8
Melbourne, July 1907–May 1908
BY THE END OF 1907, the Prichard family had moved out of the house where Tom had died to 94 Caroline Street, South Yarra, just a few kilometres from the Melbourne city centre. Alfred Deakin, then prime minister, lived nearby and not only knew Katharine’s mother but also two of Katharine’s admirers, Reay and Walter Murdoch. Katharine ‘walked into town with him sometimes … he, tall and stooping … already worn and disillusioned; I, full of idealistic illusions, and my intention to become “a famous writer” as soon as possible’.1 They talked of the writers they loved, especially George Meredith, whom Deakin had visited while in Britain earlier in 1907.2 ‘I did most of the talking’, Katharine wrote, ‘and Mr Deakin listened to my blithe chatter with a grave smile. So sensitive and sympathetic, that I knew when he was sharing my enthusiasm’.3 Deakin wrote her a general letter of introduction to take to London in 1908 as well as one addressed to George Meredith.4
Many years later, Katharine wrote a didactic play about Deakin for the 1951 jubilee of federation competition. It was not shortlisted; nor was it ever performed. By that time, she was a rigid communist, but the play shows she still greatly admired the liberal politician for his role in achieving federation and shaping the new nation. Exaggerating her family connection to Deakin, the characters based on her parents, Tom and Edith Pollard, return from Fiji to witness key moments in Deakin’s life and become his close friends and confidantes. Instead of dying in 1907, Tom outlives Deakin, saying in the epilogue after Deakin’s death in 1919, ‘You have gone beyond the Veil, Deakin. And we, old friends, grieve for you as we knew you—the soul of honour, poet, philosopher, and ardent lover of your country’.5
The influence of Deakin and Reay is apparent in ‘Defence of Australia’, a passionate opinion piece by Katharine published in the Herald in May 1908 marking the first known use of the initialism ‘KSP’. Concern over Australia’s defence had been growing since Japan’s victory in its war with Russia in 1905. The influential Military Defence League brought together leaders from different sectors of society to agitate for compulsory military training for all young men. As a nationalist, Reay was a strong advocate for the policy and had written a series of articles on the Swiss military training system, published as a pamphlet in August 1907. Deakin had come around to the idea gradually, finally committing his government to it in December 1907. Conflict in the unstable parliaments over details of the legislation meant it was not passed for some time. The scheme eventually began in 1911 under the Labor government, with compulsory training for boys and men from ages twelve to twenty-six.6
As Deakin looked to grow popular support for the scheme in 1908, Katharine’s article called on women to play their part by shunning any man who evaded training. ‘Women will have nothing to do with him, for he is either a weakling who is unfit for, or a poor-spirited wretch who has evaded the discharge of a sacred and patriotic duty.’ Katharine explicitly evoked the fear of an ‘Asiatic invasion’, writing with racism typical of the time but disturbing today, ‘It is difficult for us to realise that the small yellow man, whose slant eyes squint at a woman in the street … hopes, in his secret brain, some day to be possessor and lord of our country. We must prepare against his hope …’. Among answers to common objections, Katharine wrote that although ‘compulsory training sounds like a curtailing of public liberty … it is just the means whereby we may establish, emphasize and maintain our independence, safeguard our freedom, and snap our fingers at the suggestion of invasion’.7
Her strong support for the scheme might seem surprising, given her interest in the socialism of Rudolf Broda, whom she had met two years before. However, parts of the left were in favour of the idea. The federal conference of the Labor Party pledged its support in July 1908 while Reay’s pamphlet noted that the Swiss socialists ‘accept and uphold’ the training system in their country.8 Katharine’s support for an Australian scheme in 1908 is the background to her dilemma over conscription during the first referendum on the issue in 1916.
IN DECEMBER 1907, Rudolf Broda published the first issue of an ambitious journal called The International: A Review of the World’s Progress. Released simultaneously in French, German and English, he wrote that it ‘will aim at being a mirror of the entire panorama of human evolution in all its many aspects’.9
In that first issue, alongside a piece on wage boards by Reay and ‘The Women’s Movement in Australia’ by the suffragist Vida Goldstein, Katharine contributed a short manifesto on Australian literature. She wrote of how Australian literature was moving past the imitative stage of its infancy:
It has reached the adolescent stage—it is astir with great things; growing daily in power and freedom. Bushrangers, drought, and dead sheep have too long been the entire tale of our existence. With our national feeling is growing a sane and vigorous treatment of the problems which affect our social and political life … The genesis of nationhood lies in its literature, and with the notion of elevating and glorifying the patriotic instincts Australian writers are dragging the minds of Australian people at the chariot wheels of their imaginations. Yet the muse of Australia is elusive—[Henry] Kendall caught ‘A glimpse of her face and her glittering hair / And a hand with the harp of Australia’. But no-one has completely expressed the characteristic of our country, life and people. We await transfiguration at the hands of a great writer.10
Katharine’s aspirations and opinions were not unique. They reflected the hope of the Australian Literature Society she was a part of with Nettie Palmer, the ideas of Walter Murdoch and writers like Bernard O’Dowd, as well as the vigorous nationalism espoused by Reay and the Australian Natives’ Association. Yet her statement is remarkably prescient. Eight years before the publication of her first novel, she anticipated the goal she was to pursue throughout her long literary career: the attempt to express the ‘characteristic of our country, life and people’. It is the thread which runs through her diverse oeuvre. In a poignant echo of this opening statement, she was to write in a kind of last testament in 1968, one year before she died: ‘My work has been unpretentious: of the soil … telling of the way men and women live and work in the forests, back country and cities of Australia’.11
In the 1907 statement, the development of an Australian literature was coinciding with Katharine’s own literary development. She ascribed to the nation the very things she was striving for—to throw off ‘imitativeness’; to grow ‘daily in power and freedom’. She was ‘astir with great things’. She wrote the piece with confidence and verve. Perhaps she dared to hope she would be the ‘great writer’ the nation awaited.
IN 1908, KATHARINE wrote the first draft of The Wild Oats of Han.12 Ric Throssell imagines it as a ‘turn from the pain-filled present … to the memories of childhood in Launceston with her beloved young brothers, Alan and Nigel’.13 Yet Wild Oats evokes not just a carefree idyll but also its shattering as Han becomes aware of death and the struggles of life. Katharine left the manuscript in draft form for years; for some reason she wasn’t ready to try to publish it yet. Perhaps, as Jack Beasley speculates, she realised that ‘the hapless father character she had created might have been regarded as an insensitive portrait of her own father, so soon after his death’. Or perhaps the draft still fell short of her hopes for the work. Ric Throssell notes that the version eventually published in 1928 ‘bears none of the hallmarks of Katharine’s earliest stories’, but instead shows the lyricism, sensitivity and perception of her best novels written in the 1920s; he believes she rewrote it extensively in that period.14
Ric might be right, but Katharine’s most accomplished story of this period, ‘The Kid’, shows what she was already capable of, as well as having some resemblances to Wild Oats. Published by the Bulletin in January 1907, ‘The Kid’ is a gothic bush story. When the Kid’s beloved baby half-brother dies, she runs away with his body, determined to stop God taking him away to sell for his skin like her father does with dead cattle. A few days later, her body is found with the baby’s under a white gum ‘like a column of stainless marble’.15 The theme and setting come together convincingly and Katharine gives death an emotional impact lacking in the melodrama of her other stories of the period. The Bulletin was at the centre of Australian literary culture and being published in it built on her success in New Idea. The grimness of the story befitted the bleak period in the Prichard household, published as it was while Tom was still alive but gripped by depression.
TURNING TWENTY-FOUR AT the end of 1907, there was a great sense of possibility for Katharine even in the midst of grief. She hadn’t narrowed her choices by marrying. Her writing career was budding, her beloved but restrictive father was dead, and her well-travelled ‘friend’, Reay, was encouraging her to see the world. When a cheap fare was advertised for London, she decided to go.16
For young Australian women at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘just embarking for London’, writes Angela Woollacott, ‘was often construed as a sign of success and ambition’.17 Returning ‘home’ to the centre of the British empire seeking fame and success was a ‘recognised cultural ritual in Australia’.18 Katharine saw the trip as a literary and ancestral pilgrimage: ‘I had hoped for years that some day I would see the historic places, and haunts of the great English writers’. It was also a chance to prove herself: ‘I thought an Australian writer would never be appreciated in her country until she proved that her writing could win some recognition in England’.19
Yet her focus was not on fiction as it had been until now but journalism. She had freelance work guaranteed with New Idea on the strength of the popularity of the ‘City Girl’ serial and with the Herald thanks to her relationship with Reay. ‘A Franco-British Exhibition was to be held in London that year. The Herald agreed to accept some articles about it, and the New Idea editor, my good friend William Somerset Shum, suggested interviews I might do for him. In a whirl of excitement I booked a passage.’20 Katharine had turned her back on teaching and remade herself into a journalist. She was confident enough to list it as her occupation on the passenger list.21