NATHAN HOBBY The Red Witch: A biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
Nathan Hobby explores the life of one of Australia’s most controversial writers.
Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel Coonardoo is her best-known and most accomplished work. Published in 1929, and serialised in the Bulletin, it’s a tragedy about sexual longing and repression. Set in the Kimberley, it follows the relationship between the son of the homestead and his Aboriginal childhood playmate, Coonardoo. Hugh is a decent man, but in his denial of his feelings for Coonardoo he destroys her and ultimately her whole community. Its publication was met with outrage, not because of its depiction of sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men, but by the love that could exist alongside of it.
The way Katharine Susannah Prichard lived her life also gave rise to controversy and judgement. On the one hand she was the wife of a celebrated public figure, Hugo Throssell, a World War I hero. On the other she was ‘the Red Witch’, a lifelong communist and admirer of the Soviet Union, her every move of keen interest to ASIO.
Nathan Hobby’s biography adroitly navigates the contradictions in KSP’s life, painting a picture of a talented, compassionate yet inflexible woman who faced tragedy and hardship without flinching. It’s the story of a life, rather than a literary biography, the novels being interrogated for biographical clues with not much discussion of their literary value.
Prichard was born in 1883 into a respectable family where money was tight, especially when her father, a journalist, was unemployed. As a child she watched as the contents of the house were put up for auction, and her mother had to support the family by taking in sewing. In spite of that, she was determined to follow in Tom Prichard’s footsteps and become a writer. She started writing for New Idea and the Bulletin, winning competitions with romances about plucky bush girls.
When she was 22 her father had a breakdown and killed himself. It probably hastened her decision to leave Australia and set out on her own to England. In London, struggling to make a living as a freelance journalist, she sampled the lively intellectual currents of the time, the suffragette movement, the Fabian Society, anarchism, theosophy. But it was the desperate poverty she saw, far worse than her own, that had the greatest effect.
She spent a night among the poor on the Embankment, visiting a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter in the slums with a stench of ‘unwashed bodies, damp clothing, and physical decay’. ‘The problem of how such poverty and suffering could be prevented, haunted my mind.’ With hindsight, this experience became a moment of clarity about what was wrong with the world. She would come to understand the next decade of her life as a quest to find a solution.
Her first successful novel, The Pioneers, was written in London. Set in Gippsland, its lyrical descriptions of the Australian bush sharpened by homesickness, The Pioneers won a major award and was well received in the UK, US and Australia. It sold 35,000 copies in the 10 years from its publication in 1915.
Turning 30, Prichard had several novels and plays behind her and was committed to a writing life.
She had serious affairs, one with an older married man who pursued her for years, but in 1915, at the Anzac Club and Buffet, she met Lieutenant Hugo Throssell, a veteran who had been wounded at Gallipoli and awarded a Victoria Cross. Back in Australia they married, and settled in the Darling Ranges outside Perth, where she would spend most of the rest of her life.
In 1920 she was one of six people to found the Perth branch of the fledgling Communist Party of Australia. They held weekly study circles, working their way through the writings of Marx to prepare themselves for the imminent collapse of capitalism. Isolation in the hills, the birth of her son and Hugo’s disengagement from politics meant that she was not as actively involved as she would have liked. But it was enough to attract the interest of ASIO in her, Hugo and later her son Ric. Even though Ric Throssell was not active politically, he was never able to shake off the taint of his mother’s radicalism, and his career as a diplomat suffered as a result.
At the same time, Prichard was becoming recognised as a major literary talent, her writing celebrated for its eye for detail and strong characterisation. Working Bullocks, her next novel, was inspired by a timber workers’ strike in the karri forests south of Perth. It was praised as a vigorous, uncompromising story of life on the land.
Coonardoo has always been controversial. Hobby describes it as a novel both ahead of its time and of its time. It has a vast canvas of characters but Coonardoo herself is front and centre, a sympathetic and tragic woman. At the same time, she exists largely in relation to the white characters and how they feel about her, and we learn little of her life away from the homestead.
In recent times it’s been criticised by Indigenous academics for cultural appropriation and for failing to acknowledge the history of violence in frontier relations:
Berendt and Leane both discuss Katharine’s failure to understand the political conditions of Aboriginal people living under settler-colonial oppression or advocate for their empowerment – an ironic failure, given Katharine’s politics. Katharine critiques the abuse of Aboriginal people by station owners but assumes the station owners’ duty is to show benevolence, rather than liberate the Aboriginal people from slave-like conditions on land which had been stolen from them.
In 1933 Prichard decided to visit the Soviet Union to see for herself how the workers’ paradise was evolving. She travelled to Moscow, Leningrad and Siberia as an honoured Australian communist. Although the worst horrors of Stalinism were still to come, there were plenty of warning signs for a keen observer. She even attended the purge trials, in which comrades were denounced by their fellow workers, and witnessed the humiliation of farmers who had not achieved the targets of the Five Year Plan. But her memoir of the visit, The Real Russia, downplays these sinister events, recording instead her excitement at the advances in education, health and the arts.
She was back in London preparing to return home, when she read in the newspaper a short report on the suicide of war hero Hugo Throssell, her husband. The telegram to the newspaper had arrived before hers. She came back to her son Ric, who was 11, and to the huge debts that Hugo had accumulated through reckless business ventures.
‘She had three things left, and she would cling to them the rest of her life: her faith in communism, her writing career and Ric.’ And although there were to be other dalliances during her long widowhood, she never married again or had another publicly acknowledged relationship.
In some ways Hugo’s death, like her father’s, freed her to become more politically engaged. As the Second World War approached, it was a politically charged time and she threw herself into Communist Party work, joining the Spanish War Relief Committee, the Workers’ Theatre, the Modern Women’s Club, and the Movement against War and Fascism, among others.
Her writing also become more political. Over the next 30 years she wrote plays, short stories and another six novels, three of them set on the Kalgoorlie goldfields. Prichard identified several factors in writing socialist realism – simple language, immersion in the lives of the people and writing that exposed the oppressive nature of capitalism. At the same time she realised that a writer must remain true to the motivations of her characters and not impose her own views on them.
Nevertheless, her later novels were not as popular as the earlier ones. Hobby wonders whether it’s because they weren’t as good or because the times, with the Cold War in full swing, were less amenable to her message, and decides that both apply. The Bulletin claimed that Katharine Prichard the novelist had lost out to Katharine Prichard the propagandist. However, many other critics praised the books, Dale Spender writing that the goldfields trilogy, ‘with its combination of the family saga … and working conditions on the goldfields … is a powerful and perceptive documentary on Australian political history’.
Prichard was never able to return to the Soviet Union, but she remained its fierce defender, even as the Communist Party in Australia broke away from Stalinism.
In spite of her frail health and a dicky heart, isolation and lack of money, she continued working for the causes close to her, becoming involved with the Australian Peace Council, the anti-nuclear movement, and receiving visits from international communists such as the singer Paul Robeson.
She died in 1969, still living in her austere house in the Darling Ranges. Her adventurous life, her close acquaintance with tragedy and her commitment to working people morphed into novels that had a clear-eyed toughness unusual for the time. Nathan Hobby has comprehensively captured the many facets of this complicated and gifted woman and the turbulent times in which she lived.
Nathan Hobby The Red Witch: A biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Melbourne University Publishing 2022 HB 464pp $49.99
Kathy Gollan is a former executive producer and editor for ABC Radio National.
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