feel … a shattering blow has been struck at the resilience and creative energy I once had. Despite skilful treatment there is still a consciousness of depression, uncertainty of movement, and some brain disorder … Has it broken a vital fibre of my contact with life? I don’t know. Time will show I suppose’.¹⁵

Oksana Krugerskaya visited Perth for a second time in February 1965, this time as translator for the novelist Daniil Granin. Too sick to travel into the city, Katharine was only able to see her once. It made her miserable, and she wrote to Oksana afterwards, ‘Sometimes I think it would have been better to die, when everybody expected me to, a few months ago, than to be only half alive. Certainly I don’t want to live if I cannot regain my creative energy and write again’. Oksana presented her with the gift of a ring. Katharine wore it every day and told Oksana, ‘I … regard it as a symbol of mystic union with writers of the Soviet Union’.¹⁶

In April 1965 she began to write again—two hours every morning. The hardest part was writing without cigarettes. After more than fifty years, she’d been forced to give up smoking after her stroke and, becoming convinced of its link to cancer, implored Ric to quit too. ‘Can’t you convince yourself that every cigarette you take from the packet is suicidal?’¹⁷ She developed a routine, attempting to write a chapter by hand each week. Her old friend Annette Aarons came on Tuesdays, answering her fan mail and business correspondence and typing whatever Katharine had written.¹⁸ Against great odds, Katharine finished the first draft of Subtle Flame in the second week of November 1965.¹⁹

It was a long manuscript—170,000 words—and politically heavy; she’d been worried from the start about its prospects for publication. She had complete confidence in the quality of the work itself—it was just, to her mind, that the times were against her. ‘All my Welsh guile, literary expertise and passionate faith in the grail of world peace, went into this book to make the story interesting, contemporary, and convincing.’²⁰ After so many successes in literary competitions over the years, she thought she would have one more attempt. The British publishers MacGibbon & Kee and Panther Books were offering a £3000 prize for ‘the best original prose work’, calling for submissions which had ‘outstanding imaginative qualities or make an important contribution to knowledge, or both’.²¹ She posted her entry in March 1966.²² A letter came in May to say she hadn’t won, an anticlimactic finish to her incredible run of competition success. ²³

She sent Subtle Flame to Jonathan Cape Ltd next. Their response came back in July 1966, her second rejection in a row from her old publisher.²⁴ It was ‘“as much on my account as theirs”, they say because they can’t see the possibility of it being a best-seller evidently and I can’t either, and they talk about “the ever-increasing costs of publishing”’.²⁵ She hadn’t expected any differently, telling Beatrice Davis that she feared Cape ‘will find it too Australian and too controversial’ and added, possibly hoping to be contradicted, ‘I’m not suggesting that it’s suitable for A & R [Angus and Robertson]’.²⁶

The Union of Soviet Writers wanted to arrange a Russian translation, but she felt it should be published in English first and so she submitted it to the left-wing Australasian Book Society, who had brought out N’goola and Other Stories in 1959. Les Greenfield from ABS wrote back in October 1966 to say they would publish it if she could cut the manuscript substantially to 120,000 words. The reader’s report praised Subtle Flame, calling it ‘a beautifully constructed novel, with plenty of good meat in it, and an intense survey of our contemporary way of life’. However, it ‘could be effectively told in half its present length … for the entire novel is subordinated to her obsession with peace and disarmament, and … the manner in which she labours the subject almost destroys it’.²⁷ Katharine disagreed with the criticism but accepted the terms. She found it ‘heart breaking’ to make the cuts; midway she complained ‘it has meant dropping some of my best arguments for disarmament—the facts & figures—so I don’t know whether the book will now cut any ice’.²⁸ In December she informed Ric Subtle Flame had ‘gone to its fate’ though ‘I feel now, I’d just as soon have burnt the ms [manuscript]’.²⁹

On 3 August 1967, Katharine appeared on television when she was interviewed on the ABC to mark the publication of Subtle Flame. The Australian literary community held such affection for octogenarian Katharine—Stalinist though she was—that launches for Subtle Flame were held in Sydney and Melbourne in her absence, as well as one in Perth with her present. The Perth launch was on the afternoon of Saturday 5 August at the Palace Hotel. The communist newspaper put attendance at 100; an ASIO report more generously estimated 110 or 120.³⁰ ‘Started with chandeliers ablaze, in brilliant light—& halfway through there was a blackout’, making it hard for Bert Vickers to read out the many messages of congratulations.³¹ Two figures of the Perth cultural establishment gave speeches praising her work—Allan Edwards, professor of English, and Mollie Lukis, state archivist—offering Katharine a sense of ongoing recognition outside left-wing circles.³²

She began her own speech by saying, ‘Dear friends—I think of all Australians as my friends!’ She had started writing Subtle Flame in the midst of the Korean War and now Australia was fighting in the Vietnam War. ‘My argument remains the same, how to make the masses of kindly, inert people understand what is at stake for their home and children … The best defence of Australia in my opinion is organisation for peace.’ She finished by saying, ‘This may be my last word to you in novel form, my dear Australian men and women. I owe so much to your encouragement and sympathy always’.³³

The reviews were mainly negative. Cherry Grimm in Australian Book Review was scathing: ‘The flimsy characterisation, the loose, scanning time-schedule, the superficial emotionalism, above all the continual infelicities of style: the vintage clichés and vintage slang, mark out Subtle Flame not as an unsuccessful novel or a minor work, but as a book quite monstrously bad: the final debacle in a notable career’.³⁴ But other reviewers found elements to appreciate—Nancy Keesing praised Katharine’s attempt to capture youth culture and slang when older writers were avoiding it while Maurice Vitner wrote, ‘Perhaps it does stumble a little at times, but this story … has surprising energy and freshness’.³⁵ By the end of 1967, it had sold 3000 copies, with only 500 left.³⁶

Katharine had two other books published in 1967. In May, Angus and Robertson brought out Happiness, a volume of short stories she selected from her three collections. She wrote a foreword giving a brief account of the origins of the stories and defending herself from her critics by quoting praise from Nettie Palmer, Hugh McCrae and others. ‘All the stories were inspired by intimate sympathy with men and women in the comedy and tragedy of their lives.’³⁷

In November, the children’s story Moggie and Her Circus Pony was published by Cheshire with illustrations by the painter Elaine Haxton. It was part of a short-lived series pairing major Australian writers and artists. Decades earlier, Katharine had written the story for Wirth’s Circus. ‘Gladys [Wirth] suggested to write a story which cd be sold with the ice-creams and peanuts’; Katharine had been paid £50 for it but had never seen it. Copies had been sold at the circus with the title The Story of Frisky, The Clever Circus Pony under the pseudonym ‘Val West’.³⁸

Adding to the late flourishing in Katharine’s literary stocks, a booklet on her in the ‘Australian Writers and Their Work’ series also appeared in 1967. It was written by Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Katharine’s old Perth literary friend from across the political divide. When Henrietta first came to talk to Katharine about it, she joked that it might ‘break a life-long friendship’ but Henrietta’s assessment of Katharine’s work was generous and appreciative in putting her novels in their literary and biographical context.³⁹ Henrietta claimed Katharine as ‘fundamentally … an artist of pagan sensibility’, summing up her achievement—most apparent in her novels of the late 1920s—as ‘the sensuous awareness of people and places, of delight and agony, of action and skill’.⁴⁰

NETTIE PALMER HAD a stroke in May 1964—two months before Katharine—and was moved to a nursing home.⁴¹ She died in her sleep on 19 October 1964. It had been years since Katharine had seen Nettie in person. Katharine happened to write to her days before Vance’s sudden death in 1959, saying, ‘We’ve come such a long way on our road to-gether, Nettie dear—and how fortunate we’ve been to win through after all’.⁴² In the last surviving letter from Katharine in January 1964, she wrote, ‘I think of you so often & wish we cd meet to yarn about books and the writing fraternity. But here I sit on my hill-top, with few people to talk to whose opinions I value’. She sent her love to Nettie and her daughters and finished with, ‘All the best, always, dear Nettie, yours, Katharine Susannah’.⁴³

Hilda had been gone a decade and the other of the group of four friends from school days, Christian Jollie Smith, had died in January 1963. Katharine wrote to Ric of Christian, ‘Though we didn’t see each other often, latterly, there was a bond of deep affection between us’.⁴⁴ Katharine, the heavy smoker who had been chronically ill for decades, had outlived her three peers.

THE ONLY CLOSE friend from Katharine’s Melbourne years to outlive her was Guido Baracchi. He wrote a long letter to her in April 1965 saying that he’d been told a few years earlier that she’d died from a heart attack, and was attending a tribute to Nettie Palmer when he was shocked to hear a message from Katharine read out.⁴⁵ Katharine told Ric that in Guido’s letter ‘he says: “I love you and have always loved you”—which didn’t prevent him from having several wives’.⁴⁶

Katharine was a little cool in her reply to Guido:

It was a surprise to hear from you. I feel grateful to you always for having introduced me to Marxism, & an understanding of Communist principles. My life has been illuminated by them … It seems that you have been more susceptible to changes in the political atmosphere. But I’m glad to know you take part in marches and demonstrations for peace & the cessation of USA aggression in Vietnam.⁴⁷

As their correspondence continued Katharine’s tone warmed. They talked of politics, the old days, and their children and grandchildren. She complimented his poetry; he loved Subtle Flame, sending her a telegram, ‘What a wonderful picture beauty lives by intelligence humour nobility strength of character without it my cup would have been less full from the heart thank you.’⁴⁸

A SIGNIFICANT NEW friendship in Katharine’s eighties was an intergenerational one with an eccentric teenager named David Helfgott. He was a talented pianist and a number of funds were set up to pay for him to study overseas; according to the scholar Cath Ellis, one of these was organised by the Communist Party ‘with whom Helfgott’s father, Peter, was informally connected. The young Helfgott played at a Communist Party gathering and it was then that he met Katharine’.⁴⁹ In November 1963, Katharine invited them to visit her:

The boy, sixteen, already a brilliant pianist—& his father, a spare, hard-working little man—desperately anxious to give his son a chance to be world famous. David, still a shy, rather callow youth, but if he gets the chance for overseas study, will surely become world famous. He is heard sometimes, on the ABC, and is as mature, as far as his music is concerned, as if he were years older. I liked them both so much.⁵⁰

When Katharine’s granddaughter Karen was staying in January 1966, Katharine invited David to dinner, hoping to matchmake as she considered him ‘a cut above the youths she has been meeting, intellectually’. ‘He played the whole evening for Karen—though I think, did not disturb her allegiance to Tom.’⁵¹

David began visiting Katharine for dinner on Friday nights. In March 1966 she wrote that he ‘played to me for hours. It is a curious attraction for 18 & 80. He is a devout admirer of the writings of KSP & likes to discuss ideas & literature with me, and I am in awe of his brilliant quality as a pianist—& his dedication to music & its interpretation’.⁵² After Marge’s death in March, her superior piano was still at Katharine’s and it was the one David would play on; Katharine asked that Marge’s family leave it with her until David departed to study music in London in the middle of the year.⁵³

In a letter David sent after he moved to London he wrote that ‘The Roaring Nineties is my “bible” if you know what I mean! I only have to read a bit of it—and immediately Australia comes to life—all the hard dry heat—and endless bush and hot desert. Katharine you’re the greatest genius Australia has ever produced—absolutely!’⁵⁴

Thirty years later—after David’s mental breakdown, recovery, and fresh renown as a pianist—the unlikely friendship between David and Katharine was movingly depicted in the Academy Award–winning film about his life, Shine (1996). As is often the case in biopics, the actor Googie Withers doesn’t resemble Katharine; her character is also much softer than the real Katharine. The casting may not have pleased Katharine, who saw Withers perform in July 1956 when she watched a production of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea (1952) with Rose and Les Atkinson. In a letter to Ric, Katharine wrote, ‘Didn’t like Googie Withers. She was so emotionally over-wrought all the time & her performance seemed to me stagey. Others don’t think so. Les & Rose delighted with her’.⁵⁵

KATHARINE HAD AN unhappy friendship with the writer Bert Vickers. He was twenty years younger than her, and they had become close through their work together at the Peace Council. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘He was tall and slim, unpretentious, simple and straightforward, and addicted to his pipe’.⁵⁶ In some ways he seemed Katharine’s disciple, organising her eightieth birthday celebrations and the Subtle Flame book launch, and chauffeuring her around. But he frequently argued with her about politics. ‘He’s so used to dominating poor Mim [his wife], that he thinks he can dominate me in an argument. And then gets annoyed when I say: “But you’re so stupid Bert.”’⁵⁷ One Sunday afternoon in 1967 Katharine wrote to Ric that she was glad Bert wasn’t visiting; but then later he did and they argued about ‘freedom’. ‘I said there is freedom within the socialist system to criticise administration measures & persons—but not freedom to attack the basis of the socialist system’.⁵⁸ After he seemed pleased by a negative review of Subtle Flame, Katharine wrote that he had a ‘complex that delights in anything that takes me down a peg’. His wife died in May 1967, and Katharine had started cooking him dinner on his Sunday visits; he would drink all her Soviet vodka while still ‘never miss[ing] an opportunity to criticise the SU’.⁵⁹

Katharine used to talk of her ‘boyfriends’, of whom Bert was one. In the late 1960s, these relationships seem to have been platonic; she wrote in May 1968 that her housekeeper ‘looks on with amazement, because all my boyfriends are married men, & she doesn’t understand their affection for me, & the fact that the wives concerned don’t object & that I remain on good terms with the wives’.⁶⁰ John Gilchrist—‘Gil’—was another boyfriend and he worshipped Katharine with none of the ambivalence of Bert. Gil’s daughter remembers, ‘Dad was always up there, he used to go up there regularly and look after the house and do all the repairs … There was tremendous affection between them … She saw him as the symbol of what she thought the working class hero should be’.⁶¹ In his daughter’s memory, Katharine was right and his devotion didn’t worry his wife, Roma.

In the last year of Katharine’s life, Gil took the only surviving video footage of Katharine. The ten-minute colour video captures her doing ordinary things at her home in Greenmount—writing at her desk, standing outside her writing cabin, posing in front of a blooming wattle bush in her garden, drinking tea on her verandah with friends. All through it she is talking, talking, talking, but her words are lost; there is no sound. Near the end is a scene which belongs at the beginning: Katharine at the driveway, opening the gate as if to invite us in. It cuts to a scene of someone holding open a copy of Subtle Flame, and then, shockingly, a procession is following a hearse through the gates of Karakatta Cemetery. Just as she seems so alive, she’s snatched away again.

ON THE INTERNET, the most frequently appearing quote attributed to Katharine isn’t something she wrote but something Dorothy Hewett claims Katharine once told her: ‘Don’t sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are human relations. I found out too late’.⁶² Years after the event, Dorothy probably wouldn’t have been able to remember the precise words Katharine had used and her memory may have been shaped by what she wanted to hear while in the process of leaving the Communist Party. But at the end of her life, Katharine was reflecting anew on what mattered. Something she wrote in a letter to Ric in 1962 is similar to Dorothy’s quote, but with more ambivalence:

But all the time my chief happiness is that you are happy in your life with Dodie and the children. When I weigh up the values that seems the most important—to have had a taste of personal happiness with people we love. Fame, for what it’s worth, doesn’t give it. I suppose it means something to have achieved what you have set out to do, but, my own, what there is of it, seems flat & stale now. Service of the great ideals remains something wh cannot be ignored. There’d be no self-respect, if it were; but sometimes, wonder whether I’ve been stupidly idealistic—for such a confirmed materialist. Though the materialism of Marxism does not mean a rejection of the great ideals, rather an intensification of service to them.⁶³

Katharine hadn’t wavered in her communism, but in small ways she put relationships ahead of her beliefs, including a plea to Dorothy when they disagreed sharply on a political matter that it shouldn’t mean the end of their friendship. It did, however; ‘I didn’t go to see her’, Dorothy remembers, ‘I was afraid to discuss controversial matters with her … I didn’t want to be the cause of her death’.⁶⁴

The issue they fell out over was the trial of two Soviet writers in 1966. Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were accused of publishing anti-Soviet material, their satires of the Soviet Union having been smuggled out and published under pseudonyms in the West. They were convicted and sentenced to years in prison with hard labour. To Katharine’s distress, the Communist Party of Australia made its first public criticism of the Soviet Union over the incident, the general secretary Laurie Aarons labelling the arrests and jailings ‘unnecessary and wrong’.⁶⁵ The CPA was beginning to split from the Soviet Union, and it would break the hearts of Katharine and the other remnant of loyal Stalinists. She had read Sinyavsky’s offending novel, The Makepeace Experiment, and wrote to Oksana: ‘Who could doubt … the whole purpose of Sinyavsky was to outrage … the whole concept of socialism? I was furious when I read it, and get furiouser and furiouser when I think of the fools who consider Soviet writers should be free to foul their own nest’.

Like many on the left, Dorothy supported the dissident writers and launched a petition to send to the Soviet president calling for clemency. ‘I think the petition you sent me is short-sighted and ill-advised’, Katharine told her, calling it ‘sheer effrontery’ to presume to judge the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union for their ‘safeguarding’ of communism from ‘slander’.⁶⁶

For Dorothy, Katharine embodied the rigid Communist Party she herself finally left in 1968. When Katharine died in 1969, Dorothy wrote that brutal obituary for Overland called ‘Excess of Love: The Irreconcilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard’. It was polar opposite to the tribute in her 1963 review of Child of the Hurricane. Dorothy wrote that it was ‘as if, after the suicide of her husband … she willed her own creative death … The sensuousness of her imagery dries up and her style becomes arid and blind’.⁶⁷ Katharine ‘lived in a dream world up there on the range above the sprawling, changing skyline of Perth, her solitariness partly due to her failing health, partly to her perverse, almost nun-like withdrawal. She moved amidst a narrowing circle of communist friends, who would not argue with her but kept her insulated from reality’.⁶⁸

Yet this wasn’t the end of Dorothy’s wrestling with the legacy of Katharine. When Ric Throssell interviewed Dorothy in 1972 as part of the research for his biography of Katharine, she told him he overestimated the importance of her obituary and it was ‘just how I felt at the time’.⁶⁹ In 1983, on the centenary of Katharine’s birth, Dorothy wrote that tribute to Katharine which cemented the ‘red witch’ moniker; its emphasis is different to her earlier piece and it is more generous about Katharine’s achievements. ‘“A year after my death I will be forgotten,” she once told me. She was wrong. She was one of a band of Australian women writers who wrote against fearful odds and she is part of the fabric of literature in this country now.’⁷⁰

KATHARINE FELT OUT of step with the times—unfashionable and unappreciated. ‘I suppose the young think they’re going with the tide these days, disregarding all things old. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s almost a crime to be old.’⁷¹ Although she finally saw the back of Robert Menzies when he retired in January 1966, the Liberal–Country coalition remained in power under the new prime minister Harold Holt. They won an increased majority at the election on 26 November 1966. Katharine had many visitors the next day coming to commiserate with her. She wrote to Ric:

The Australia I know & loved is passing away—if it hasn’t already passed … The struggle for adult suffrage, trade union organization democratic rights—all seem to have been forgotten by the present generation of voters who vote for the conscription of youth & seem satisfied for a greater number of Australian young men to be the victims of this cruel war in Vietnam. Sorry darl, I can’t think of anything but the shame & disappointment I feel at the moment.⁷²

She wasn’t just alienated from the conservative-voting public; the left was changing too. Another crisis point for the Communist Party of Australia came in August 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring which had seen the communist state giving its people greater freedom. In Perth, a number of party members held a meeting to debate the situation. Katharine wrote:

I haven’t been invited, but couldn’t go in any case. Am out of favour with the reformist group in Party affairs. Am regarded as a ‘hardliner’. If that means abide by the principles of Marxism-Leninism, of course I do. And have no patience with this ‘open door’ policy for the sabotage of socialism as established in Czechoslovakia & the USSR. All this talk of freedom leaves me cold. Freedom for what? … the situation in the Party, at present, is so split by divergences of opinion that I cd not recommend any young person to join it. Although the basic principles are as they always have been the basis for a sound reorganisation of society.⁷³

Momentously, the Communist Party of Australia issued a statement condemning the Soviet Union’s actions. Katharine sent a letter to the party newspaper, Tribune, defending the Soviet Union. She wrote that although it ‘grieves’ her to disagree with the CPA leadership, ‘My confidence remains unshaken that the people of the Soviet Union, and their government, will always defend the socialist system, which they have suffered so much to establish and raise to the great power it has become in the world today’.⁷⁴ Katharine’s loyalty to the Soviet Union was greater than her loyalty to the CPA and she considered herself an honorary Soviet, even encouraging the Russian form of her name: ‘I like it that you should call me Katya’, she had told Mikhail Apletin, ‘Ric sometimes does’.⁷⁵

The situation festered. ASIO reported that Katharine ‘regretted that … $10 was all she intended to contribute [to the party appeal] because she did not agree with the present line’; six members had resigned from the state branch and up to thirty members—15 per cent—supported the Soviet actions and were in disagreement with the party.⁷⁶

KATHARINE WAS NOT able to travel much—she was frail, she had no car, and the buses from Greenmount were infrequent. Instead, she had a lot of visitors, invited and uninvited, some communists, some literary. ‘Katharine always turned on the sherry, olives and barbeque shape biscuits’, one visitor remembers.⁷⁷ She loved to have visitors from the Soviet Union; they revered her and she revered their country. Groups of sailors, tourists and performers would come in pilgrimage with gifts and she would serve refreshments. ‘As my doctor said, “One day you are at death’s door, & the next when the Ruskies come to town, you have a new lease of life.”’⁷⁸

‘I find pleasure in the simple things these days’, she wrote in April 1967. ‘A vase I’ve just arranged as a poem to autumn with yellow leaves [and] rose berries … Music too, though that’s not simple. Sometimes wonderful recitals come over my little transistor—& Clem has lent me his record player.’⁷⁹ She took delight in her garden, writing in the spring of 1968 of ‘a blaze of colours with bougainvillea growing as high as the pine tree & the pink honeysuckle in masses through the wattle tree near the gate, the Xmas lilies along the path in all their glory. The cerise pelargonium tangling with mauve creeping lantana, nasturtium rioting every[where] … ’.⁸⁰ She made friends with two magpies she called Caruso and Greedy, feeding them each day when they warbled at her door, and stopping to listen to their ‘repertoire’.

IN AUGUST 1968, Katharine was working on an essay commissioned by GA Wilkes for Southerly journal, the third in the series ‘Australian writers in profile’. She wrote to her granddaughter Karen, ‘It’s been difficult to talk chiefly about me & my work, preoccupations & intentions. And the academic critics have loved sniping at me. However, let them do their darndest, I have no regrets about writing the way I have—& clearing the way for scientific socialism in Australia’.⁸¹ Even as the weakened CPA broke with the Soviet Union, Katharine was not admitting defeat; a socialist Australia was inevitable sometime in the future.

It was appropriate for Southerly, at the centre of Australian literature, to offer the distinguished writer an opportunity to give a testimony at the end of a long life. She wrote to Ric, ‘Quite pleased to say my piece in Southerly—wh has always been rather supercilious about your KS’.⁸² ‘Say’ her ‘piece’ she did; the essay is Katharine’s defiant last stand.

Calling it ‘Some Perceptions and Aspirations’, she pushed back against the idea that Australian literature had only truly begun with the recent work of Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Long before the advent of these writers, her generation—and she names Vance and Nettie, Louis and Hilda, Hugh McCrae, and Miles Franklin as well as several others—had ‘loved Australia and sought to make others care for the glorious potentialities of the country and people’. She argued that the ‘aesthetic and humane philosophy which animated a past decade of writers and poets should not be disregarded’.⁸³

In her own work, she wrote, ‘I have only hoped to communicate … perception of the beauty and harsh realities of this land: to tell about the joys and sorrows, courage and humour, of men and women I’ve met in my wanderings through the country districts and cities of Australia’.⁸⁴ The sentence sums up well both her aspiration and her achievement, even though it leaves out her attempt to not just describe Australia but transform it politically.

In telling something of the genesis of her works, she also defended them against criticisms—her English was not slipshod; her goldfields dialogue was authentic; Intimate Strangers had nothing to do with Sigmund Freud or DH Lawrence. Like most writers, she was deeply sensitive about her work. Only at the end of the essay did she identify a weakness: ‘Perhaps I have not made readers dream and laugh enough. The wit and gaiety I admire so much in other writers, I have lacked’.⁸⁵

The issue of Southerly containing her essay came out in February 1969. It was her last piece of writing published in Australia in her lifetime, seventy years after her first story appeared in the Sun newspaper in 1899.

KATHARINE’S GRANDDAUGHTER KAREN, now twenty-one, flew over to stay just after Katharine’s eighty-fifth birthday in December 1968. Their relationship was close, but it wasn’t easy: ‘I realise something of the same ardent, headlong temperament in both of us’, Katharine wrote to her once, ‘that’s why, I suppose, I’m so anxious about you’.⁸⁶ Katharine was unexpectedly old-fashioned about Karen. She once objected to Karen coming to visit by sea because she was concerned about men flirting with her; another time she described her ‘shock to see you looking like the imbecilic specimens of brainless girls that the fashion magazines for teenagers want you to become … lank hair, blue eyelids & going about barefoot!’⁸⁷ This visit was happier, and Katharine wrote to Ric, ‘what a darling sweet herself is: brings me early morning tea & has been acting as my assistant secretary, typing innumerable letters’.⁸⁸

Katharine celebrated her last Christmas with Karen and great-nephew Patten, Beatrice’s grandson, who was temporarily living in Perth. It was a hot day, ‘101 in the shade’—38 degrees Celsius. Katharine cooked roast duckling and they ate plum pudding set alight with brandy. Ric had sent her a recording of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and she played it on the verandah. ‘It was heavenly hearing it all under the vines, on such a hot still night, after the sunset had faded behind the dark trees.’⁸⁹

In a letter to Ric a few days later, Katharine wrote, ‘So the year ends! And what [will] the next bring to us all?’⁹⁰

IN THE NEW year, Karen’s boyfriend, Tony, arrived. In the letters to Ric which followed, Katharine kept returning to the subject of Tony and what she called ‘the honeymoon’; he wasn’t responsible, he didn’t share Karen’s interests in art, literature and music. She didn’t tell Karen though, and Karen had no idea Katharine didn’t approve of him.

‘I ache over her’, Katharine wrote to Ric. ‘What life will do to her—and there’s nothing we can do to ease the pains & tribulations when they come.’⁹¹ With her own time running out, Katharine was aware that she wouldn’t get to see how the lives of her loved ones would turn out, but she’d been through enough to anticipate some of the pain they were certain to go through.

A few weeks later Karen and Tony left on the train to return to Canberra. ‘The house has been so quiet—I feel lonesome without that chirpy little song in the morning. Only the rats & my Caruso to talk to.’⁹²