I’m talking about the lives of Katharine Susannah Prichard and her son, Ric Throssell, at 1pm, Saturday 4 May at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Greenmount. Here’s a photo of my props! It’s a double act, with Professor Bobbie Oliver speaking about The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime, Karen Throssell’s memoir of Ric’s battle against ASIO. It’s a rare chance to hear the story of Katharine and Ric in the house where they once lived. Karen’s book and my book, The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard, will be on sale and afternoon tea is provided. You can book free tickets here.
I’m glad reviews don’t come out all at once. The new issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History has the most generous and engaged review by Dr Christina Spittel of my book, The Red Witch. Dr Spittel saw in my book so many things I was hoping readers would see. And her review shows such attention to the biographical process, its methods and ethics – a rare and wonderful thing! I’m so happy and grateful. You can read the review here. This new issue of AJBH is so full of interesting articles on biography and reviews of recent releases – the full open-access contents is here.
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.
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.
My mum comes from the Winning family, a rather unlikely Scottish surname ripe for puns. I think it might be too much pressure to have as a surname. My beloved grandad, Ian Winning, never won much. But I was winning last night. I am thrilled to have won the WA Premier’s Prize for Book of the Year for The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard.
[At the State Library of Victoria, I found some extraordinary letters between Leon Brodzky (pictured) and Hugh McCrae, friends of Katharine Susannah Prichard, which are remarkably frank about sex and dating in 1909. It’s such an underground subject that it gives some important background to the lives of twentysomethings at the time. Leon was in London and interested in another friend of Katharine’s – Ethel Robson, or Robbie. She taught Katharine about the ‘wicked ways of men’ and the risks of VD, revealing she had gonorrhoea. It was hard to delete this scene and I’m glad to be able to share it now.]
Another deleted scene from The Red Witch – when Katharine was working at Tarella Station as a governess in 1905, there was a visit from a young Anglican minister which found its way into the serial she wrote based on her time there.
Katharine’s father, Tom, had given her a commonplace book for Christmas in 1904, inscribing it, “‘Kattie’s album: Let here be written thoughts that live and burn.” Few of the thoughts written in it are her own, but the accretion of sayings and signatures from friends and family over the next couple of years contain a number of biographical clues.
In June, a young Anglican minister, Reverend Fred Newton, who had begun a church at Ferntree Gully near the Quins’ Melbourne residence, arrived at the station for a holiday to improve his health. He was one of five people to leave answers to a survey Katharine started in her commonplace book. To the question “What is life?” he responded in the negative, “Without God—a failure.” To the question “What is love?” he responded, “The summit of human happiness.”
In “City Girl,” Katharine plays out a strange flirtatious relationship between “Mollie, my eldest pupil” who is “all sunshine and storms” and the “young parson who is here with a lung.” Kit chaperones the pair on an excursion one weekend. When they stop and talk, Molly says she is possessed by seven devils and wishes she was dead; when the parson tries to console her she turns on him. “‘Be quiet!’ she chided strenuously. ‘You just want to catch cold and die—or go to Melanesia or some other black place. You’re a wicked man!’” As it turns out, the parson is sent to the Pacific Islands and Mollie is heartbroken. In real life, Newton returned to Ferntree Gully in September, his health much improved; he married in 1912 only to die in 1919 after a relapse.
One reason I find the Rev Fred Newton intriguing is because later in London Katharine spends the whole trip entangled with his brother, a singer. She kissed him once in a cab, then agreed with him there should be no more nonsense like that.
Glimpses of KSP series: this month is the first birthday for The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard and I’m marking the occasion with some posts throughout May offering random glimpses of KSP. During May you can buy a signed copy of The Red Witch directly from me at the discounted price of $45 with free postage (usually $10) to anywhere in Australia – the online shop is here.
Here’s another Red Witch deleted scene from the time of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s arrival in Perth in 1919.
Rather than seeking out the writers of Perth, Katharine was launching herself into the city’s radical political circle. She and Hugo would come into the city on Sunday afternoons for the Social Democratic League meetings on the Esplanade, ‘the green flats beside the shining river where the people of Perth gather for such occasions’. Katharine made one of her first friends in Western Australia on one of these afternoons, an octogenarian radical named Monty Miller.
I found this paragraph which I cut from The Red Witch due to the word limit. It’s more a glimpse of Katharine’s husband, Hugo Throssell, actually. I was intrigued by just how different this first Anzac Day was after the Great War – certainly lacking the solemnity of today.
At first it seemed that Hugo was settling into his expected role of war hero. Anzac Day on 25 April 1919 wasn’t a public holiday in Perth and the commemoration was very different from the solemn ceremonies which now mark the day. In the evening, St George’s Terrace, the main street, was blocked off and ‘converted into a corner of Egypt’ for a fundraising event called ‘A Night in Cairo’, taking its theme from the middle eastern campaigns of the war. Costumed volunteers acted out an Egyptian wedding, funeral, and a court trial and guides took visitors to a replica of Cheops’ pyramid. Finally, at 8pm at the ‘Cosmograph Americano Esplanade Gardens’ a performance by a young dancer was followed by a lecture from Hugo in which he showed lantern slides of Egypt and Palestine. It was drizzling and attendance was down; the ₤700 raised for the Returned Soldiers’ Association was less than they hoped for.
Glimpses of KSP series: this month is the first birthday for The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard and I’m marking the occasion with some posts throughout May offering random glimpses of KSP. During May you can buy a signed copy of The Red Witch directly from me at the discounted price of $45 with free postage (usually $10) to anywhere in Australia – the online shop is here.
Launch at UWA TavernThomas with the Beaufort St Books crewElizabeth Lewis, KSPWC chairperson, introducing the launch at Katharine’s Place with Glen Phillips seated. Photo by Lauren Pratt.It’s me on the verandah where Katharine used to hold her parties in the 1920s! Photo by Lauren Pratt.
It’s a year since The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard came out.
I’ll always remember the night of my book launch at the UWA Tavern, my family and friends and colleagues and KSP fans gathered together. There were speeches from my supervisors, Tony Hughes d’Aeth and Van Ikin, who had been there with me all those years I was writing it. To my disbelief, Norman Jorgensen handed me a signed copy of KSP’s seven inch record on which she reads two of her short stories. It was such a generous gift. It was a surreal night – just before the event was due to start, I had a job offer over the phone which threw me off balance. I had been going to say no, because I couldn’t work full time, but in that evening when I’d finally climbed the mountain of the book it felt like everything was changing, opening up and that I needed to say yes.
That launch was the first of many events, a busy, giddy couple of months. I was even interviewed by Phillip Adams, something I’d long dreamed of. I’d been rather selfishly worried he would retire before the publication of my book. But it happened, an hour long special with me and Karen Throssell, KSP’s granddaughter. We pre-recorded in the morning but, alas, there was no cosy chat with Phillip before or after – he was in a hurry. The reviews started rolling in and there were so many of them! I was grateful to be met with astute and generous reviewers, some of them writers I admire greatly. I had an online launch, compered by Lisa Hill of ANZ Litlovers with Karen Throssell launching and my publisher, Nathan Hollier, also speaking. I had another launch at Katharine’s house itself in Greenmount, now the KSP Writers’ Centre, a place which had been so central to the journey. Fittingly, the centre’s patron, Glen Phillips, launched the book; he’s been writing about KSP for decades.You can see in the photographs the golden autumn light. It was a perfect afternoon.
As a bookend to the first launch, at the end of June the theological college where I’d worked for fourteen years had a combined farewell and launch for me and theologian Michael O’Neil spoke eloquently and appreciatively about my book.
I had a week off before I started my new job and a long list of things I was going to do but instead, I came down with covid and a severe case of a bad review. Since then I have been holding in a very juvenile desire to swear on my blog at the eminent historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. (Maybe an acrostic poem, Gwen Harwood style?) I’d always wanted to review for ABR and be reviewed in it. Professor Fitzpatrick’s review in the July issue came on day two of covid, when I was at my sickest. Confined to bed, I got up when I heard the postie. And there I was, finally in the ABR. Her review was disdainful and it seemed as if she didn’t understand the conventions of biography and what my biography was trying to do; she didn’t even consider it on its own terms. I’ve always been an outsider to the academy – I don’t come from an academic family and my work doesn’t fit neatly into a discipline – and I felt my eight years of research and writing were crushed by an insider who had all the power. But reviews should be honest and it was no doubt the honest opinion of an expert in Soviet history, an aspect of my book which isn’t its strong point – nor its focus. The thing is, it never looks good to respond to negative reviews. You end up looking thin-skinned and perhaps a little ridiculous. Of course, if I’m honest, I am thin-skinned and thereby temperamentally unsuited to the public exposure of publishing a book.
But other aspects of public exposure suit me. I love public speaking, love talking about my book and answering people’s questions. Due to the ongoing covid pandemic, I haven’t pushed hard to do more talks. I’m still wearing a n95 mask, trying to stave off repeat infections, and that’s something few people have sympathy with any more, let alone in a guest speaker. (If anyone is tolerating a masked speaker and can gather a few people to hear me talk about KSP, drop me a line!)
I wrote to a friend, ‘I had told myself that being published would be enough, but I think I had my fingers crossed.’ I thought there would be invitations to literary festivals (there was one – Mandurah, thank you!) and a shortlisting or two. But like most books, mine has largely missed out on these things.
A few years before I finished The Red Witch, a publisher told me that non-commercial Australian biographies sell between 200 and 1000 copies. It was a reality check and I was crestfallen. I read somewhere that David Marr’s biography of Patrick White sold 40,000 copies and there was a part of me setting that up as a benchmark. But here was this wise publisher recalibrating my expectations.
The thing about climbing a mountain is the dilemma of what to do next. ‘Climb another one’. A higher one? No chance. Or at least not right now. I’ve had two false starts on new books. Both foundered on the lack of rich archival material – personal letters – to bring the subjects alive. I’ve got two other ideas I’m spending a long time choosing between; both of them have promise and both of them have problems. I don’t want to commit to starting and then stop again. Also, I have no time. I do have an article celebrating Elizabeth Jolley’s centenary out next month in the State Library of NSW’s OpenBook magazine.
Thanks to everyone who has bought my book / read my book / come along to one of my talks / followed my blog – I appreciate it so much!
To celebrate the first birthday of The Red Witch, during May you can buy a signed copy directly from me at the discounted price of $45 with free postage (usually $10) to anywhere in Australia – the online shop is here.