3
Melbourne, 1895–1903
WHEN THE PRICHARDS returned to Melbourne in 1895, Tom couldn’t find a job and Edith kept the family going. She ‘was always sewing then … smocking lovely little dresses for other children, or painting illuminated addresses which she sold to be presented to distinguished citizens’.1 In this unhappy period they were staying in a ‘dark, ugly’ house in Caulfield lent to them by Katharine’s wealthy uncle and aunt, Slingsby and Han Davies, who lived next door.2
Then, about a year after their return, Tom found a job as editor of Critchley Parker’s Australian Mining Standard. ‘Suddenly it was as if the dark and dreary days of winter had been chased away by the sunshine of spring. The house was filled with gladness. Father went off to catch an early morning train; Mother no longer sewed all day.’3
The Prichards moved two doors down to 401 North Road, ‘a painted weatherboard house with a garden and lawn at the back, and open land covered with gorse, briars and bracken stretching before it’. It became the second ‘Korovuna’. Katharine remembered it as ‘a place of happiness and peace for a long time’.4
Despite interludes in Levuka and Launceston, North Road was the centre of Katharine’s childhood and youth. At one end of the road was the Brighton General Cemetery where Katharine’s parents were both to be buried; at the other end was the Ormond railway station. In between was ‘Clareville’, her maternal grandparents’ house where she had lived from 1886 to 1888, ‘Withersdane’, home of Slingsby and Han, and, more humbly, her own family’s ‘Korovuna’. The 1896 Municipal Directory describes the Caulfield area as ‘pleasant and healthy’ and ‘so increased in importance that it has become one of the leading suburbs’ with a population of 8000.5 In the depression of the 1890s, it was full of middle-class families like the Prichards struggling in genteel poverty.
THE ARTS WERE important in the Prichard house. ‘During our bright times father’s and mother’s interests were chiefly literary and artistic. They talked to us about music, painting, and poetry. Mother played on the little Broadwood piano … She and Father sang together: he often read to us in the evening, usually Australian poetry.’6 They took the four children to the National Gallery ‘to see almost every new picture when it was bought’.7
Tom and Edith sent Alan and Nigel to state schools but Katharine was kept home for a time because ‘the aunts were horrified at the idea of my going to a state school’.8 Eventually, ‘Father and Mother compromised with the aunts by letting me go to a state school in another district where Mother had heard there was a good teacher’.9 It was Armadale State School and Katharine was there from 1895 to 1897. While she was there, the Argus reported that forty-five students were crowded into a classroom meant for ten.10 In September 1896, two classrooms were destroyed in a fire and the fifth and sixth classes, Katharine among them, began attending classes at Toorak State School, still taught by Armadale teachers.11
With no public secondary schools, public school students wanting to continue their education competed for merit-based government scholarships to private schools. After the exam, Katharine was devastated to be disqualified because she had just turned fourteen. However, a few days later, ‘a short fat man arrived on a bicycle who said he was JB O’Hara, headmaster of South Melbourne College … He had been so pleased by my papers that he had come to offer me a half-scholarship’.12
ACCORDING TO KATHARINE, she had her first story published in a Melbourne newspaper at age eleven; it awaits rediscovery.13 At present, her earliest extant published story is from age fifteen, ‘That Brown Boy’. Winning the Sun’s quarterly children’s prize for stories, ‘That Brown Boy’ is a lively, melodramatic tale which shows Katharine’s early potential. It’s the story of Nicholas Brown, a mischievous orphan who drowns defending some younger boys against a bully. She had to share the prize of ten shillings with another girl because of ‘carelessness in writing, grammar, and orthography’.14 Entering—and often winning—competitions would be an important part of Katharine’s literary career in the decades which followed, the impetus for many new works.
This writing success meant much to Katharine. Despite her parents’ appreciation of the arts, she felt they discouraged her literary ambition. ‘Mother and Father were too absorbed in each other, and in their struggle to provide food and clothing for us all, to be interested in my scribbling.’ She showed her grandmother a story called ‘A Soldier’s Love’, only to later overhear her reading it out loud to her aunts in ‘gales of laughter’. Then her family laughed again at her dramatic adaptation of William Tell, elaborately staged at home with her brothers and cousins.15
Although her parents were indifferent about her writing, South Melbourne College encouraged it; the principal, John Bernard O’Hara, was an established poet.
He was very pleased with a contribution to the school magazine which the professor of English in a German university praised. One of our teachers had married this professor, and she wrote to say her husband thought the girl who wrote that sketch ‘would become a famous writer some day’.
How excited I was! To have my writing thought so well of was surprising. I decided forthwith to become ‘a famous writer’, and began consciously to study the work of great writers in order to learn something of how stories should be made, and why some were more powerful than others.16
Her French teacher, Irma Dreyfus, ‘introduced her to French writers including De Maupassant, Anatole France and Victor Hugo’.17 Her mother encouraged her to read the great writers of the Victorian-era such as Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens as well as less enduring romances.18
Reading Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) was another part of her literary formation. In Katharine’s first letter to Miles in 1930 she remembered, ‘It made a very vivid engraving on my mind, at about the time I had just left school, & I am sure it matured my mind in the direction of reality and truth at that moment as nothing else did’.19
THE FIRST DAY of 1901 marked both the federation of Australia and the beginning of the twentieth century. Melbourne was the temporary capital of the new nation. Federal attorney-general Alfred Deakin, a family friend of Edith’s, sent a message to the Century Night held in the Melbourne Town Hall saying, ‘May the new year of the new century usher in a new nation whose history shall be an illustrious record of progress’.20 Katharine had arrived in Australia at the time of the centenary of colonisation; she was now on the cusp of adulthood at federation. This period of heightened awareness of Australian identity fed into an event significant to her personal mythology: the Prichard family reunion.
The reunion brought together fifty of the descendants of Tom’s parents on 12 November 1902, the fiftieth anniversary of their arrival in Melbourne. While the other side of Katharine’s family, the Frasers, had largely stayed in Melbourne, the Prichards had scattered across the Australasian colonies. All ten of the children were still alive, and they and their offspring came from around Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and New Zealand to gather at the house of Katharine’s stern aunt, Agnes Church, in the Melbourne suburb of Canterbury.21
Katharine prefaced her account of the reunion by saying that her grandfather intentionally ‘forgot the past’ when he came to Australia, cutting off the ‘myths and legends of family history which had captivated him as a young man’ so that the next generations might truly start a ‘new life’ and ‘make their own way in the colonies’. Katharine’s grandparents were free settlers but her first novel, The Pioneers (1915) is marked by a concern with Australia as a fresh start for descendants of convicts, the past forgotten. In the epilogue, Dan, the grandson of the pioneers—the same generation as Katharine—is told by his mother, ‘They may talk about your birthstain by and by, Dan … but that will not trouble you, because it was not this country that made the stain. This country has been the redeemer and blotted out all those old stains’.22
The intergenerational saga of The Pioneers owes something to the mood of this reunion when Katharine was eighteen. An original family of twelve had grown to eighty-three. The first generation brought up in Australia were now ‘stout and grey-haired’ elders ‘disporting together’. Her own generation were bright and young with a new century ahead of them in a newly federated nation.
‘I seem to be the only rebel among them’, wrote Katharine, yet it was through her books that her grandfather’s name would ‘live on’. She wondered what that grandfather would say to her, having made his own ‘bold venture into the unknown’. ‘Would he understand that I am seeking to find as he did, a new and good life, though not only for the members of my own family, but for the families of mankind?’23
IN 1902, 16-YEAR-OLD Hilda Bull ‘with glorious red hair’ moved next door.
Hilda and I had met at the Armadale State School, and were soon talking to each other over the garden fence. Before long we had broken a gap in the grey palings near a clump of lilac bushes, and could call to each other as soon as we got up in the morning. Living side by side, we shared our hopes and dreams in a friendship that grew stronger with the years.24
Such was their deep friendship that Hilda wrote years later of the ‘telepathic sympathy’ between them.25 In the published version of Child of the Hurricane, Katharine wrote, ‘there was never anyone with whom I could share my most intimate thoughts as I could with Hilda; and she, with me, I know, felt the same deep sense of security and understanding’.26 The typescript contains a passage she deleted:
Such intimate friendship between women is suspect these days. But there was never anything Lesbian in Hilda’s and my association.
We were both too much in love with men always later to need any other sexual interest. We could discuss the adventures of our minds in our love affairs as well as all the happenings of our lives, with complete freedom. That was what made our friendship the rare and lovely thing it was.27
It is an intriguing denial. ‘Always’ adjusted to ‘later’. The love of men precluding same-sex attraction. What’s more, it seems an unnecessary protestation—what prompted it in the first place?
Unlike Katharine, Hilda was her (wealthy) father’s favourite, and he nurtured her aspirations. She was attending Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Melbourne’s most prestigious girls’ school, and introduced Katharine to two of her PLC friends, Nettie Higgins and Christian Jollie Smith:
We sat on the lawn between Hilda’s room and mine, comparing notes about our enthusiasms and ambitions. We were each of us working for the matriculation examinations … I don’t think we ever discussed the things that are supposed to interest girls—boys and dresses. We were interested mostly in ourselves, our future, and the first step towards it: those exams.28
The four of them were near-contemporaries, but the other three matriculated the year after Katharine in 1903 and went on to study for exhibitions in 1904. Nettie Higgins, later Palmer, was raised in a devout Baptist family. Christian was a boarder and only began at PLC in 1903; her father was a Presbyterian minister and she had been brought up in the South Australian town of Naracoorte.
All four young women were to go on to live remarkable lives—Katharine as a writer and Nettie as a critic, who both shaped the development of a distinctively Australian literature; Hilda as a patron of Australian drama and a medical doctor; and Christian as a lawyer. All four also came to hold left-wing political convictions, with Katharine and Christian both foundation members of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920.
Unlike any of Katharine’s other close friends, Nettie kept many of her letters and diaries. The invaluable biographical insights into Katharine they provide also have the distorting effect of giving Nettie a bigger part in Katharine’s known life than her closest friend, Hilda.
BAPTISED AS AN infant, it came time for Katharine to be confirmed into the Church of England. Despite Katharine narrating Han’s brief desire to become a missionary in Wild Oats, her resistance to Christianity began early. She remembered attending a ‘small, wooden Anglican church standing in the midst of bare paddocks’ in Caulfield when she was eight and being outraged by the story from Genesis in which Jacob deceives his father Abraham to receive the birthright that was rightfully his brother’s. She was with Uncle Arthur, her mother’s only brother, and told him she didn’t like God for allowing this injustice to happen. It is far from the most troubling story in the Old Testament, but with two younger brothers it touched a nerve. Katharine suspected Uncle Arthur shared her opinion.29 ‘The years of Bible reading, church-going, family prayers and religious instruction, which filled my youth, never removed my secret doubt as to the goodness of God, and the omnipotence that was claimed for Him.’30
According to Katharine, ‘four clergymen in turn had undertaken to prepare me for confirmation; but I asked questions which they did not answer to my satisfaction’.31 Tom tried his own arguments on her and she finally decided to not only be confirmed but to try harder to believe. It wasn’t the arguments he used which changed her mind but rather his sadness at her apostasy. At her confirmation, the beauty of the ceremony in the cathedral impressed her.
Very devout for a while, I prayed earnestly every night and went to church with Father and Mother on Sundays, giving God, as I thought, every chance to prove to me that He wasn’t a myth like Santa Claus, Jack Frost, or the black dog on my back—those inventions which had beguiled my childhood.32
The surprise of Katharine’s religious ‘testimony’ is that despite her retrospectively emphasising her many doubts, for a period of her youth she was a devout Christian.
My imagination had been caught up by the inexplicable in religious ecstasy. I used to go out into the paddocks, gaze up into the sky and away in to the distance, enraptured by the gorse in bloom, its musky fragrance, the beauty of everything; and feel that I was communing with God.33
This sense of enchantment in nature stayed with her, even when she didn’t believe in God any longer, and many of her novels have moments of it, notably Working Bullocks (1926) when Deb is among the trees and ‘swung to them in a fury of worship and admiration. The invocation, passion and lamentation of the trees swayed her’.34
In 1907, Katharine watched Tom’s depression worsen as he prayed fanatically each day, and she prayed too, promising herself she would believe in God if Tom got better. ‘When Father died, I was finished with religious superstitions.’35
KATHARINE’S YEARS AT South Melbourne College from 1898 to 1902 were happy ones. She was stimulated intellectually and creatively and formed friendships she remembered fondly. She described the principal, John Bernard O’Hara, as ‘a man of joyous and buoyant personality who taught by a sort of magnetism which brought the best out of his pupils’.36 O’Hara was a highly regarded educator; under his leadership ‘students prided themselves on being an educational elite. Girls and boys were encouraged in similar ambitions and competed on equal terms’.37 However, his interest in bright girls was not all innocent; seven years after Katharine graduated, a student fell pregnant to him.38
In 1902, Katharine’s last year of school, she worked hard, haunted by the fear she might fail her exams. ‘I used to be out at dawn walking round the garden, with a book in my hands, and sit huddled up in a blanket on winter nights because there was no fire in my room.’39
A highlight of the year was the annual school ball at the South Melbourne Town Hall on Saturday 16 August. A local newspaper reported a long list of ‘pretty and varied’ dresses, including ‘Miss K. Prichard—white silk and violets’.40 She wrote about the dance for the school magazine: ‘The quick hours are flying. A whirl of dainty frills, visions of light feet in pretty slippers, a subdued rustle and swish with the music, glimpses of flushed faces, waving hair, parted lips, graceful bows and curtseys, breathless laughter, and sighs. Clang! clang! and it is over’.41
Her friend, Maggie, was escorted by her father, the commissioner of police, Thomas O’Callaghan, ‘a portly red-faced, old man, very pompous’. O’Callaghan asked Katharine to dance, and O’Hara ‘chuckled hilariously afterwards, accusing me of having “captivated the commissioner of police”’.42 This was just months after Katharine had charmed her grumpy Uncle Albert at the family reunion; in a rather naïve choice of phrases, that had been her ‘first attempt at flirtation’ as she ‘coaxed him to dance’ and ‘made love’ to him.43 At times, Katharine’s autobiography reads as a series of anecdotes about men she had, in one way or the other, beguiled.
The school’s prize ceremony was held on 20 December, a couple of weeks after Katharine’s nineteenth birthday. Katharine won the group prize for English, history and geography as well as individual subject prizes for German and physiology.44 In algebra, she was equal bottom; O’Hara ‘told Father that if I managed to pass in algebra in the matriculation examinations, I should return to school the following year and study for a university exhibition in the post-matriculation class. It was understood I was to do this’. It was one of the great disappointments of her life that she didn’t return and was never to attain a degree.45
‘Mother was suffering from sciatica when I should have returned to school. She lay in bed for six months, and I had to stay at home, do everything for her and look after the housework. There was no possibility of winning an exhibition after that.’46 It wasn’t simply a financial decision; the Prichards were in a better financial position than ever before. In September 1902, Edith’s brother, Arthur Fraser—the same uncle Katharine had shared her doubts about God with—was thrown from his horse in a race and died; he had no heirs and left Tom his estate of £366, three years of a basic wage.47
As Katharine grew older, she became increasingly aware that her father’s expectations of her were different because she was a girl. In Wild Oats, it is shown in Han’s younger brother being given an axe to cut firewood. ‘Being a boy, Han thought, must be more important than being a girl if it meant having an axe all to yourself to cut wood.’48 When Katharine was in her early twenties and her brother Alan lay in hospital near death from acute appendicitis, she told Tom she wished it was her. Distractedly, he told her he wished that too. ‘For the first time’, she wrote, ‘I realised that I was not the most important member of the family’.49 Yet if it was the first time, then it was a realisation which had been growing for years.
Tom wanted her to be like Edith—a genteel housewife, a painter of watercolour copies, educated but not too educated. While her mother gave her books of poetry by Keats and Wordsworth as gifts for Christmas or birthdays, ‘Father liked to give me pretty feminine things, a sunshade or a bottle of perfume, a pair of ear-rings, or a gauzy hand-painted fan’.50
As Katharine gave up her dreams of university to run the household, Tom ‘was delighted to see me becoming more of a home-girl’. Edith’s illness had played into his hands. Yet in misunderstanding his daughter, in trying to shape her to be something she didn’t want to be, Tom provoked Katharine into proving him wrong and carving out a career—first as a governess then as a journalist and finally as a writer. ‘Nothing’, she wrote, ‘was further from my thoughts than being the domestic angel into which he hoped I would be transformed’.51