39

‘My Joy Will Be Complete’

Greenmount, 1969

IN FEBRUARY 1969 Katharine learned Ric would be visiting in March and it became a new focal point for her. She was going to make fig jam. It would be a ‘heavenly month’.¹ The next week she had a bad fall in the garden, by the gate, as she was trying to move a hose. Her face was bruised yellow and purple. She told Ric she only hoped she would be looking better by the time he arrived. To reassure him, she listed the many friends who were helping her as she lay in bed recovering. ‘You’re still the object of my affection’, John Gilchrist told her.²

Her friends were telling her she needed another housekeeper but she was reluctant; it would be expensive and none of them had lasted long since Marge. Eventually, she found a ‘Mrs W’, whom she regarded a ‘wonder’. She let Mrs W and her husband set up their campervan in the paddock on the condition they didn’t bring their cat, out of concern for the safety of the magpies, Caruso and Greedy. When the cat appeared, Katharine was angry and worried for the magpies but decided to say nothing.³

In March, she wrote to Ric, ‘my joyous thought all the time has been that you’ll soon be here … And, I suppose, your next letter will tell me wh plane I must watch the sky for … my joy will be complete just to see you, & feel you’.⁴ She went into the shops at Midland and bought a new dress to ‘gladden’ Ric’s eyes; it was the first one she’d bought in five years.

There was a break in Katharine’s letters to Ric while he was staying and the details of his visit are lost. It was the last time they would see each other, and although Katharine did not know that for sure, she wrote, ‘I did feel as if the light had gone out of my world when your plane passed over—though I didn’t see it—waited, scanning the sky, for half an hour, then decided there was so much cloud, I’d probably missed seeing it’.⁵

Sometimes Katharine’s love for Ric was almost worshipful, the love of a mother who lost her husband to suicide and whose only child has lived on the other side of the country for twenty-five years. ‘As my great day approaches—the day on which you arrived—how can I say all that it means to me?’, she wrote before his birthday on 10 May.

My feeling is one of overwhelming gratitude that life has given you to me—and I don’t know who to thank except Daddy. And he always said: ‘You chose me to be sire for your son’ … No wonder you are such a wonderful person—the best of your father & mother went to making you and rearing you—and you, I feel since, were not infected by any of our qualities wh were not as admirable.⁶

She didn’t want to be alone on the day and, as had become her custom, she invited friends to dinner to toast Ric in his absence.

Although she was staunchly atheistic her ceremonies and superstitions had a religious quality. She picked flowers each day and placed them by the photographs of her family as an act of communion with them. ‘I’ve just picked some roses to say good morning to you, darl—actually I’ve been able to have some fresh flowers for you every day through the hot weather—only once had to fall back on lantana, but it was a pretty little mauve one!’⁷

She was still thinking about her writing, even contemplating learning about television screenplays so she could adapt her story, ‘Painted Finches’ (1939). However, the only pieces she finished in 1969 were articles commissioned to honour the centenary of Lenin’s birth the next year—as many as three for Soviet publications and one for a pamphlet, Lenin Through Australian Eyes. Faithful to the end, she wrote, ‘Marx and Engels revealed the principles for organisation of socialism … Lenin and the Bolshevik Communist Party recognised the validity of these principles … They changed the dream to a reality, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded on the basis of scientific socialism’.⁸

She kept up with her own literary business, negotiating paperback editions, royalties and translations. But she put more energy into promoting the work of her son and her father. When Ric’s play The Day Before Tomorrow was published she ordered multiple copies and sent them to people of influence she knew. After an article celebrating the centenary of the Fiji Times didn’t adequately recognise her father’s role as an early editor, she decided she must try again to have some of his stories about the Pacific republished in book form. In late September, five days before she died, she wrote asking Beatrice Davis at Angus and Robertson whether they would consider a collection of his stories or whether she had ‘better try another firm in fulfillment of my filial duty’.⁹

In June she sent a message of support for the World Peace Assembly and particularly its work on disarmament, urging that they pass a motion opposing germ warfare. In July, she wrote to Karen, ‘The struggle against war—& the system wh thrives on it—won’t be over for many years but it’s the most worthwhile one to work for, surely’.¹⁰ But while supporting the protests against the Vietnam War, she thought that Karen shouldn’t get involved until her university exams were finished.

KATHARINE WAS SORTING papers, the endless task which had occupied her for decades. She had told an interviewer in 1967, ‘I do not want anything of mine to be published after I am dead that I have not approved of … I do not like to be seen in dishabille even in manuscript. I never even liked my husband to see me that way, brushing my teeth and so on’.¹¹ She wasn’t sure what to keep and what to burn and she was taking advice from others in the winter of 1969. ‘When Annette [Aarons] was here, on Saturday she urged me to burn a box of letters from you. But when I saw a packet labelled “Ric’s letters from NG [New Guinea]” I cdn’t agree.’¹² Katharine wrote about it to her pen-friend, Catherine Duncan in late June or July:

I’m still on deck—and much as usual, not doing much writing, just enough to justify existence, but tidying and sorting mss like mad—Hate to think of leaving letters & unfinished screeds for all & sundry to read! It’s a terrible wrench having to commit some to the flames, though … I’ve just discovered the most innocuous letters of mine have been sold to the National Library—& students have been seeking permission ‘to have access to them’. So I must sort and burn while there’s time.¹³

Catherine was alarmed and wrote back:

I can understand that you should want to put a time limit on giving students access to personal papers, but in fifty years, dearest Kattie, the KSP you are now will have become someone else—she will have escaped you. It’s already astonishing to read letters written ten or twenty years ago. I wrote that? I felt that? Another life, another person. Perhaps in the end it’s better to surrender the truth to posterity rather than allow one’s self to be deformed by supposition. Anyway I do beg you not to be too ruthless. I cannot believe that beauty in writing can ever belong entirely to one person, or where would be our Heloise and Abelard?¹⁴

Catherine perceived that future generations would be more likely to remember fairly and truthfully with more evidence available. Her plea may have saved some of Katharine’s surviving letters from the fire. ‘Suppose you’re right about letters’, Katharine replied nine days before she died, ‘but never think mine are worth anything’.¹⁵

Before Katharine died she had put aside the letters she wanted preserved.¹⁶ The day after her death, Ric burnt all her unpublished manuscripts. ‘There were notes, novels, unfinished short stories and plays—I don’t know how many.’¹⁷ The bonfire was a great loss to scholarship and to history, but there are good reasons to think there are no lost masterpieces. Her major research trips are accounted for—she published books from all of them. She didn’t work in secret—she usually told her friends about her works in progress, and there are no references to full-length works which had progressed past the stage of notes. She also had such confidence in her work that it’s likely she would have tried to publish anything which was fully drafted.

KATHARINE LIVED LONG enough to see the wattle bush bloom in ‘all her glory’ with ‘masses of golden down’ in July as the Americans landed on the moon; she lived long enough to feel the winter lift and spring arrive. Mrs W departed—circumstances unknown—and Katharine’s loyal friend, Amy Barrett, moved in to look after her. Ric would be visiting again in October, a quick business trip. ‘Have just heard a chestnut-breasted whistler … he warbles gloriously in [the] gum tree at the end of the verandah—I’ve been asking [him] to come & sing to you darl! Though you’ll hardly have any sunny hours with me. And October [is] usually a glorious month.’¹⁸

IN SEPTEMBER, BILL and Dorothy Irwin took Katharine down the road to meet the playwright John Joseph Jones at his ambitious Parkerville Amphitheatre, which was nearing completion. Jones remembers ‘the bushland surrounding the playing areas was bright with her beloved wildflowers’. The amphitheatre had three stages and a central pool, and ‘as we stood there together on the main stage in the bowl of the amphitheatre Katharine turned and said with some emotion, “I want you to put Brumby on here. It’s never been done and this is where it should be done”’.¹⁹ It was more than forty years since she’d written Brumby Innes and she was still thinking of it, imagining it coming to life. Perhaps she hoped to live long enough to see it. Or perhaps she took comfort in the idea of a posthumous life for her work.

KATHARINE’S DISAGREEMENTS WITH the Communist Party of Australia were intensifying. After hearing that Australian representatives at an international communist meeting in Moscow had publicly criticised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, she wrote to Oksana, ‘I feel sure the next National Congress will see some changes in the leadership. The tendency has been to increase membership by placating middle-class “intellectuals”—among writers chiefly—so I’m very unpopular with many who used to be my friends’.²⁰ On 22 September 1969, she decided to make her outrage public, writing a letter to Tribune stating, ‘I am no longer proud and happy to say I am a member of the Communist Party of Australia … I have not deserted the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Some leaders of the National Committee appear to have done so’.²¹ The editors wrote back requesting that she cut her letter to fit the limit of 300 words but by the time it arrived she was dead. This disagreement with the party at the end of her life caused her great anguish but she lived in hope it would be resolved by changing leaders at the next congress. Instead, only greater pain awaited her as the anti-Soviet leadership consolidated its grip and the party split. Three days before she died, she renewed her party membership, the breach not yet complete and her criticism of the party unpublished.²²

TWO REPRESENTATIVES OF the Soviet Women’s Committee, Zoya Zarubina and Olga Chechetkina, were visiting Perth as guests of the Union of Australian Women. They stayed with Katharine’s friends, John and Roma Gilchrist, and Katharine invited them for morning tea on Friday 26 September. John photographed a smiling Katharine with her arm around Zoya, whom she hadn’t met before, their heads touching. It’s the last known picture of Katharine. They stand on the verandah at the front of the house, the same one where Katharine danced the Charleston with Hugo in 1927. The stone wall in the background is cracked and the bare chicken wire covering the eaves of the verandah hangs down.

Zoya was a language teacher and sports administrator. As a young woman during World War II, she’d been a KGB translator for Joseph Stalin when he met with American president Franklin Roosevelt. Katharine would probably have been thrilled to learn of this connection to Stalin; it might explain her arm around Zoya. Zoya was less likely to have discussed her role translating stolen plans for the atomic bomb or her dismissal from the KGB in 1951 when Stalin sent her stepfather, a high-ranking KGB officer, to prison. Perhaps fittingly, the ostensibly benign final image of Katharine is coloured with Soviet intrigue.²³

BACK IN 1954 when Miles Franklin died, Katharine wrote to Ric:

When I die I’ll have a sense of the fullness of my life: that I’ve had so much in love and work. To have had the best that life could give in your father and you, my darling. In my work, too. To be able to write what I wanted to, and to have used my energy and intellect for the things I believed in. That’s why, I suppose, Death has no fears for me. To have lived to the fulfilment of the individual self means that the logical end can be looked forward to quite serenely.²⁴

On the day of Katharine’s own death, Thursday 2 October 1969, she wrote a letter to her old friend, Doon Stone. Doon had been contemplating moving back west to live near Katharine, but she had written to say she’d decided instead to move to Tuross Head on the south coast of New South Wales. Katharine wished her the best but confessed she was ‘green-eyed’ about it; ‘we both know how to overcome disappointments’, she wrote, a little tartly. ‘Ric’s due tonight on the late plane from Canberra—and I’m aching to see him. Such a strange, lonely life it is, these days.’²⁵

For years Katharine had been limiting what she did and avoiding excitement to keep her blood pressure down—but Ric’s arrival meant so much to her. She and Amy spent the day preparing the house; his plane was not landing until 11.10 p.m. ‘They had made his favourite dish, goulash, festooned the house with flowers and had everything in readiness.’²⁶ Katharine was tired and said she would welcome Ric in her dressing gown and pyjamas, heading to bed at six o’clock. At 10.15, she was awake and restless, so Amy made her a cup of tea. When Amy brought the tea in, she found Katharine ‘breathing heavily’ with her face to the wall. She said she was hot and threw off her blankets. While Amy was out of the room, Katharine had a stroke. Amy came back in to hear her stutter, ‘Jolly’, her doctor’s name. Alec Jolly came straight over and gave her an injection to calm her. The way Amy remembers it, Katharine died as the noise of Ric’s plane roared overhead on its descent.²⁷ Her last moments were lived in anticipation of a reunion with her beloved son, trying to hold on just a little longer to see him.

HER FUNERAL WAS held two days later, on Saturday, at Karakatta Cemetery. There were 130 mourners, among them communists, writers, friends, and a wharfie in stained overalls. ‘The coffin, draped in a red flag, was decorated with one simple bunch of West Australian wildflowers.’²⁸ A brief service was held in the crematorium. Joan Williams’ husband, Vic, recited a poem he’d written in Katharine’s honour. A party member sang the ballad, ‘Beloved Comrade’, the lyrics promising the fight would continue until it was won.

Katharine requested ‘a cremation, the ashes to be scattered over the top of Greenmount … overlooking the lovely prospect and in view of the house where the happiest years of my life have been spent’.²⁹ Ric carried the cannister of her ashes to the spot where Hugo had always talked of building his dream house and eventually ‘wrenched off the lid of the tin and scattered the ash on the dry grass’.³⁰