6
Melbourne and New Zealand, 1906–1907
IN 1906, KATHARINE started teaching at Christ Church Grammar School. She struggled to control a class of thirty boys in three grades. The classes were all in one big hall, a ‘babel of teachers and boys talking against each other’. She had to contend with sexual harassment from her students. When a hook in her ‘flame-coloured blouse’ came undone, one of the boys offered to help her; instead, he ‘unfastened all the hooks’. Giving French lessons to the senior boys, one of them asked how to say, ‘I’d like to kiss you’. ‘Exhausted at the end of every day’, she resigned and took up private tutoring, leaving her ‘time to write in the afternoons, and to attend night lectures at the university’.1
These lectures ‘were the fulfilment of a long frustrated desire’; they broadened her understanding of literature and gave her a taste of university.2 Yet they were also a further frustration of her desire; unlike Hilda, Nettie and Christian, she wasn’t working towards a degree. She remained defensive and a little bitter about some of those who did. ‘I found that one of my cousins, who had got her degree, knew very little French, and less of international literature.’3
One of her lecturers was the academic and essayist Walter Murdoch; they talked when they caught the same tram, the beginning of a quiet friendship that would last the rest of their lives. He helped inspire in Katharine a love of the English writer George Meredith. Later, they would both move to Western Australia and would be considered the two giants of Western Australian literature. A literary scholar, Murdoch reached a wide audience writing for newspapers, with his popular columns on a wide range of topics appearing from 1905 onwards. Although they only saw each other irregularly, he wrote to Katharine in 1954, ‘What you mean to me, and have meant for nearly half a century, you will never guess’.4
IN MAY 1906, the first episode of ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ appeared in New Idea. It was a major leap forward in her literary career, putting her name alongside established writers Miles Franklin and Mary Gilmore, whose serials had previously been published in the magazine. One newspaper called it ‘a capital, racy sketch’ while another wrote that the editor ‘is to be congratulated on securing such an able writer as Miss Pritchard [sic] to follow Mrs Gilmore with descriptions of life in the inner parts of the continent’.5 Katharine had forced her father to take her writing seriously. He composed a poem in response, one of his last, in which he wrote that ‘our Kattie has taken wing’; it was ‘a touch of Quin-sy’—a swelling of the throat, punning on the name of the Tarella Station owners—‘ending in a case of swollen head’.6
IN JUNE 1906, Katharine attended a speech by a visiting Austrian academic named Rudolf Broda, a socialist in his mid-twenties. She described him as ‘a little man, with “much of a balcony” (big tummy), as the French say, and a round angelic countenance. It positively beamed with the beauty of a high and noble character’.7
He would discuss literature, art and music with eager joy in the manifestations of human genius, but always come back to the need for political and economic organization to release the potentialities of men and women from the poverty and injustices they suffered under a system by which the wealth and power of a few dominated the lives of a majority of the people.8
A journalist wrote that Rudolf’s ‘keen desire’ on his visit to Australia ‘was to meet the liberated, the enfranchised woman—advanced and intelligent men, he said, he could meet in Europe, but the Australian woman, who enjoyed a freedom social and political unknown elsewhere … he wished to … converse with’.9 When Katharine met him, she told him she was saving up to visit Europe; he asked her why she would want to see Europe when she lived ‘in the most progressive country in the world. You are making history here. You will write a new page in the story of the world. Helping to do that is more important than anything you can do, or write, in the old world’.10
Meeting Rudolf was Katharine’s first exposure to left-wing politics, and even though she would later find his reformist approach inadequate, she was inspired. The third federal election was held six months later with Alfred Deakin’s Protectionist Party retaining government in alliance with Labor. Katharine voted for the first time. Although women in Victoria did not have the right to vote at a state level until 1908, they had gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1902. There were three major parties contesting the election—the Labor Party representing the working class on the left, Deakin’s Protectionist Party in the middle, and George Reid’s Anti-Socialist Party on the right (formerly the Free Trade Party). Tom’s vote was firmly with the Anti-Socialist Party. Defying the politics of her family and her class, Katharine voted for Labor without her father’s knowledge. ‘He was ill at the time and I could not tell him.’11
Tom had just been released from an asylum and she was right to think he would have taken it badly. She had difficulty coming to terms with his politics even long after he was dead. In 1950 she apparently told Cyril Cook that ‘Tom Prichard was a liberal of the old school and a friend and admirer of Alfred Deakin’.12 Perhaps Cook misconstrued her or perhaps she grew more aware of her father’s politics in the years which followed as she read through his scrapbooks to research Child of the Hurricane; whichever was the case, she wrote in her autobiography that Tom’s politics were conservative, ‘anti one-man-one-vote, anti trade-unionism, anti even the liberalism of Deakin’.13 She had written another line, which she crossed out for the published version: ‘Strange it seems to me now, that so humane a man could have been so blind to the fundamental needs of humanity’.14
Tom had such strong conservative political convictions that he published a manifesto in 1902, Australian Popular Delusions, a collection of his columns from the Australian Mining Standard. He called for an expansion of cheap indentured labour from Asia, such as could be found in the plantations of the West Indies. He railed against the minimum wage in Australia, blaming it for the loss of investment in industry. Unions ‘have striven to put workmen into artificial families in which all share alike, the able with the incompetent, the lazy with the industrious’.15 He went on to condemn the welfare state, writing, ‘That the government which be made to give most lavishly is the best for people and, therefore, worthiest of their support, is a delusion which the spineless section of the community hugs very closely to its heart’.16
If Tom had lived to witness it, the eventual conversion of his daughter to communism—far to the left of Labor—would have been the most outrageous thing he could have imagined.
IN OCTOBER 1906, Katharine’s brother, Alan, nearly died from appendicitis. He was taken to hospital in an ambulance while the family waited at home. ‘What an appalling night that was … [knowing] that Alan might not live until morning. Father walked up and down the hall all night, frantic with anxiety.’ Alan lived but it ‘was a shock Father never recovered from’.17
Tom couldn’t sleep. He grew obsessively worried about Alan and about his job. Unable to work, he stopped going into the office, which only increased his worry. Edith and Alan had him committed to the Toorak House Asylum on 15 November. The doctors diagnosed him with delusions and melancholia. He was having trouble with dates and remembering anything from recent weeks. On 17 November, the doctor wrote, ‘Saw patient today but he seemed suspicious of me & wouldn’t converse’. A week later, he was discharged on probation, the doctor noting, ‘I thought advisable recommend removal as he seemed well but greatly worried & vexed at detainment in an asylum’.18
The doctor advised a sea voyage and months of rest. Edith thought Tom should visit his brothers in New Zealand with Katharine accompanying him. Money was tight and Katharine paid for both their fares with her savings.19 Katharine and Tom left on 12 December 1906, six days after the federal election, on the steamship Monowai.20 They spent Christmas 1906 in Christchurch and a few weeks later Katharine returned home, leaving Tom at his brother Alfred’s farm on the Canterbury plains.
There were blue snow-capped mountains in the distance but the plains looked bare and dreary … Heavy rocks, scattered far and wide, seemed to hold down the soil which would otherwise have been blown away by icy winds.
I hated to leave Father in such a place. He worked in old clothes, carting water and manure. It hurt to see him so humble and anxious to help out of doors. I felt that he should not be allowed to do such heavy work. But he insisted that this quiet, uneventful existence was what he needed for a while, and that physical toil would rest his mind.21
Writing her autobiography, the memory of leaving him in that bleak landscape—the heavy rocks and the icy winds—felt to her like a rehearsal for what came after.
THE DAILY LIFE of the Prichard household continued, anxiously, through the first half of 1907. Alan, twenty-two years old, was also working for the Australian Mining Standard. Nigel, now twenty, had left home to teach primary school students at Wangaratta Grammar, 230 kilometres north of Melbourne.22 Beatrice was fourteen and—despite being Anglican—attending a Catholic convent school.23 Edith’s widowed sister, Lilly Williams, moved in with the family in March, the same month Tom returned from New Zealand. ‘When Father came home from New Zealand he had lost weight and looked so much older. There were silver threads in the silky black hair he was so proud of.’24 It distressed him that he felt unable to return to the office, but working from home he did start writing for the Australian Mining Standard again.
He may have pretended that the manual labour and fresh New Zealand air had cured him, but it hadn’t. None of the family knew what to do for him. ‘Often during those last months, when he couldn’t sleep, he would ask me to sing to him. I sang for hours to soothe and comfort him.’ He took to praying obsessively.
We all knelt down round him in the little drawing-room, and long and earnestly he pleaded with God to restore him to health, give him another chance to provide for his dear wife and children. So humble and eloquent those outpourings were. Open-eyed I watched him, as he crouched over a chair, believing he was communing with God. It was torture to see the agony of mind he was suffering, and Mother’s anguish as she wept quietly beside him.25
Katharine bargained with God, promising to believe in his existence if Tom recovered, but ‘full of passionate resentment that Father and Mother should be suffering so cruelly; that their belief should require such humiliation. I felt that it was a farce, a tragic farce, to imagine there was a God who could hear their prayers and would avert the sorrow which threatened us’.26
IN CHILD OF THE HURRICANE, Katharine left the cause of Tom’s death unsaid. ‘In the end it seemed the struggle and frustration of many years had caught up with him.’27
On the morning of Thursday 27 June 1907, he was home with Edith, Katharine, Beatrice and Aunt Lilly. It had been a bad night and having been kept up by his restlessness, Edith returned to bed about 10.30 a.m. He came in to apologise and told her she should rest. Lilly saw him about 11.15 a.m. ‘He was then on the lawn close to the door of his tool-house. I did not like to watch him too closely because he felt this keenly. I did not speak to him. He had some wood in his hand. He had been making a bookshelf.’28
Lilly must have been worried about him; about half an hour later she ‘went to see how he was’. The door of the tool house was locked but she looked through the window and could see him hanging. ‘I tried to open the door but failing that I ran to my sister [Edith] for help. We burst in the door. There is a beam cross to which he’d tied the rope … My sister cut the rope. He had not been dead long. He was quite warm.’29
Katharine and Beatrice must have come out by now. Between the four of them, they laid Tom’s body out on a board in the shed. Someone was sent to fetch the family doctor as the others waited with the body. When the doctor arrived, he told them death would have been instantaneous. Someone placed a handkerchief over Tom’s face.30
‘Nothing was done’, Edith testified, ‘until the police came about 1.45 p.m.’ It had been two hours since they’d found the body by then. Were the police slow to come, or were the family slow to fetch them? Constable Creed said, ‘I went to the shed. I found the deceased lying on the board a handkerchief over his face. On removing the handkerchief I saw the marks of rope on his throat. He was quite dead. No marks of violence were visible … I was informed that the deceased was expert in making knots’.31
THE CORONIAL INQUEST was held the next day, Friday 28 June, by the district coroner. Edith, Lilly and Constable Creed gave their testimonies, leaving a fuller picture of this final, short day of Tom’s life than any other—his insomnia, his final, inconsequential words, the bookshelf he never finished making. Edith testified Tom had never threatened suicide but he had said ‘he would be better away than burdening us. He said this several times during the course of the illness’. After hearing the evidence, the coroner ruled that Tom had ‘committed suicide while temporarily of an unsound mind’.32
The funeral was the day after this, Saturday 29 June. The mourners gathered at Korovuna at 3.15 p.m. and processed the short distance along North Road to the Brighton Cemetery. ‘The very large number of mourners present testified to the high esteem in which he was held. These included journalists, representatives of the mining industry and commerce, and many friends.’33 On his gravestone is a verse from Psalms: ‘He sent from above, He took me, He drew me out of many waters’.