In 1926, Katharine spent ten weeks on Turee Station in the Pilbara. There was red dirt everywhere, the food tasted like petrol, the vegetables ran out, and Katharine was stricken with sandy blight. Yet out of it came some of her most important works, including the novel Coonardoo. It’s the story of the repressed and thwarted love between a white station owner, Hugh, and an Aboriginal woman named Coonardoo. The denial of their love destroys both their lives. It caused an outcry when it was first published for its depiction of the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by one of Hugh’s neighbours. Outraged letters to the editor declared that it was a libel on all the fine people of the north and such things did not happen. They did, of course, and the novel became part of the Australian canon, seen as a groundbreaking portrayal of race relations. Yet this century, its shortcomings have been written about by Indigenous scholars like Jeanine Leane. It is, inevitably, a white depiction of Aboriginal people and nearly one hundred years old; it does not reckon properly with the dispossession of Aboriginal people or empower them. It was ahead of its time and yet of its time. Katharine even acknowledged this in her lifetime, saying decades later that she would have written it differently in the present. I think it’s a beautiful, sparse tragedy and her finest novel, still worthy of attention today, even if we must read it with some caution.

You can find the full story of Coonardoo and its sister works in chapter 22 of The Red Witch, ‘The Station’ – out 17 May.

Katharine met Guido Baracchi on a boat home to Melbourne in the last days of 1915. He was a rich socialist, a perpetual student, and a world-class charmer. They fell in love and his radical ideas and unfaithfulness added to the disquiet and turmoil of Katharine’s life from 1916 to 1918. Baracchi introduced Katharine to Karl Marx, among other thinkers, and in 1917 she enrolled as the first student of the very left-wing Victorian Labor College, where he lectured. It was a revelation to find among her papers an unsent letter to him where she sounds so vulnerable and present – a heartfelt scrap showing the richness of her inner life, when most of the papers from this time which have survived are so innocuous. Baracchi broke her heart one more time by suddenly marrying, at 2am, a pantomine chorister he had recently met. But it wasn’t until Baracchi was kicked out of the Communist Party for Trotskyism in about 1941 that she broke off contact with him. And yet, if you read The Red Witch, you will find there was a happy ending of sorts for Katharine and Guido. Guido’s full story is told in Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography Communism: A Love Story.

The Red Witch is out on 17 May – https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-red-witch-hardback

Katharine was actually born in Fiji, but both her parents had grown up in Australia. She loved Australia and spent her career trying to express its distinctiveness, seeking out the stories of the people and places of the country’s back-blocks.

She turned 18 in the year of Federation, 1901, and like many of her generation, saw Australia as the hope of the world – a newly-created nation which would leave behind the old hatreds and injustices of the old country and forge a more just society. Something changed for her in 1916-1917. She saw a country sending its young men off to die while the rich got richer. She fell in love with a socialist and endured the death of her beloved brother at the front. She came to see the hope of the world not in the gradual reform Australia had been undertaking but the revolution in Russia.

She never lost her love for Australia but for the rest of her life she carried a great disappointment in her country that only intensified as it moved further away from its early egalitarian impulses.

I started this A-Z of KSP on my Facebook author page to promote my forthcoming book. I thought I’d share it here too. You can find my Facebook page here