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Review: Potch and Colour by Katharine Susannah Prichard

19 Sunday Jun 2016

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Here’s my slightly tatty copy of Potch and Colour, Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1944 collection of short stories. It’s the only copy I’ve ever seen – it’s not particularly rare or valuable, but it shows up less often than her better known books. I found this copy serendipitously in a secondhand booksale run by the library where I work. I wish it had the beautiful dust cover I have glimpsed at low-resolution in an antiquarian bookdealer’s catalogue (right).Potch and Colour 2

Katharine wrote some incredible short stories. I would go as far as to say that I think the form suited her better than the novel, even if she is not as remembered for it. This collection mainly includes stories originally published in journals after her first collection, Kiss On the Lips (1932), but the first appearance of some of them still needs to be established. One story, at least, is quite early – “The Bridge”; I found a newspaper copy of it on Trove from 1917 (unfortunately, it’s not one of her “incredible” stories; but it’s here, if you’re interested).

This collection divides into two types of story – goldfields “yarns” and the more substantial, realist stories, several of them about Aboriginal characters. The yarns are old-fashioned and entertaining enough with flashes of inspiration. They point the way to The Roaring Nineties, the first novel of the goldfields trilogy, which Katharine was already writing when Potch and Colour was published.  But it’s the other stories which impressed me.

There’s three particularly worth commenting on.

The first is “The Siren of Sandy Gap,” which manages to be both humorous and an astute critique of marriage. Susan, “a little woman, well over fifty,”  leaves her tight-fisted husband  George for the more jolly Dave. She “lives in sin” with Dave unapologetically but talks fondly to her ex-husband when he comes to beg her to return to him. When her new lover becomes morose and fights with her ex-husband over her, she runs off with a third, younger man. “‘I want to go away and have some peace and happiness in my life,’ Susan said. ‘They’ve no right to think I must just do what they say.'”

The second is “Flight,” a story which begins with a police officer charged with removing three “half-caste” (sic) Aboriginal children from their families. He doesn’t particularly agree with their removal, but his strongest feeling is not about the injustice so much as the embarrassment in the eyes of the locals as they watch him ride his horse with the girls. When he arrives at his house, the point of view shifts to his wife, who feels compassion for the girls, but of a very narrow kind – she feels strongly they shouldn’t have their hands tied for the night and sneaks out to untie them, telling them she’ll come back first thing in the morning to retie them. And then the point of view shifts to the girls themselves and the options that face them, untied as they are. It’s a traditional, beautifully crafted story which is devastating and prescient in its critique of the Stolen Generations policy.

The third is “Christmas Tree,” a poignant portrait of failed wheat farmers in Western Australia in the Depression. It’s one of the occasions Katharine gets the balance right between her politics and aesthetics, as she reveals the injustice of the banking system not didactically but through the eyes of one of its victims. Perhaps her husband Hugo’s failure as a farmer before World War One fed into her account. My supervisor Tony Hughes-D’Aeth tells me this story gets a mention in his literary history of the WA wheatbelt, forthcoming from UWA Publishing.

Katharine’s stories are not in print at the moment, though several “best-of” collections have been published – the ones containing just her short stories are Happiness, published in 1967, two years before she died, and Tribute (1988), selected and edited by her son Ric Throssell. Rather than a new selection or a reprint of one of the old collections, I think the best thing for the future would be a collected stories edition.  It could showcase her development as a writer and the themes which preoccupied her over different periods and show how substantial her body of short fiction is.

Review – How to Survive the Titanic: or The Sinking of Bruce Ismay by Frances Watson

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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Thanks partly to James Cameron’s film, our cultural memory of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is one of a linear narrative. There’s a clear chronology; we “remember” it as if looking through a camera, able to pan out from the experience of the individuals to the ship as a whole. There is a clarity to the disaster.

Frances Wilson’s How To Survive the Titanic (2011) has undone these things for me. Instead, she captures so well the uncertainty, the fact that for anyone in 1912 trying to understand what happened – even for survivors – there was a mess of contradictory reports, eyewitness statements which diverged as much as they converged. (The first report received over the radio was that the Titanic was being towed back to port, with no loss of life.) J. Bruce Ismay, former owner of White Star Lines and the managing director of the shipping company, was on board the Titanic and jumped into a lifeboat as it was lowered. After contributing greatly to the confusion about what happened, he spent the rest of his life as a pariah.

This is a biography focused on a single incident in a man’s life. Watson’s book begins with that critical moment when Ismay decides to save his life;  the rest of the book moves backward to explain how Ismay became the man who made that decision, and forward to tell the story of the long consequences. I greatly admire Watson’s handling of her material; she shows a mastery of creative non-fiction in her control of time, scene, and detail. An example: in chapter one she weaves survivors’ accounts of watching the Titanic sink to contrast them with Ismay turning away; she finds three quotes from three different survivors which use the word “Fascinated,” and she begins each quote with that word, creating a kind of poetry and heightening the effect of the contrast.  How to Survive the Titanic is a witty and profound biography of a man’s ordinariness in extraordinary circumstances. The reversal of the survivor genre is refreshing: the story of a man who failed to be a hero.

The uncanny parallel of the Titanic disaster to the 1898 novella Futility (retitled Wreck of the Titan) is a well-known factoid. (As a child, pre-internet, I think I first read of it in the ubiquitous Reader’s Digest Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.) But the more subtle literary parallel Watson pursues in her book is that between Ismay and the titular character of Conrad’s Lord Jim, who similarly fails to be heroic when he jumps ship. She makes a convincing case for it to be the text with which to illuminate and compare Ismay. It’s a bold and interesting biographical technique, even if I found myself impatient with the lengthy exploration of it. In every other way, I found this book unputdownable.

 

Link: Cooper, Cather, Prichard, ‘Pioneer’: The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism – Australian Literary Studies Journal

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

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I was chuffed when my PhD co-supervisor, Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, gave a paper last year (partly) about Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel The Pioneers. Now a version of that paper has been published in Australian Literary Studies; you can read it free during June before it goes behind the paywall.

Abstract: This essay considers three novels which each bear the word ‘pioneer’ in their titles: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Pioneers (1915). The three novels, although moving widely across time and space, are taken as representative of the creative literature of settler colonialism. A model of reading settler colonial literature is advanced that draws on four distinct features found across the three novels. These are: a tendency to spatialise the historical time of settler colonialism within the geography of the novel; the condensation of settler legal anxiety into a legal drama in the text; the application of a generational structure to Indigenise the settler; and the recurrence in the text of a ‘primal scene’ by which the settler society remembers its foundational violence in repressed form.

Source: Cooper, Cather, Prichard, ‘Pioneer’: The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism – Australian Literary Studies Journal

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s “A City Girl in Central Australia”

04 Saturday Jun 2016

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For several months now, it’s been 1905 for me. In May of that year, at the age of twenty-one, Katharine Susannah Prichard set out to work for six months as a governess for the Quin family at the Tarella Station in far-western New South Wales. It was a critical season in Katharine’s life.

Source: Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre – home | Your KS #11: “A City Girl in Central Australia”

My June column for the KSP Writers’ Centre is now on their blog. It’s about Katharine’s fascinating and largely forgotten serial “A City Girl in Central Australia” or “Letters from the Back o’ Beyond”. I’ve ordered in the microfilm of the magazine it first appeared in and next week I’m reading it again. (So far I’ve been reading it from my photographs of the clippings in Katharine’s papers.) It’s also going to be the subject of a paper I’m giving at the UWA Limina Conference at the end of July – “Boundary-rider: the early Katharine Susannah Prichard on the edge of fiction and autobiography”.

 

Now on Westerly blog – my review of Sylvia Martin’s Ink in her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

20 Friday May 2016

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Sylvia Martin’s new biography of Palmer reveals, unsurprisingly, a woman who lived in the shadow of her parents, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Australia’s literary power-couple of the first half of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the biography, Martin quotes the verdict of David Martin (presumably no relation) on Palmer’s life: ‘Her attempt to write from within the Palmer constellation, her failure to escape. Chain-smoking her life away in Sunbury mental hospital, felled by her sexuality. Aileen was the poet’ (246). Sylvia Martin’s accomplished biography largely confirms this verdict while adding the important dimension of her political activism and war service.

Source: A Review of Sylvia Martin’s ‘Ink in her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer – Westerly

My review of this recent biography has just been published on the Westerly blog. Aileen Palmer is a fascinating subject and Martin is an elegant biographer. She achieves a balance of narrative and research I’m striving for in my own biography. Reviewing it was a fruitful exercise for my own thinking about the art of biography.

Bill also reviewed this book last month – https://theaustralianlegend.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/ink-in-her-veins-sylvia-martin/

 

Books in the boundary-rider’s hut: a KSP treasure from Trove

06 Friday May 2016

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When I get stuck or there’s something I don’t want to do, I sometimes procrastinate in Trove, searching for undiscovered Katharine Susannah Prichard newspaper articles. I was rewarded today with a timely and unexpected treasure. I’m writing about 1905, Katharine’s year on the Tarella Station in western-New South Wales, and here was Katharine offering an otherwise unknown memory about that year. It’s in a 1913 article in South Australia’s Observer they’ve entitled “What Australians Read”. They’ve reprinted (stolen) much (perhaps even all) of an article by Katharine published in The Book Monthly,  and I’m so glad they did or I probably would not have found it.

In this article, Katharine begins with an anecdote from that year on the station in which

I happened once on a boundary-rider’s hut. It had earthern [sic] floors. A rough wooden bed covered with a coloured blanket, two clumsy chairs, and a heavy, hand-made table, on which stood some large tin mugs that shone like silver,were, all its furniture, but a narrow shelf ran round the white-washed walls, and on it were a score of books—two or three-of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, a volume of Byron’s poems, a damaged green “Treasure Island,” “Adam Bede,” some much-thumbed, cheap edition[s] of Dickens, “Rienzi,” another of Lord Lytton’s works, and some battered schoolbooks. Those who know Australians bush and back-country life are not surprised that the country folk, rough and simple though they be, often seek the masterpieces of English literature rather than the popular works of modern writers.

Katharine had already romanticised the boundary-rider in her 1906 serial, A City Girl in Central Australia, turning him into Billy Northwest, the rough hero Kit, her narrator, falls in love with. The self-educated man of the back-country is a recurring character in her fiction, most notably in Black Opal with the figure of wise socialist Michael, who holds together Lightning Ridge with the knowledge he’s gained from the books in his hut. She saw herself as self-educated, even though she excelled at school and matriculated. The night classes she attended at Melbourne University in 1906 and 1907 and the Victorian Labor College classes in 1917 were no substitute for the degree she missed out on.

After this portrait of the well-read folk in the back country who have read the English canon as it was then, Katharine goes on to outline an Australian canon for her British readers. Despite the predictable titles she mentions, it’s interesting as it comes so much earlier than any other extant writings of hers on Australian literature. I’m struck by the fact it’s missing Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, even though Katharine would later speak of how much of an impact it had on her (its influence on the City Girl serial seems quite strong to me). It also connects to work by other bloggers – Sue over on Whispering Gums blog has written some great posts on Australian reading lists, including this recent one.

There’s more I could say about this article; it’s a minor but significant source, giving some clues to 1913 (a year which will be hard to trace), her literary development, her perspective on Australia while she was living in London, and another glimpse of 1905 in Tarella.

I spent some time trying to find the original article. No library in Australia holds The Book Monthly; Trove directs users to the digitisation provided by Hathitrust, and yet they’ve geoblocked everyone outside the US from accessing it due to possible copyright issues! No-one benefits from this kind of madness.

 

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

25 Monday Apr 2016

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Compulsory reads can be a chore but just as often they lead to wonderful discoveries. I’m so glad I’ve been pushed to read  American writer Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), a set text for the first-year fiction unit I’m tutoring this semester. It’s a brilliant novel about youth and middle age, success and failure. It’s spread across a canvas of American characters between the 1970s and 2020s, all of them with some connection (or two degrees of separation) to music publicist Bennie. In the first chapter, focused on Sasha, her friend Rob who drowned in college is mentioned in passing. I thought nothing of it at that point, but chapters later we read his story, this character who is just a sentence in the first chapter. In ways like this the novel gives a sense of the poignancy of all the remembered (and forgotten) people and events in any one’s life. It’s a novel which expands our appreciation of life, going beyond initial viewpoint characters and their present to reveal the past and future and inner lives of other characters. The title might have put me off reading it, but it turns out to be so appropriate – a character reflects midway through that time is a goon who comes along and beats you up. The narrative voice reminds me of Jonathan Franzen; its also the same milieu. The approach itself – linked, self-contained stories – must be emerging as a genre in its own right; off the top of my head, two other works I love have used it – Tim Winton’s The Turning (2005) and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination (2011) – and my friend Laurie Steed has a manuscript which will join this club when it’s published. (I remember some earlier examples – Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Thomas M. Disch’s 334, John Updike’s work – but I’m wondering if it’s becoming more common, and also feel there’s an increased element of design and effect of the whole in these recent examples.)