4
Yarram, Victoria, 1904
THE HIGHLIGHT OF Katharine’s desultory year of housekeeping was her first adult success as a writer, winning a love story competition run by New Idea journal with a tale called ‘Bush Fires’ despite ‘knowing nothing about either love or bushfires’.1 Katharine gave the main character her own name. She described Kath’rin’ as ‘an Australian woman, browned with the wind and sun, inured to the open-air life of freedom and danger. The countryside loved her for her fearlessness, the physical strength of her beautiful body, the sweet charity of her woman’s eyes’.2 Kath’rin’ rides recklessly into a bushfire to save her estranged lover; she is reconciled to him, only for both of them to be killed by the fire. Like much of Katharine’s early work, she sets romance against a quintessentially Australian backdrop.
In Katharine’s memory, her decision to become a governess was connected to her literary ambitions. She decided, ‘I must know more about bushfires, love, and the country beyond our ranges’ and announced to her family her intention to work as a governess to a family in the country.3 It was a chance to escape.
Governessing was one of the few respectable careers open to young women at the turn of the twentieth century. The status of governesses was ambiguous—not really one of the servants, if there were any, and not quite part of the family.4 Although usually well educated, their need to work would have suggested their families were not wealthy.5 Perhaps this implication of middle-class poverty was why Tom and Katharine’s aunts objected to her plan. However, Edith had worked as a governess for a time before she was married; now recovered from sciatica, she ‘quietly and practically sided’ with Katharine against the objections.6
And so, at the beginning of 1904, at twenty years old, Katharine set out to live away from her family for the first time, as a governess in the isolated town of Yarram, 220 kilometres south-east of Melbourne in South Gippsland. With a population of about four hundred, it had recently become the largest of the cluster of towns settled in the 1840s and 1850s. She was to teach the two children of the local doctor William Muir and his wife, Lizzy—13-year-old Marjorie and 9-year-old Charles. ‘It was an adventure into life, away from books.’7
Katharine was close to Dr Muir. On weekends she went with him ‘on some of his long journeys to see patients in the mountains and along the coast’. It seems incredible that there was no scandal in the town about the 41-year-old doctor taking his 20-year-old governess with him on long trips, unchaperoned. He had ‘intellectual interests beyond his surgery’ and so they discussed literature and ideas; at home in the evenings he read Robert Burns to her ‘in the broad Scottish tongue’, giving her a new appreciation for the poet.8
There must have been some tension with Lizzy, even if Katharine couldn’t remember it in retrospect. It comes through in Katharine’s description of her as a ‘pretty woman, in her thirties, plump and amiable. Her favourite occupation seemed to be sitting on a sofa, sucking her thumb and plucking fleas from her little dog’s pelt. She played aristocratic roles in productions of the Yarram Dramatic Society as if to the manner born’. When Katharine arrived, Lizzy initially expected her to ‘help with all manner of household tasks. I explained that I had been engaged to teach, and wasn’t prepared to darn socks or do the ironing, after school hours. That being understood, we got on very well’. With typical ambivalence, Katharine added ‘as a favour … I often did help with domestic doings’.9 If Lizzy had felt threatened by her forthright, slim governess, she gave no hint in the reference she wrote her: ‘We have great pleasure in recommending Miss Prichard as governess. She lived with me for one year in that capacity & gave every satisfaction. I consider her an excellent teacher, the progress my children made under her tuition was marvellous, & it is with great regret we parted with Miss Prichard’.10
Katharine was learning German that year and ‘when a German doctor, temporarily living in the town, visited the Muirs … he offered to help me with my studies’. Her encounter with him ‘brought me closer to the dark realities of life, and left a psychological impression which was never obliterated’.11 She called him ‘Dr Paul’ in Child of the Hurricane and described him as ‘elderly’. His real name was far more unlikely—Otto Gmelin—and he was only 43 years old. Gmelin ‘came twice a week and we read Goethe’s Faust together’.
Sometimes he talked brilliantly about famous places in Europe, or distinguished writers and artists with whom he was acquainted. Sometimes, strangely overcast and morose, he scarcely spoke at all … These German lessons were a pleasant break in the quiet nights I usually spent in my room. Quite guileless, I looked forward to Dr Paul’s visits.12
Lizzy heard rumours about Gmelin and warned Katharine about him—he was a married man and a cocaine addict; he was too fond of Katharine, and she must not ‘encourage’ him but put an end to his visits.
Gmelin lived a troubled life, a doctor always in desperate circumstances. After graduating in medicine from the German city of Leipzig, he came to Victoria in 1891, already a cocaine addict with ‘completely shattered’ nerves.13 In 1893 he was sentenced to two months in prison for larceny. By 1899 he had recovered his fortunes enough to run a practice in Lilydale and marry, in an elaborate wedding, 18-year-old Edith Clarke, the niece of the minister for customs.14 In their eventual divorce case, Edith testified that Gmelin became close to a Miss Blyth, who would come to their house until all hours. On 18 May 1904, heavily drunk, Gmelin announced he was leaving her, and departed at midnight with Miss Blyth and all his surgical instruments. The next month, Gmelin began advertising his practice in the local Yarram newspaper. By that time, he’d lost Miss Blyth.
After Lizzy’s warning, Katharine initially tried avoiding him, allowing Lizzy to tell him she did not wish to continue the German lessons. However, he was so persistent that eventually Dr Muir told Katharine to talk to Gmelin herself. ‘It was an appalling interview. I was cruel and uncompromising in my youthful ignorance; astounded to hear this elderly man talk in such a distraught way about his love for me and beg me to go to Europe with him. “You’re old, over sixty”, I said. “How could I ever think of such a thing?”’15 According to Katharine, Gmelin left town the next day; his final advertisement in the Gippsland Standard appeared on 26 October. In late November, Katharine was horrified to read in the newspaper that Gmelin was in hospital after collapsing at the Russell Street police station in Melbourne; in his pocket was ‘a hypodermic syringe and a phial of atropine’, a poison extracted from deadly nightshade and sometimes used with morphine to commit suicide.16 Katharine blamed herself and spent anxious days wondering if he would live. He did, but for the first time—setting aside her nurse, N’gardo—the shadow of suicide had come over her life.
WITH LIZZY’S ENCOURAGEMENT, Katharine became involved in the Yarram Dramatic Society’s production of Arthur Pinero’s play Sweet Lavender (1888), a sentimental comedy which was one of the most popular plays of the period. Katharine played the eponymous Lavender, a young woman who must overcome obstacles to marry a law student. The locals started calling Katharine ‘Lavender’, a nickname which stuck for years afterwards as she cultivated an association with the plant. The one-off performance of the play was held on the night of the annual show, Wednesday 23 November, a public holiday in the shire.17
On the wet and muddy show day, Katharine came first in the ladies’ trot to young men yelling, ‘Ten to one on Sweet Lavender’, but she was disqualified for galloping.18 The Mechanics’ Hall was ‘filled to its utmost capacity’ for the play by eight p.m. The newspaper recorded, ‘The central figure of the play was Sweet Lavender, a fascinating young lady of undoubted charms, nicely acted by Miss Prichard’. The annual dance afterwards ran until 4 in the morning.19
The long show day was the climax of that year and a farewell to the town. The way she remembered it, she ‘planned to stay only a year in one place’ as she was determined ‘to learn more about Australia, our country and people’ but the character reference from Lizzy dated December 1904 shows it was actually the Muirs who let her go: ‘it is with great regret we parted with Miss Prichard, our reason for doing so was our approaching return to England’.20
THE YARRAM LOCALS found Katharine an interesting topic of conversation; Anne Home, then a child, remembered:
I overheard the following conversation over the teacups one afternoon when the local gossip was being passed round, the new and only governess in the town being the highlight.
Mrs A: ‘Have you seen Dr M’s new governess?’
Mrs B: ‘No, but I hear she is quite a blue stocking, one of those literary girls, the sort that has holes in her stockings and lives with her nose in a book. They say that she has come down here for copy.’21
Perhaps it was clear even at that point that Katharine was intent on turning her time in South Gippsland into ‘copy’, although it’s also possible the knowledge of Katharine’s later literary success influenced Anne Home’s reminiscence in 1946.
In 1968, looking back on her career, Katharine wrote, ‘In reaction to [Henry] Lawson’s descriptions of the dreary and drought-stricken districts of New South Wales, I wanted to write of the beauty of forests and river meadows in South Gippsland’.22 The area was to inspire two major works. The first was a 10,000-word short story, ‘Diana of the Inlet’ (1912). Drawing on her memories of the landscape from an Easter holiday with the Muirs at nearby Port Albert, Katharine evoked the power and beauty of nature in mythical and religious terms—‘There is a mysterious spell in the lonely stillness and beauty of the forest hills. The air, with its mingled musky aroma of trees, its wild, heavy fragrance of flowers, is narcotic’.23 The anonymous narrator visits the promontory and seeks out a hermit who lives in the bush, the survivor of a shipwreck whose ordeal caused him to embrace nature and decide that cities are ‘plague spots—filthy and reeking of men’s vices’.24
The second work inspired by South Gippsland was to be her breakthrough success—her first published novel, The Pioneers (1915). The novel begins with a Scottish couple, Donald and Mary Cameron, overcoming the hardships of the land to establish a farm in South Gippsland in the 1840s. Jumping forward to the next generation, it describes the development of the district and the rebellion of their only son, Davey, as he falls in love with Deirdre, an escaped convict’s daughter, and strives to make his own way in the new country, free of the restraints of the old country.
Katharine obscured the geographical and historical setting of The Pioneers by renaming the places; the last page of a notebook for the novel reveals her key: ‘Tarra = Wirrie; Tarraville = Wirrieford; Port Albert = Port Southern; Sale = Rane; Yarram = Ayrmuir’.25 When the novel won a competition in 1915, her uncle’s newspaper reported, ‘Miss Prichard knows well the country of which she writes. Her material was gathered in talks with old people about the early days and the early settlers in the country. Some were survivors of the pioneering days. It is to a certain extent folk history’.26 The pioneers of South Gippsland were dying off in 1904. In June, Katharine might have read in the local newspaper:
One by one are the pioneers of the district entering the portal which is called Death … They depart hence honoured in memory by those who, following in the pioneer’s footsteps, have no regrets at having chosen South Gippsland as a field in which to labour, if not to ultimately reach the goal of mankind—wealth and comfort, and freedom from care.27
Like the editor of the Gippsland Standard, Katharine was to reflect on the meaning of pioneering and the legacy to the future generations. The major source of conflict between Donald Cameron and his son Davey is the wealthy father’s meanness about money; if the next generation is not allowed to live comfortably, what is the point of all that striving? In the penultimate chapter, Davey’s mother Mary declares, ‘Oh God, we broke the earth, we sowed the seed. Let theirs be the harvest—the joy of life and the fullness thereof’.28
Katharine claimed to have met an escaped convict while in Yarram and she wove his tales into The Pioneers.29 The colonial South Gippsland of The Pioneers is filled with escapees who have made their way by sea from Van Diemen’s Land. One of the escapees, the Schoolmaster, reveals to Mary that he was an Irish political prisoner; he proves to be a sacrificial hero. Convicts, Katharine was arguing, were often the victims of a cruel system. Today, that seems an easy political point to make, even if it was more challenging a century ago. Katharine was, of course, less aware of aspects of colonial settlement which stand out today: the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the degradation of the environment. At this stage of her political awareness, she was oblivious to the first and only hinted at the second.
The Scottish explorer and pastoralist Angus McMillan was long honoured as someone who ‘pioneered Gippsland and spent the rest of his life contributing to its welfare’; for decades his portrait hung in the Shire of Alberton chambers in Yarram and the adjacent federal parliamentary seat was named after him in 1948.30 Yet in 2018, the seat was renamed; today he is notorious for his role in the 1843 Warrigal Creek massacre in which many Aboriginal people were murdered 30 kilometres north of the future site of Yarram.31 Katharine may have had no knowledge of the massacre; ‘a wall of silence fell across the incident’.32 Aboriginal people only have a shadowy presence in The Pioneers, their existence mentioned in passing at several points, but without any awareness that the white settlement of the area involved their displacement and murder. The Aboriginal minor character, Teddy, is spoken to but never speaks; he often becomes ‘the black boy’. Three decades later, when Katharine wrote another novel of pioneers—this time of the Western Australian goldfields—The Roaring Nineties (1946), she began with a short, violent story of the abduction of an Aboriginal woman by prospectors before gold has even been discovered; the novel is haunted by the presence of displaced and mistreated Aboriginal people.
With Katharine’s rapturous appreciation of nature, and particularly trees, she may have experienced the denuded farmland around Yarram as a wound on the land. At the midpoint of the novel, Deirdre, the beautiful young heroine, contemplates a dead tree with its ‘hacked zone that the axe of a settler had made when he ring-barked it years ago … It might have been an avenging spirit of the wilderness, it stood with an air of such tragic desolation by the wayside’.33 The tree finally falls in a climactic chapter, killing Donald Cameron as he rides past it; Deirdre wonders ‘if he had ring-barked the tree … and in turn it had killed him’.34
As she wrote The Pioneers in a cramped, cold London flat in the winter of 1914, she ‘returned to the lovely countryside about the Tarwin River, with Wilson’s Promontory outlined against the sky’.35 The memory of South Gippsland was a quintessentially Australian space where she could play out her romance tale, interweaving it with her patriotic hope for a new, better nation as her generation, the grandchildren of the pioneers, took over. In the epilogue to the novel, Deirdre and Davey’s son Dan remembers his grandmother Mary telling him, ‘You will be a pioneer too, Dan … a pioneer of paths that will make the world a better, happier place for everybody to live in’.36
Katharine was only in Yarram for a year but it was a long year in her memory and, like Launceston, she revisited it in fiction and autobiography, in this case a time and place of adult freedom and sexual naïvety before tragedy struck.