Greenmount, 2019
ON THE NIGHT of Wednesday 2 October 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of Katharine’s death, I drive to Katharine’s Place, home of the KSP Writers’ Centre since 1985. The Great Eastern Highway is a constant roar, four lanes of cars and trucks chugging up or hurtling down the Greenmount Hill. I park down the side in what was Katharine’s orchard. Her workroom still stands, but its view of the distant city could disappear soon when the neighbours finish building.
Katharine’s rundown cottage was at risk of demolition when Ric sold it after her death. I recently met Bronwyn Lewis, who lived in it as a teenager in the 1970s and returned to scatter the ashes of her mother, Patricia, in the garden. It was Patricia who decided to save the cottage, repairing and renovating it, naming it ‘Megalong’, and opening it to the public as an art gallery.
Katharine’s Place is full tonight. As I come through the outside kitchen into the sitting room, an ageing, excited David Helfgott—whom I have never met—kisses me on the cheek like we are old friends before moving off to greet someone else.
Tonight, Potchnagoola, a play written by David’s sister Louise Helfgott, is staged in the extension, the enclosed north verandah. The title, a combination of Katharine’s short story collections, is the name David used to give his time with Katharine. The backdrop to the set is a huge Soviet flag. It’s eerie watching two actors play the old Katharine and the young David on this anniversary, like a veneration or a seance. I feel a collapse of time, a haunting. At the end of the play, the real David plays Katharine’s original piano, which found its way back to the Centre in the 1980s. At quarter past ten, I imagine Katharine breathing heavily in her bedroom, beginning her final descent into death. Everyone is talking; we don’t stop.
ON SATURDAY, THERE’S a day-long commemoration at the centre. I stand in front of the red flag and announce with my fellow judge the winners of a Katharine Susannah Prichard-themed literary competition. The entries are a tapestry of the mythology around Katharine, Hugo and their house. In judging them, I had to let go of the overriding concern with historical accuracy I bring to my own work. In my biography I am stripping back mythology but with this different hat on I am encouraging it to grow.
One story wrestles with the complicated legacy of Coonardoo as an Asian-Australian woman working as a food-delivery driver meets with the ghost of Katharine and is threatened by Sam Geary, come to life from the pages of Coonardoo in all his sexism and racism.1 In another, a character named Kath who suffers debilitating migraines is determined to plant a vegetable garden at Katharine’s Place as an act of hope in the midst of a near-future crisis caused by climate change.2 In some of the non-fiction pieces, memoirists look to Katharine as a secular saint, her life an inspiration and a consolation. Twenty-first century Katharines, personal Katharines, comedic Katharines, they’re all there in the competition, along with a Hugo more mythic than ever in the glow of Anzac veneration.3
Karen Throssell has flown over from Melbourne for the event, and launches an anthology of the best competition entries called Kaleidoscope: The Colours of Katharine. Her speech is warm and generous while still touching on her strong conviction that Katharine’s literary legacy must never be stripped of its politics. She speaks of having to overcome the feelings of ‘exposure and intrusion that comes from having members of your family as public property’, and eventually seeing the positive aspects of that exposure, including the reverence with which many hold Katharine and Hugo and the new knowledge about them that researchers have unearthed.4
It’s another sad anniversary in 2019—twenty years since Karen’s parents, Ric and Dodie, died on the same day in their house in Canberra. Faced with Dodie’s death from cancer, Ric took his own life at the age of seventy-six. He lived three decades after his mother, and spent many of those years wrestling with her legacy and his father’s. In 1989 he published My Father’s Son, describing his Kafkaesque attempts to escape the secret suspicions which prevented him being promoted in his diplomatic career. I found a video-taped show about the book, the television crew following him to Katharine’s Place for the first time since Katharine’s death. He remarked on how it had changed—the outside kitchen enclosed, the wall of his old bedroom taken down to extend the sitting room—but he thought that was a good thing, because Katharine never wanted a museum. He was in his sixties then, dressed in a brown suit and tie, and he was melancholy as he relived the past, well-spoken and thoughtful.
After the launch of the anthology, I stand on Katharine’s verandah talking to people who have come to commemorate her. A literary pilgrim who has followed in Katharine’s footsteps to Moscow, Turee Station, Kalgoorlie, and many other places. A Queen’s Counsel passionate about Victoria Cross winners whose interest in Hugo Throssell has spread to Katharine. A man with disabilities whose story in the anthology tells of how, on a trip to Perth in the 1970s, Katharine’s books become crucial to him finding confidence and hope. He thought he saw her ghost at the house. And a writer who has spent three decades working on a history of the Workers’ Art Guild, with Katharine a central figure; it has finally seen print and he is signing copies. There’s a WH Auden poem with a line about writers becoming their admirers at the moment they die.5 As a biographer, I tend to think of the writer becoming their archive at the moment they die, but in a different sense, Auden was right too. If Katharine’s world had narrowed by the end of her life, it seems wide again in this gathering of devotees fifty years into her afterlife.
It’s been a strange couple of days, my years of solitary research and writing suddenly having a correlation in the real world outside my laptop, my rows of books, and my visits to libraries. The spring afternoon is over too quickly and I drive back down the hill to the city to return to my silent remembering.