In 2019 I was asked to write an essay for a literary journal for the fiftieth anniversary of Katharine Prichard’s death about her legacy in the light of criticisms of Coonardoo. The anonymous peer review was so discouraging and, to my mind, wrong-headed that I couldn’t revise it in an appropriate way. I’ve been meaning to publish it on my blog ever since, and now I finally am! Since 2019 some things have changed – notably, Working Bullocks and Intimate Strangers are back in print, thanks to the wonderful Untapped project. But the need to read Coonardoo in an informed way and to look beyond it to other works KSP wrote remains.

Writers don’t choose which books come to define them.  ‘Coonardoo seems to be the most popular of my books’, Katharine Susannah Prichard said in a 1960 interview, but ‘others… I consider of more importance’. (de Berg) Coonardoo: The Well in the Shadow (1929) is a novel about the repressed love between Hugh, a Pilbara cattle-station owner, and Coonardoo, the Aboriginal woman who has grown up with him. Fifty years after Prichard’s death, and ninety years after Coonardoo’s publication, the problems with her best-known novel are increasingly apparent. ‘This is a story’, writes Eualeyai / Kamillaroi academic Larissa Behrendt, ‘about white sorrow, not black empowerment’. (Behrendt 94) Its representation of Aboriginal Australians, while ahead of its time in certain ways, was also very much of its time.

Prichard (1883-1969) lived from the end of Australia’s colonial period to the middle of the Vietnam War; her first work appeared in 1899 and her last in 1968. She wrote novels which quickened the Australian literary scene between the world wars and she remained an important literary presence through the 1950s and 1960s. She captured Australian life in many phases, writing in new ways not just about Aboriginal people (albeit problematically) but also miners, timber-workers, and even circus performers. But what is the Australian literary community to make of her after its eyes have opened to the troubles with Coonardoo?

To some extent, scholars have already resolved this question in their sphere. Prichard remains a significant figure in twentieth century Australian literature, with aspects of her work relevant to various contemporary research concerns; in recent years scholars have considered less well-known aspects of Prichard’s oeuvre, including her drama and poetry, her reception in East Germany, and her depiction of settler-colonialism in her first novel. It is worth, however, taking stock of Prichard’s reputation now that her best-known work is widely held to be problematic, and considering her ongoing relevance (or not) to other parts of the literary community—a general readership, particularly, dependent as it is on publishers keeping her work in print, as well as secondary school teachers and university lecturers teaching Australian literature. A related problem also needs to be confronted: she dedicated herself to telling other people’s stories—not just Aboriginal people, but all kinds of people. With contemporary concerns over cultural appropriation, what do we make of this integral part of her approach to writing fiction?

Working as I am on a biography of Prichard, I believe her work is worth reading and her life is worth remembering.  I believe Katharine Susannah Prichard has a future. Her reputation, however, has rested too narrowly on Coonardoo, and the inevitably limiting claim that it was ‘ahead of its time’. Acknowledging the damage done by the uncritical teaching of Coonardoo and its representation of Aboriginal people, there is much else in Prichard’s oeuvre lying underappreciated.

The Problems with Coonardoo

Coonardoo was the joint winner of the 1928 Bulletin novel competition with Flora Eldershaw and Marjorie Barnard’s A House is Built. At the time of its serial publication in The Bulletin, it scandalised readers for its depiction of the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white station owners. The local conservative member of state parliament wrote, ‘the whole yarn is a libel on everyone in the North and North-West, and most of it is exaggerated and untrue’. (F.W. Teesdale) Angus and Robertson was initially interested in publishing an Australian edition, but declined, probably because of the controversy. (Prichard to Palmer 1928) Published in book form by Jonathan Cape in Britain and William Norton in the United States, the New York Times’ view of the book was to prevail for many decades:

Coonardoo stands as a forceful piece of social documentation and bids fair to do for Australia what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for America… to make the white race face the facts of its treatment and study of the black descendants of the aborigines, through an authentic piece of national literature which raises a parochial problem to the level of the universal. (Carter 4)

By the 1970s, Coonardoo was taught in Australian high school and university curriculums, damagingly, as ‘an Aboriginal text’. Wiradjuri academic Jeanine Leane gives a personal account of her experience of reading Coonardoo in her high school English class:

The novel was set far away from my Country, but I could still see myself in its racist representation. It struck me that thousands of years of Aboriginal culture and spirituality were being reduced to base instinct. Coonardoo and her fellow Aboriginal women were cast as victims of their own rampant sexuality; it was their animalistic desires that destroyed them. The colonial scheme imposed on these Aboriginal women was presented as justified—it was to ‘save’ them from themselves. (‘Other’ 42)

In 1926, Prichard spent ten weeks on Turee station to research Coonardoo and a related corpus of work. A group of Aboriginal people lived in a camp eighty metres from the homestead and caught Prichard’s attention. (Day) She wrote in a letter, ‘I find them poetic and naive. Quite unlike all I’ve ever been told, or asked to believe about them. I’m doing some character studies.’ She complained in the same letter that her host, Doris Maguire, had attempted to write stories about Aboriginal legends and was ‘weaving our psychology and sentimental morality over native [sic] legends’. In words which now sound particularly ironic, she continued, ‘I’ve been trying to show her how to do them on their own merits—to see things as the blacks [sic] see them.’ (qtd. in Throssell 49) Leaving Doris Maguire to write about Aboriginal legends, Prichard later remembered, ‘One of the native [sic] girls who I used to ride with particularly interested me, and it was her stories about her own people that went into the making of Coonardoo.’ (de Berg) The woman Prichard was referring to was Topsy, whose tribal name was Kundri. (Austin-Crowe 101) Ric Throssell, Prichard’s son, writes that she was ‘the model for much of the characterisation of Coonardoo. There are photographs of her in the red album annotated in Katharine’s writing “A girl like Coonardoo”.’ (qtd. in Austin-Crowe 194) The Turee Station manager had taken Topsy and her husband, Duck, and their daughter to Queensland with them on a holiday in 1922. According to a police report supporting the granting of a permit to take Topsy and Duck, they had grown up at Turee and spoke English very well—unlike Coonardoo in the novel. (Austin-Crowe 101)

Behrendt notes Coonardoo  is ‘strongest when it critiques the behaviour of pastoralists and weakest when it seeks to create multi-dimensional Aboriginal characters’. (Behrendt 105) Despite Prichard’s time spent with Aboriginal people on the station, her representation of them was shaped by white ‘experts’. She asked Ernest Mitchell, Inspector of Aborigines, to read the manuscript for accuracy, and one scholar notes that many details of Aboriginal life and culture are taken ‘almost intact’ from Herbert Basedow’s The Australian Aboriginal (1925). (Austin-Crowe 103)

In 1978 J. J. Healy noted ‘an inability to connect Coonardoo [the character] with a real world and a real history’. (152)  Expanding on this, Leane and Behrendt both discuss Prichard’s failure to understand the political conditions of Aboriginal people living under settler-colonial oppression or advocate for their empowerment. (Leane, Whiteman’s 60ff; Behrendt 94ff) It is an ironic failure, given Prichard’s putative sensitivity to oppression as a communist.  

Referring specifically to Kate Grenville’s The Secret River but presumably also Coonardoo Leane writes:

I am not suggesting that this work and others like it be scrapped—they are important texts that reveal synchronic slices of settler consciousness of and about Aboriginal people at any given time. But I am challenging the notion that these are Aboriginal stories. They are not.

Any reading of such texts in Australian curricula needs to acknowledge this point. Critical interpretations, both within and outside of school contexts, must also be informed by the growing body of Aboriginal scholarship exploring the politics of representation. (Leane, ‘Other’ 42–43)

In Leane’s earlier doctoral thesis, she gives an instructive reading of Coonardoo, reconnecting the novel to the historical context of Aboriginal experience at the time and the ways in which the genre and characterisation limit the possibilities for the Aboriginal characters. (Whiteman’s 48–75) Her work suggests how Coonardoo can be fruitfully read ‘as a story of Aboriginal representation’. (Whiteman’s 59)

Reviews on Good Reads—a social media site for readers—suggest the possibility of a future for Coonardoo where the limitations and flaws of its Aboriginal representation are recognised alongside other qualities. The 324 ratings and 24 reviews for the book, as of February 2019, suggest an ongoing readership. Typically, one reviewer begins by writing ‘I agree with the majority [of] reviewers in that Coonardoo is ultimately racist in its depiction of Aboriginal people’; she concludes, ‘Reading it today, while uncomfortable, shows us how far we have come, but also how far we still have to go concerning Indigenous treatment and rights.’ (Jacqui) Another reviewer also begins by acknowledging the racist representation of the novel but praises it for its literary qualities: ‘Prichard is an artist… it’s truly just beautiful to read.’ (Jasmin Jane) Coonardoo should be read alongside critiques by Aboriginal scholars like Jeanine Leane and Larissa Behrendt; the ‘lay’ criticism offered on Good Reads suggests some of their ideas have begun to permeate the general readership.

Speculation about the responses of the dead is of limited value, but I believe Prichard would have been disturbed by the knowledge that the canonical status of Coonardoo led to perpetuating damaging stereotypes about Aboriginal people. In an interview in 1956, she noted ‘there was a movement for recognition of their rights among the Aborigines’ and ‘if that kind of book were written now, it would reflect these developments’. (Irwin 31) Her oeuvre shows an evolving understanding of Aboriginal issues over the decades, with Coonardoo serving as a midpoint.

Prichard’s first novel, The Pioneers (1915), is set around Yarram in Victoria’s Gippsland region where she spent a year as a governess in 1904. Aboriginal people only have a shadowy presence in the novel, their existence mentioned in passing at several points, but without any acknowledgement that the settlement of the area involved their displacement and murder. At least one hundred and fifty Aboriginal people were murdered in the area in the 1843 Warrigal Creek Massacre. Prichard may have had no knowledge of it; ‘a wall of silence fell across the incident’ among settler-colonists. (Adams 26–27)

If Prichard moved from silence in Pioneers to paternalism in Coonardoo, her largely unknown 1939 essay ‘The Aborigine in Australian Literature’shows a writer whose perspective is continuing to evolve by beginning with an acknowledgement of genocide: ‘The early history of our country reeks with the massacre of these people and with the crimes committed against them by ruthless men who would even leave poisoned flour in their huts in order to exterminate men, women, and children’. (‘Aborigine’ 49) Around this time she started work on her goldfields trilogy and the first volume, The Roaring Nineties (1946), begins with a group of Aboriginal people witnessing the destruction and violence wrought by prospectors. The prospectors come ‘emptying the water-holes, scaring away the wild animals, tearing up the earth in their madness to find that yellow stone’. They disturb an Aboriginal woman, Kalgoorla, who has just given birth, tying her up and demanding she show them water; their actions cause the baby to die. Throughout the trilogy, displaced and abused Kalgoorla haunts the narrative in both her presences and absences.

Telling Other People’s Stories

Related to the problematic representation of Aboriginal people, one of the challenges for the reception of Prichard’s work today is that much of her writing involves the telling of other people’s stories. Her signature method was an immersive research trip into a way of life. She would take notes for weeks or months, listening to people’s stories, taking down the vernacular and distinctives of a place or an occupation. Working as a governess in her early twenties, she had taken notes on the landscapes and stories of Tarella station in outback New South Wales and the Gippsland region. Out of these would come her first two major literary successes—her ebullient serial ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906) and her first published novel, The Pioneers (1915). She adopted it as a formal method, with a trip to Lightning Ridge in 1918 for her opal mining novel, Black Opal, a ten-week stay at Turee Station in the Pilbara in 1926 for Coonardoo (1929), a tour with Wirth’s Circus in 1927 for Haxby’s Circus (1930), and several trips to the Western Australian goldfields between 1930 and 1949 for her trilogy which begins with The Roaring Nineties (1946). Prichard wrote, ‘I prefer always to live among the people and the places I write of: use notes taken at the time, and try to discover the thoughts and reactions of people under my microscope to situations they have been through, or may have to encounter. The law of libel necessitates variations from the original, of course. Otherwise I am concerned to draw as I see.’ (‘On Purpose’ 121) Her method reflected her background as a journalist, seeking a story outside her own world and building the setting and characters from observation. 

Is Prichard’s approach valid in today’s context when there is growing sensitivity about cultural appropriation? American novelist Lionel Shriver’s 2016 keynote address to the Brisbane Writers’ Festival rejected concerns about cultural appropriation, defending fiction as a ‘vital vehicle of empathy’. Jeanine Leane wrote in response:

to achieve empathy one must know those they are seeking to represent—and not just through limited and controlled observation, or through a state archive, or someone else’s research. Rather, they must know through social and cultural immersion.  (‘Other’ 43)

Although Prichard failed to live up to Leane’s guidelines for achieving empathy with Aboriginal people, she did it particularly well with other groups, writing authentically about working and rural life despite her middle-class, urban background.

Prichard began inauspiciously in her twenties; when ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’  appeared, a letter in one newspaper rebuked her:

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. (‘Experiences’)

Prichard took the advice to heart. Throughout her career she would return again and again to the people of the back-blocks of Australia, but never again as a city girl encountering them as ‘specimens’. A number of her novels stand as invaluable literary accounts of different ways of life around Australia. In a typical example, Prichard spent ten weeks in Kalgoorlie in 1941, one of several trips for her goldfields trilogy. She wrote to her friend, ‘I hunt out “old timers”, yarn to miners & prospectors & all the time with the drone of the mine batteries in my ear.’ (Prichard to Esson) She was at pains to verify her account, from the technical aspects to the ‘feel’ of life on the goldfields.

Accompanying Prichard’s commitment to immersive research, she also wanted to see working class people empowered to write for themselves. In 1917, Prichard was granted honorary status as a unionist—and hence a worker—by the Victorian Labor College to become its first enrolled student. (Sparrow 76) The college was an ambitious attempt to create an alternative to university for workers, with subjects taught from the perspective of their own class. It was an early instance of an ongoing commitment on Prichard’s part. The activist and writer Joan Williams was married to Vic Williams, a water-side worker, and she remembers, ‘Always helpful and generous to developing writers of the working class, Katharine encouraged Vic especially giving high praise for the passionate poetry flowing from his work experiences and political convictions, eager to discuss aesthetics, [and] hear him read… poems’. (Williams 132)

To respond to the problems of Coonardoo and of Prichard’s writing method is to still leave other possible objections to Prichard’s legacy unresolved. Prichard’s loyalty, as a communist, to the Soviet Union is another significant one; indeed, for some cultural commentators on the right, it is insurmountable. It is my hope that, when published, my biography of Prichard could respond to this (biographical) objection—not with an excuse but with an explanation for how a person of compassion and integrity could ignore or excuse the atrocities committed by the Soviet government. I’m still clarifying the answer in my own mind, but what she thought she was doing is summed up well when she wrote that being a communist, ‘helps us to overcome personal grief which would otherwise be almost unbearable and to concentrate on working for the good of the people and of all humankind’. (qtd. in McNair 151) These are the words of a woman who had lost a brother in a war and a father and a husband to suicide, and who had come to see communism as the only hope left, both personally and globally.

The Fullness of Prichard’s Oeuvre

To confront the problems in Prichard’s legacy is not to justify a future; there are many ‘unproblematic’ writers who are not remembered. Critic Geordie Williamson offers a number of reasons for ‘renewed attention’ to neglected Australian authors and works, including some particularly applicable to Prichard: ‘as carriers of knowledge about people, a vivid gallery of Australian selves; and, at their best, as vessels of a beauty and strangeness that elude any final, fixed meaning that might be turned to ideology’s ends, yet give pleasure to those who engage with reading as the joy, entire unto itself, of one mind, meeting another’. (Williamson 11)

Prichard published thirteen novels and three volumes of short stories in her lifetime. She was also proud of her poetry and drama, although the standout from those, the play Brumby Innes, is part of her Turee Station corpus, and shares the same problems as Coonardoo. Of her novels, although none of the others have the literary consistency of Coonardoo, only three of them are minor works—an early romance, Windlestraws (1916) and a late one, Moon of Desire (1941), she wanted forgotten herself, and her didactic final novel, Subtle Flame (1967). There are ten other significant novels, each with qualities to engage and reward readers. ‘It is one of the easiest gestures for a critic to make these days’, writes Ivor Indyk, ‘to extol the virtues of an Australian classic, and then to exclaim, with an air of astonishment, that it is out of print.’ (Indyk 125) The market for Australian literary classics is so limited that perhaps the astonishing thing—and the encouraging sign for Prichard’s legacy—is that a handful of her novels do remain easily available in print or as ebooks. Mindful of Indyk’s admonishment, highlighting some which are not currently available offers possibilities for expansion.

Of the ‘research trip novels’ which form the bulk of Prichard’s oeuvre, Working Bullocks (1926), one of those out of print, particularly deserves to be recovered; Indyk might agree as he contributed a foreword to the most recent printing in 1991. The story of the people of the karri forests in the South-West of Western Australia, Working Bullocks follows a young man named Red Burke who has a way with horses and bullocks but not people, as he is torn between two women and struggles to make his way in that world. Prichard’s friend, the critic Nettie Palmer reflected in her diary:

The creative lyricism of the style impresses me more than either the theme or the characters. From slang, from place-names, from colloquial turns of speech, from descriptions of landscape and people at work, she has woven a texture that covers the whole surface of the book with a shimmer of poetry. As you read, you are filled with excitement by the sheer beauty of the sounds and the images. (Palmer 24)

John Sleeman wrote for Britain’s The Bookman in 1928 that Working Bullocks ‘is the high-water mark of Australian literary achievement in the novel so far’. (Sleeman 12) Yet it sold poorly on publication and has always been hampered by its unattractive title; the Russian translation, The Brumby Hunter, may have been a more popular choice. (Prichard to Palmer 1927)

Another high point in Prichard’s oeuvre is Haxby’s Circus (1930), a portrait of a circus family across a couple of decades and the transformation of the central character, Gina Haxby, an innocent acrobat who breaks her back at the start of the novel and shows both deep resilience and despair as she becomes, by the novel’s end, a world-weary middle-aged clown. As well as being a notable depiction of disability it is also a story of women’s lives—concerned with the experience of pregnancy and childbirth and emotional abuse at the hands of the domineering family patriarch. Henrietta Drake-Brockman regarded it as ‘the best and most moving’ of Prichard’s novels, writing that the reader is left ‘feeling the richer for reading it, perhaps even a little less bitter over the frequent injustices of life’. (Drake-Brockman, ‘Great’ 4)

After struggling for many years to write her autobiography, Prichard claimed she hated to write about herself. Yet outside the core of Prichard’s ‘research trip novels’, there are two significant out-of-print works which reflect her own class and culture.  The better-known work is Intimate Strangers (1937), a novel of a middle-class marriage strained first by the husband and wife’s attractions to other people and then by the Great Depression. Drusilla Modjeska calls it a ‘hesitation’ and a ‘point of crisis’ in Prichard’s oeuvre, and laments that it is the path not taken in the rest of her career. (Modjeska location 2762) The novel is drenched in seawater and sand, lovingly evoking Perth beaches in the amalgam place of Calatta, part Rockingham, part Cottesloe. It is a valuable picture of Western Australian beach culture and of middle class marriage during the Depression. The second work is the underrated autobiographical novel, The Wild Oats of Han (1928), telling of a young girl’s enchantment with the world darkened by the growing shadows of the responsibilities and crises of the adult world. If it hadn’t been marketed as a children’s novel, its qualities may have been better recognised.

Prichard’s short stories are also underrated; at her best, she showed a mastery of the form. Her first Western Australian work, ‘Christmas Tree’ (1919) is a poignant portrait of failed wheat farmers who have had to sell up. Balancing politics and aesthetics unusually well, the story reveals the injustice of the banking system through the eyes of one of its victims. ‘Grey Horse’ (1924), winner of the Art in Australia short story competition, parallels the respective sexual frustrations of a grey stallion not allowed to mate and an orchardist next door whose marriage turns sour. ‘The Buccaneers’ (1935) is a deceptively light-hearted story that captures the disappointments of aging as it follows a group of friends who return each year to Rottnest Island. The well-realised depictions of, respectively, the Wheatbelt, the hills of Perth, and Rottnest in these three stories give some sense of the range of Prichard’s settings; across her oeuvre she captures so much of the Australian landscape. Although Prichard’s short stories are out of print, many have recently been digitised in their original appearances in journals and newspapers and are available through the National Library of Australia’s Trove site.

Conclusion: Prichard’s Legacy

In her 1967 study of Prichard, Henrietta Drake-Brockman begins:

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. Today judgement has a prevailing tendency to appear clouded, however faintly, by political bias. (Drake-Brockman, Katharine 5)

As Drake-Brockman anticipated, fifty years later the Cold War no longer influences assessments of Prichard in the way it once did—yet for new reasons, Prichard remains a controversial figure. Furthermore, if Drake-Brockman expected a definitive, ‘objective’ assessment to ever occur, she misunderstood the time-bound nature of literary reputation, its ebbs and flows.

Prichard herself was more concerned with recognition while she was alive. In a broadcast on Miles Franklin she said, ‘Tributes to writers who are dead always sadden me. I know how much better it would have been to appreciate their work when they were alive.’ (Prichard, ‘Her Brilliant’ 97) Later, she wrote to her son, ‘A letter from Miles this week… Poor darling, she seems very discouraged, and not well. Wish she could have more appreciation.’ (Prichard to Throssell) Ironically, Franklin has fared better, posthumously, than Prichard.

Writing to fellow communist Vic Williams, Prichard gave an ostensibly modest but improbable hope for her legacy: ‘If only, in the time to come, my works will have helped people to realise the future they can create for this country of my own, I will be satisfied.’ (Prichard to Williams) The motivations in reading Prichard’s work are less about the future and more about her vivid account of our past (her present) and its people, its ways of life, and of the Australian landscape. In a valedictory essay addressed to the literary community and published the year before she died, Prichard wrote, quite differently, and more in keeping with this:

I have only hoped to communicate in my novels perception of the beauty and harsh realities of this land: to tell about the joys and sorrows, courage and humour, of men and women I’ve met in my wanderings through the country districts and cities of Australia. (Prichard, ‘Some’ 235)

Prichard’s ‘wanderings’ over her life and onto her page were extensive. Their full range becomes more apparent once the limitations and problems of Coonardoo are understood.

Works Cited

Adams, John. From These Beginnings: History of the Shire of Alberton (Victoria). Alberton Shire Council, 1990.

Austin-Crowe, Marion. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo: An Historical Study. MA diss. Edith Cowan University, 1996.

Behrendt, Larissa. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. University of Queensland Press, 2016.

Carter, John. ‘In the Back Country of Australia’. New York Times, Book Reviews, 16 Mar. 1930, p. 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Day, Bill. Letter to Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre, 15 April 2002, KSPWC archives.

Drake-Brockman, Henrietta. ‘Great Australian Novel’. Daily News, 21 July 1930, p. 4.

—. Katharine Susannah Prichard. Oxford University Press, 1967.

‘Experiences of a Governess’, Barrier Miner, 9June 1906, p. 5. Trove.

Healy, J. J. Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, 1770-1975. University of Queensland Press, 1978.

Indyk, Ivor. ‘The Economics of the Australian Literary Classic’. By the Book?: Contemporary Publishing in Australia, edited by Emmett Stinson, Monash University Publishing, 2013, pp. 120–26.

Irwin, E. W. ‘Australia’s Katharine Susannah Prichard’. New Frontiers, vol. 5, no. 2, 1956, pp. 29–32.

Jacqui. ‘Jacqui’s reviews–Coonardoo’, Good Reads, 13 Aug. 2017, http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2091224973.

Jasmin Jane. ‘Jasmin Jane’s reviews—Coonardoo’, Good Reads, 29 Nov. 2017, http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2112897540.

Leane, Jeanine. ‘Other People’s Stories’. Overland, no. 225, 2016, pp. 41–45.

—. The Whiteman’s Aborigine. PhD diss. University of Technology Sydney, 2010.

McNair, John. ‘“Comrade Katya”: Katharine Susannah Prichard and the Soviet Union’. Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, Melbourne University Press, 2008, pp. 146–69.

Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945. Kindle edition. HarperCollins, 2014.

Palmer, Nettie. Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal Fourteen Years, Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays. Edited by Vivian Smith, University of Queensland Press, 1988.

Prichard, Katharine Susannah. ‘Her Brilliant Career: Miles Franklin’. Stories, Journalism and Essays, edited by Delys Bird, UQP, 2000, pp. 97–101.

—. Letter to Hilda Esson, 7 June 1941, Papers of KSP, NLA, MS6201/10/7.

—. Letter to Vance Palmer, 23 June 1927, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, NLA, MS1174/1/2975.

—. Letter to Vance Palmer, 10 September 1928, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, NLA, MS1174/1/2669.

—. Letter to Ric Throssell, 7 January 1951, Papers of Ric Throssell, NLA, MS8071/4/187.

—. Letter to Victor Williams, 3 October 1954, Privately held.

—. ‘On Purpose and Propaganda’. Straight Left, edited by Ric Throssell, Wild & Woolley, 1982, pp. 117–21.

—. ‘Some Perceptions and Aspirations’. Southerly, vol. 28, no. 4, 1968, pp. 235–44.

—. ‘The Aborigine in Australian Literature’. British Annual of Literature, vol. 2, 1939, pp. 49–53.

Sleeman, John. ‘Australian Literature’, Western Mail, 22 November 1928, p. 12. Trove.

Sparrow, Jeff. Communism: A Love Story. Melbourne University Press, 2007.

Teesdale, F. W., ‘A Libel on the North’, Northern Times, 19 Jan. 1929, p. 4. Trove.

Throssell, Ric. Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard. Angus and Robertson, 1975.

Williams, Justina. Anger & Love. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993.

Williamson, Geordie. The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found. Text, 2012.