Katharine Susannah became instantly famous across the Commonwealth when she won the Australasian section of the great Hodder and Stoughton All-Empire Competition in April 1915 (the very month of Gallipoli) for her unpublished novel, The Pioneers. It was the big break she had been working hard towards for a decade. I think The Pioneers, for all its faults, is genuinely a very good novel, but at the time of the competition, a number of critics were unwilling to take the winning entry seriously because of the judge, British writer Charles Garvice.

The columnist in Wellington’s Dominion wrote, “…to foist such a fifteen-rate novelist as Mr Garvice upon Australasian writers as judge of their work was little short of an insult” (May 29, 1915, 14). Almost no-one remembers Garvice today, but at the time, he was the biggest-selling British author alive, having sold millions of the romances he produced many times a year. Among serious lovers of literature his name was a byword for dross. When his own books are so forgotten, it is a beautiful irony that one of his great legacies was to launch the career of such a significant Australian writer. Even if Garvice wasn’t a great writer, could he have been a good reader, able to discern something special in Katharine Susannah’s work? The Pioneers is a romance, melodramatic at times yet with characters more vivid and a plot more interesting than the genre usually produces.

In researching Garvice I came across the superb essay, “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”. Laura Sewell Matter tells of her quest for Garvice, after finding some pages of an Icelandic-language book wash up on a beach in Iceland and eventually tracking it down as a translation of one of Garvice’s novels. You can read it here: https://laura-sewell-matter.com/publications/. It has been great to become biographer buddies with Laura through our shared interest in Charles Garvice.

You can read the full story of Katharine’s novel The Pioneers in chapter 12 of The Red Witch, “Breaking Out”.

On the great Katharine Susannah pilgrimage from Melbourne to Canberra in 2016 with Nicole and baby Thomas, we stayed a few nights near Emerald in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges. Katharine lived there in 1918, but it had a place in her personal mythology that was greater than the time she spent there. With its tall, lush bush, Emerald made me think of Pemberton, the setting for Katharine’s breakthrough novel Working Bullocks (1926); I’m convinced she would have felt the similarity too.

We briefly visited Rose Charman Cottage. Katharine’s good friends Hilda and Louis Esson were living there in 1916 and it was a symbol of the domestic bliss Katharine was missing out on when she went to see them there. In 1918, she took over the lease of the cottage and spent her time there glorying in the trees, mourning her dead brother, Alan, killed in the war, and moping over Guido Baracchi while she began to fall for a war hero named Hugo Throssell. She was also reading Marx and writing her spirited third novel, Black Opal (1921). Right at the end of Katharine’s life, she fictionalised this time in her final novel, Subtle Flame (1967). The Emerald year is chapter 17 of The Red Witch, ‘Retreat’.

Katharine’s mother bought the house for her as a wedding gift with the money left by Alan. Maybe she was trying to keep Katharine in Melbourne, but instead, after honeymooning in the cottage, the couple moved to Perth. One of my favourite finds in my quest was a receipt, sitting loosely in Hugo Throssell’s scrapbook at the State Library of WA, from the Emerald General Store. It gives a picture of what they ate on their honeymoon and I found it the most unlikely and delightful relic. (Check out p. 148 of The Red Witch to discover their fare!) It would have been a painful moment when Katharine had to sell the cottage in 1932 after Hugo’s huge debts had brought the family to the brink of ruin.

I was desperate to find an old photo of the cottage, and I finally did – it had been sitting amongst scans I’d taken from Katharine’s papers right back in 2014. It’s the second photo here, labelled in Katharine’s hand on the back ‘The cottage at Emerald’. I excitedly sent it to the present owner, but she told me it couldn’t possibly be the same house. It certainly looks very different after a century of renovations and extensions. The top picture is me in front of a mural at Emerald, depicting Katharine and her literary friends, Nettie and Vance Palmer, who also lived in the cottage for a time, and CJ Dennis, another of Emerald’s literary heroes.

As a young woman in 1907, Katharine had an unlikely friendship with the Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin. The Prichards had just moved to South Yarra after Katharine’s father had killed himself, and Deakin was a neighbour. He’d known Katharine’s mother when they were both young, but more importantly, Katharine’s secret lover, the Preux Chevalier (his identity is revealed in the book!), was close to Deakin and no doubt gushed about her. Katharine would walk into the city centre with Deakin, a strange sight to imagine in today’s world of extensive security details for prime ministers. They shared a passion for George Meredith. Meredith’s name was once placed next to Dickens as one of the great novelists of the 19th century; today he’s nearly forgotten and I confess I found him impossible to read. Deakin visited him in England in 1907; in 1908, armed with a letter of introduction from Deakin, Meredith allowed Katharine to visit him too.

Deakin is seen as a father of today’s Liberal Party, but he was a progressive who would not have much sympathy with the party in its recent history. Katharine never lost her admiration for him, even as her politics veered further and further left. She wrote a play about him for the 50th anniversary of Federation in 1951; unperformed and unremarkable, it doesn’t deserve a revival, but it is biographically revealing.

For the full story of Deakin, the Preux Chevalier, Meredith – and also Walter Murdoch and Katharine’s surprising defence of compulsory military training in 1908 – check out chapter 8 of The Red Witch, ‘Astir With Great Things’.