5

Outback

Tarella Station, NSW, 1905

AT THE TIME she turned twenty-one, Katharine found herself back home for six months, without work and probably clashing with her family after a year of relative freedom. While she was away Tom had sent her a poem called ‘Now that Kattie isn’t Here’, twelve stanzas of doggerel which give a picture of what it was like to live with Katharine. She is an ‘audacious peace disturber’ and without her ‘my den is uninvaded’; in her absence, the family’s ‘grip on O’Mimosa’ and other popular songs ‘is relaxing very sadly’. She apparently not only moves all Tom’s ‘papers, books and pens’ but now that she’s gone even his ‘hammer, planes & ruler / Can be found in half a jiffy’.¹

Katharine’s friend Hilda had been at Presbyterian Ladies’ College with Hazel Quin, a boarder whose parents needed a governess for their younger children on their sheep station, Tarella, in north-western New South Wales.² Perhaps it was through this connection that Katharine was offered the job, starting in May 1905 when the Quin family returned to the station after spending the hotter half of the year at their house in Melbourne.

Tom sent Katharine on her way with another poem and a Bible. The poem, ‘Magna Est Veritas’ (‘great is truth’), exhorts Katharine to ‘do thou the right’ and never lie, so that the truth’s presence might ‘guard thy life from stain’ with its ‘vestal purity’.³ Even if the topic is ostensibly the matter of truth telling, it suggests a plea that Katharine retain her virginity.

Tarella is located so far west in New South Wales that the nearest capital city is Adelaide, and Katharine’s journey with the Quin family began with a train ride there. After Adelaide ‘came the slow train trundling to Broken Hill’, the end of the line, and they then had a 500-kilometre, two-day Cobb and Co coach ride into the outback.⁴

While at Tarella Station, Katharine began writing a six-part serial called ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’, published in New Idea the next year. The serial is in the form of letters from ‘Kit’ to her mother from a station called ‘Willara’. It’s a strange work, having a deliberate basis in real events and people while consciously exaggerating many elements, culminating in high melodrama in the final instalment. ‘While descriptions of the country and station life were vivid and realistic, I had strung them on a thread of fiction; silly, sentimental fiction at that.’⁵

In ‘City Girl’, the coach drive from Broken Hill to the station is perilous. Only the rough but honourable coach-driver, Billy Northwest, can save Kit from a drunk, ‘evil-smelling Irish brute’ travelling next to her. In Child of the Hurricane, Katharine confessed, ‘As a matter of fact … the driver was a sober respectable middle-aged man, not in the least likely to tie himself in knots outside a female passenger’s door. But my romantic imagination required a reckless and dashing cavalier’.⁶ A letter writer to the Barrier Miner newspaper rebuked her for the exaggerations in her first instalment:

She looks upon a trip into the heart of our back country as an adventure; she looks upon all who dwell here as specimens to be commented upon by her uncertain pen. She saw only in her travels the flippant side of life that appealed to her vanity—not the worth in those who in this land fight on bravely with the droughts and the duststorms and floods.⁷

The letter concluded, ‘Let us hope that “Kit’s” contribution to the next New Idea will smack of a little common-sense and be tainted with just a hint of truth’; the letter writer would have grown steadily angrier as they read on month by month and Kit’s adventures became more and more outlandish. Yet ultimately, Katharine took the advice to heart. Throughout her career she would often return to the people of the backblocks of Australia, but never again as a city girl encountering them as ‘specimens’. Avoiding the first person and writing from the inside of communities, The Pioneers (1915) and Black Opal (1921) were the first of many novels in her oeuvre to valorise rural Australians.

EDWARD AND EDITH Quin had taken over the 685,000 acres of Tarella in 1872, expanding the flocks to 120,000 sheep and building a new homestead in 1879. The station ‘was like a feudal domain … with the homestead the centre of a village; the huts of stockmen and station-hands, a store, smithy, stockyards, and innumerable sheds’.⁸ In between her duties as governess teaching her three students, Katharine witnessed horses broken in, cattle branded and the intense shearing season. In the past there had been industrial disputes between Edward Quin and the shearers. During the 1891 shearers’ strike, Quin maintained control, paying the workers the rates set by the pastoralists.⁹ Then, after another strike in 1902, he eventually conceded to the shearers’ demand that he pay the union wage.¹⁰ When the shearers strike in the fictionalised ‘City Girl’, the Boss sacks them all. Katharine’s political awareness was low at this point and her alter ego, Kit, is just an observer, not taking a side.

On weekends, Katharine went on expeditions to the outlying parts of the property and beyond. She visited the White Cliffs opal field and described it in ‘City Girl’; the experience planted the seed for her third novel Black Opal (1921). She spent much time absorbing the landscape and describing it in her ‘big black exercise book’.¹¹ Those six months were the longest she would ever spend in the outback, and she stored up her experiences to draw on over the rest of her literary career, eventually revisiting station life directly in Coonardoo (1929).¹²

KATHARINE’S STUDENTS WERE ‘sedate little girls of from twelve to sixteen, an elder sister for English and French, and the grown-up daughter of the house for drawing and painting’ but she found the teaching hard, putting ‘a great deal of nervous energy’ into it and coming down with headaches at the end of each day.¹³ She found the nightly dinners an ordeal; there was not only all the Quins to socialise with but usually guests passing through as well. Katharine was introverted. She could handle social interactions well enough, but needed solitude to recover.

The grown-up daughter Katharine mentioned was Tarella Quin, named after the station; she was a writer herself and published two adult novels about station life and several books of children’s stories between 1907 and 1934. Nothing is known of the conversations Katharine and Tarella had, living for months under the same roof in 1905, two aspiring women writers in their twenties with an interest in depicting the outback.¹⁴

THERE WAS MUTUAL attraction between Katharine and Tarella’s brother, Alfred Quin, the 29-year-old younger son of the family.

He had a pointed red beard and eyes the colour of whisky. It was the beard which captured my imagination; but he also looked my ideal of an Australian stockman: tall, slender, reserved and sensitive; walking with the graceful slouch of a man more accustomed to riding than walking … When accidentally one day the red beard brushed my bare arm, it sent a quivering all through me. Such a thing had never happened before.¹⁵

She would befriend many poets and thinkers for their minds, but it was outdoorsmen like Alfred she was usually attracted to.

To celebrate the coming of the rains, ‘folk from a hundred miles away were invited to a ball at the station’. Perhaps the ball would bring things to a head. In ‘City Girl’, it happens in mid-August: ‘I resolved to depart the austere path of my youth … I swore to the moon and all the mute, gaunt mulga, to be young and merry. There is a ball coming, and a week of festivities, in which this interesting determination is to make its debut’.¹⁶ The ball was held after a ‘sumptuous dinner’, Katharine wearing ‘a frock of filmy cirrus and cumuli sewed with threads of starlight’ as she danced with ‘a tall gangling bloke with a walrus moustache before Red Beard came to me for a waltz. We sat in silence in the moonlight afterwards, beside an orange-tree in flower. It was the best part of the evening for me.’¹⁷

With the guests staying on for two nights, the next day was a tennis tournament, followed by a fancy-dress dance in the evening. Katharine stood out that night, dressed as a Spanish dancer with a tight bodice and an artificial rose in her hair. To the applause of the guests, she ‘whirled into the Spanish dance of which Father had disapproved, long ago, when I was a schoolgirl’.¹⁸ Afterwards, Alfred fought another man who ‘boasted in the men’s hut that “he had seen Miss Prichard’s drawers”’ as she twirled about. Yet even this was no proper declaration; she only heard about it from his sister.¹⁹

Katharine fictionalised this ball and the dance not just in ‘City Girl’ but also in Black Opal. In both of these works, the fickle young man chooses another woman only to realise his mistake, declare his love for the heroine and die.

Events were far less decisive in real life. Edward warned Katharine, ‘No use your making eyes at my son, Miss Thinga-me-Bob. He’s engaged to the daughter of an old friend’.²⁰ Denying she made eyes at anybody, Katharine ‘would scarcely look at Red Beard after that’. The weather was heating up, the Quins were returning to Melbourne and Katharine was to go with them. Alfred’s ‘charm had diminished when he shaved off his beard. He looked like quite an ordinary young man then; but I was still aware of the mysterious attraction between us’. He came in to see her a few days before she was leaving, working up the courage to ask her if she had been told he was engaged to someone else. When she said she had, he told her it wasn’t true. Katharine ‘feigned indifference and went on correcting exercise books. No doubt if Red Beard had said something in the manner of a traditional lover, I would have responded. But he didn’t. I thought he was afraid of displeasing his father. My pride was hurt’.²¹