Denise Faithful and me on the verandah of Katharine's Place, 3 December.

It was wonderful to launch Dr Denise Faithfull’s novel, Discovering Katharine, on 3 December at KSP Writers’ Centre Katharine’s Birthday celebration. Here’s my speech from the event.

In 2019, the 50th anniversary of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death, I judged the fiction and non-fiction sections of a KSP Writers Centre competition in which entrants had to write something related to Katharine. One of the non-fiction entries I loved was an essay called ‘On Literary Pilgrimages’, by a person who had been visiting all the places associated with James Joyce and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Her pilgrimage had taken her to Emerald in Victoria, Launceston, Moscow, the Pilbara, Kalgoorlie, and Broome, as well as Greenmount, of course. I was amazed – here was a person who knew Prichard’s life and work intimately. I judged it anonymously and was very curious about who this writer was. When I turned in the results and found out who was behind it, I got a lovely surprise when I knew the name – Denise Faithfull.

Over many years Denise was always there with encouragement and insights into Katharine each time I posted on my blog. I hadn’t fully realised, though, the depths of her commitment to Katharine Susannah Prichard.  It can be a lonely journey to follow in the footsteps of a great writer – whether you’re doing it literally like Denise has or not. For me, as Katharine Susannah Prichard’s biographer, it had been wonderful to discover another pilgrim in Denise.

I was also pleased to discover Denise was working on what is probably the first novel about Katharine Susannah Prichard. I’ve been looking forward to reading it for years. And now, at last, it has arrived.  

To read Discovering Katharine is like joining a book-club devoted to Katharine Susannah Prichard. You will make your way through all of Katharine’s books with a dedicated and appreciative guide, Vicki, who falls in love with Katharine’s works and keeps a diary through the late 1960s as she reads them. Vicki belongs to a literal book club but she finds herself on the outer there, because they don’t want to just talk about Katharine. Thankfully, Vicki has two other Katharine Susannah Prichard experts to guide her on the way, Larry the retired teacher and a librarian named Jill who has an extensive knowledge of Katharine and access to an incredible archive of Katharine’s letters.

Vicki approaches each of Katharine’s books with an open and questioning mind. Her questions provoke us to think more carefully about different characters and their motivations and what sort of judgements we should make about them. After reading Black Opal, Vicki and her friends discuss which kind of man they would want for a boyfriend – dashing Arthur who won’t commit or faithful Potch. It helps to have read Katharine’s books yourselves, but for any books you haven’t read, Vicki gives a good summary and wrestles with issues around them. She even manages to get hold of Katharine’s two rarest novels, Windlestraws and Moon of Desire.  There’s many insights into Katharine’s work and connections between her different works. Vicki notices the way the word ‘inexplicable’ keeps coming up when Katharine writes about attraction.  In another place, she writes in her diary ‘Katharine has an extraordinary way of investigating an industry – whether it’s cattle, opals, the circus, timber, newspapers or pearling. Even in Intimate Strangers, a story mostly about a busted marriage, she tells us a lot about fish and fishing. I always learn so much about the world when I read her books.’ (p. 226) While reading through Katharine’s books, Vicki also pieces together the story of Katharine’s life from birth to old age with help from her friends.

Discovering Katharine lovingly evokes Perth in the 1960s. We visit Boans food hall and buy ham, cheese and tomato rolls to take to King’s Park. There’s a bus ride to City Beach. There’s also the background of current and recent events shaping the world. People are still talking about Eric Cooke, the serial killer. The execution of the Rosenbergs is discussed and the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights.

Something which comes through strongly in the book is the limits placed on young women in the 1960s. Limits on career, limits on education, limits on the range of young men for dating. Katharine Susannah Prichard represents someone who has overcome these limits and managed to live an unconventional life.

Discovering Katharine is clearly a labour of love. It comes out of a long and deep engagement with Katharine Susannah Prichard’s works and her life. It covers a lot of ground in its 353 pages, with the story of Vicki’s struggles to make a more meaningful life for herself, her reading of 22 books by or about Katharine, and the story of Katharine’s life. It has been well-published by Dragonfly Publishing, and it’s great that Denise has found a publisher with strong connections to the KSP Writers’ Centre. Congratulations to Denise on this fictionalised chronicle coming out of her long walk in Katharine’s footsteps. I think Katharine Susannah Prichard would be delighted to find such a sympathetic and appreciative reader of her work as Vicki. She would also be happy that this group of people here today would gather in her old cottage in honour of her and to launch this new book about her.