Nathan Hobby - The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard

This is number two hundred and five
in the second numbered series of the
Miegunyah Volumes
made possible by the
Miegunyah Fund
established by bequests
under the wills of
Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.
Miegunyah was Russell Grimwades home
from 1911 to 1955
and Mab Grimwades home
from 1911 to 1973.

THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text Nathan Hobby, 2022

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Pfisterer + Freeman

Cover image: Katharine in her sitting room, 1949 (D. Glass, NAA)

Text design and typesetting by Cannon Typesetting

Printed and bound in Malaysia for Imago

9780522877380 (hardback)

9780522877397 (ebook)

I N THE 1930S, a journalists grandmother pointed out a wooden cottage near the top of a hill on the outskirts of Perth and said that a red witch named Katharine Susannah Prichard lived there. Thirty years later, that journalist used the term in an article celebrating Katharines eightieth birthday and red witch began to catch on as a moniker for her. She was all of those thingsfounding member of the Communist Party of Australia, widow of a war hero who came from an establishment family, and an author whose distinctively Australian novels were published around the world.

My path to becoming Katharines biographer began with a novel I had been working on. Writing about a fictional biographer for five years before abandoning the manuscript, I was intrigued by the pursuit of the past, the quest to tell the story of someone from their archival remains. It became clear to me that I needed to do that in real life, rather than only imagining it. I wanted to write about someone who had walked the same streets as me in Perth. The more I looked at Katharine Susannah Prichards life, the more it seemed her many biographical mysteries and controversies hadnt been untangled and her story had not yet been fully told. Whats more, I found her work as interesting as her life; Id always liked Coonardoo, but I started reading through her other books from the beginning and found a breadth and vitality which surprised me.

Katharine lived long enough to feel neglected in the post World War II literary landscape. She wrote in 1968 that it was a shock to read in the introduction to Modern Australian Writing a reference to a naissance, not a renaissance, of Australian literature, implying that nothing worth mentioning had happened in the literature of Australia before the advent of Patrick White and Randolph Stow. As well as this continuing scholarly interest, Katharine has a popular following, with a number of her books remaining in print and her wooden cottage now a writers centre named in her honour. In 2020, Working Bullocks and Intimate Strangers were selected for republication by Untapped: the Australian literary heritage project. All of this indicates Katharines ongoing significance to Australian literature.

Its true that her loyalty to Stalin is a dark part of her legacy which needs to be reckoned with. In tracing her political journey in this biography, I found that she was guilty not of intentionally deceiving others nor of any evil intent but of deceiving herself; she had a fundamentalist faith in the Soviet Union and refused to accept anything which contradicted it.

Katharine had a troubled relationship to biography in her lifetime, and it carried over after her death as her son, Ric Throssell, became the guardian of her legacy. She found it harder to write her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane (1963), than any other book. She claimed she hadnt wanted to write about herself but needed to set the record straight after a postgraduate student wrote a very distorted version of my youth and childhood in a thesis. Child of the Hurricane is padded out with anecdotes about Katharines family, celebrities she met, and passing crushes, while avoiding weightier matters. She hoped it would be the final word about her formative years. It is not that, but for a biographer it is a priceless record of her movements and memories, a road map for a fuller, historical account.

Rics later work, My Fathers Son (1989), is a hybrid work combining a biography of his father and an autobiography, as well as revisiting elements of Katharines life. Rics biographical writings about his mother leave room for a comprehensive, critical account of Katharines life, one with some distance in time and relationship to the subject.

In 1969 at the end of Katharines life, her pen-friend Catherine Duncan was thinking forward to our present: in fifty years, dearest Kattie, the KSP you are now will have become someone elseshe will have escaped you. Duncan wanted Katharine to preserve her remaining letters so that she would be more accurately understood today. Fifty years was also the distant horizon another friend, the writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman, imagined for Katharines posthumous reckoning. Katharine Susannah Prichard, both personally and as a novelist, is still the most controversial figure in Australian literature. It is unlikely that her work and influence will be justly assessed for another fifty years. Drake-Brockman felt that the Cold War distorted opinions about Katharine and that a fairer assessment would only be possible once it was in the past.

Katharine now exists on the edge of living memory. Midway through my research, I found five boxes of material left behind by a biographer from an abandoned attempt fifteen years earlier. She had interviewed half a dozen people who had known Katharine well; they had all died by the time I started. It is the archive that remains and Katharine left behind multiple sources for every year of her long life. The many letters held in other peoples collections are as significant as the ones held in her own. The Red Witch is woven from her archival trailletters, notebooks, clippings, ASIO files, government documents, and photographsalong with her published work and, importantly, the newly digitised newspaper articles on the National Library of Australias Trove site which reveal so much about her life and world. While alert to thematic connections, this biography is a chronological account, narrating the intertwined personal, political and literary strands. It adds nuance and detail to the contours of Katharines life, setting out to show what her life was like in its different phases and in the course of that, the biographical background to her literary works.

I hope this book will be of interest and use to scholars. However, I have written it for a general readership drawn to the peculiar pleasures of biography: the true drama of a life, the glimpses of a lost but familiar world, the recoverable details of the past. It is not a cultural history or a work of literary criticism but the story of one remarkable Australian life. The biographer Martin Edmond laments that the artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjirathe subjects of his dual biographyhad come to exist only as representatives of notions espoused by others, not as real people acting in real situations. His biography becomes a mission to restore them. He wont tell their story to prove a pointhe will tell it to show a lived life.