Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in my detective work for The Red Witch was my discovery of the likely identity of ‘the Preux Chevalier’ (pictured). It’s the pseudonym Katharine gives a man in her autobiography who had a critical role in her life. He was a friend of her parents who started secretly meeting Katharine in her twenties just before her father died. She learned a lot from him about politics, journalism and culture but he grew more and more obsessive about her. He gave up his job and moved his whole family – including five daughters – to London when she moved there. He made her promise she would never marry, threatening to kill himself. Such was his shadow over her life that she felt compelled to write about it in her autobiography, but his daughters were still alive so she wouldn’t reveal his name.

Katharine’s third published novel, Black Opal (1921), is a transition work. It has the exuberance and frivolity of her early work but also the political weight and accomplished descriptions of a community at work of her mature writing.

Working as a governess near Wilcannia in 1905, she’d taken a trip out to the White Cliff Opal Fields. The breakthrough serial she wrote inspired by that year, “A City Girl in Central Australia”, ends with a bizarre plot twist in White Cliff. The lure of opals didn’t fade. After the success of The Pioneers, she travelled to the new opal fields, Lightning Ridge, with the express goal of researching her next novel. She writes in her autobiography that the pub owner initially gave her a very cold welcome, thinking she was a visiting prostitute.

Katharine gives opal a mystical allure. It will drive men crazy, they will give up everything for the pursuit of it. She would later treat pearls (Moon of Desire [1941]) and gold (the goldfields trilogy [1946-1950]) in a similar way.

Set in the opal mining settlement of Fallen Star Ridge, Black Opal has two significant plot strands: the Ridge’s pure, beautiful Sophie coming into womanhood and torn between three men; and the attempt of an American to buy out the individual miners and commercialise operations. Black Opal is not only historically intriguing as a novel of ideas, but also a gripping read. The plot slips into melodrama, and co-incidences abound, yet we care about Michael and Sophie and all the rest of the Ridge folk. Katharine has a narrative instinct and profound insight into life. It’s what made her famous a century ago, and its what makes her books still worth reading.

You can read more in chapter 15 of The Red Witch, ‘The Opal Fields’.

Only a handful of Katharine’s notebooks survive. One of them is the ‘Ti-tree journal’, and has pages of angst poured out over her storm of feelings about Guido Baracchi while staying among the ti-trees near Black Rock, Melbourne, in 1916. Most of the others are detailed notes she took on her trips to research her novels. They don’t make for easy reading and aren’t obvious to use in a biography, although they do show how she worked. She would write down slabs of dialogue, nomenclature, little word sketches of scenes. A lot of it just didn’t make sense to me. There are a few gems though, including a key at the back of her Pioneers notebook where she specifies what she has renamed each of the towns in Gippsland for the novel. And then there’s the revelations from a notebook in 1929. What seems to be a transcription of the final letter from her mysterious lover, the Preux Chevalier, probably copied out in her notebook to keep it secret while preserving it. A draft of a letter to an Australian poet whom she had grown very close to. She writes to him from the beach at Rockingham describing events she fictionalised in the novel Intimate Strangers. It took years to work out what I was looking at, but it did all finally come together when I found the final, sent version in that poet’s archives. You can read about that in chapter 24 of The Red Witch, ‘The Mirage is Breaking Up’.

As a novice biographer, I got obsessed with trying to unearth the lost years of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s father, Tom Prichard, in Levuka, Fiji. Like many other young men, he left the Victorian goldfields in about 1868 as part of the ‘Great Fiji Rush’. I found a ‘Tom Pritchard’ who went on trial for ‘blackbirding’ (which is to say, slavery) in Fiji and thought I’d found an incredible revelation. It wasn’t him though. Our Tom eventually became editor of the Fiji Times, the job he held when he returned to Melbourne to marry Katharine’s mother, Edith, in 1883. In December of that year, Katharine was born in Levuka.

Katharine’s names have often been misspelt – her given name, her middle name, AND her last name. Yet the replacement of the more common ‘Katherine’ for ‘Katharine’ has some ambiguities. In her archives, I found her birth certificate and it looks like it’s been written down as ‘Katherine’. Presumably, the clerk got it wrong!

She was actually named for a dead aunty, Katherine Susan Davies, her mother’s elder half-sister. Katherine Susan died soon after childbirth in 1873, ten years before Katharine was born. Her widower was Slingsby Davies, who soon remarried his late wife’s sister, Hannah Frances. With Katharine growing up on North Road in Caulfield two doors down from Uncle Slingsby and Aunt Hannah, the families were quite entangled. She keeps on talking about Slingsby in her autobiography, trying to settle old scores and hurts. Their family was richer and more successful than hers, and one of the houses they lived in for some time on North Road belonged to Slingsby. The echoes of names are strong too, with Katharine adopting the character name ‘Hannah Frances’ for the titular autobiographical character in The Wild Oats of Han (1928). I spent a lot of time pursuing the Davies, and found out various things about them, only to realise they weren’t germane enough to the story to keep. It’s one of the hardest parts of a biography, pruning hard-won archival discoveries from the manuscript.

In her childhood and young adulthood, Katharine was usually called ‘Kattie’ by friends and family. I call the first part of my biography ‘Kattie’. By the end of her life, Katharine wasn’t the sort of woman you could imagine calling ‘Kattie’ – she was too formidable. It might also be true to say that some of the buoyancy had left her after going through so many tragedies. By then, one of the few nicknames she seemed to welcome was ‘Comrade Katya’, which she encouraged her Soviet correspondents to call her.

Katharine’s friend and physician, Greenmount communist Dr Alexander Jolly, was summoned to her house when she had a stroke late on 2 October 1969. He couldn’t save her and she died not long before her son, Ric, arrived from the airport for a visit. If she had any last words, it was Jolly who heard them.

Katharine used to credit Jolly with keeping her alive through her seventies and eighties when she had been expected to die from her bad heart and high blood pressure.

At the pivotal 1949 federal election, Jolly stood as the Communist Party candidate for the seat of Swan. Although he was a Midland councillor, the council forbade him as a communist candidate from hiring the town hall. So he held the rally outside his house on the Great Eastern Highway. Anti-communist protestors came to disrupt the meeting, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in unison as loudly as they could. Katharine was the celebrity guest, declaring ‘In this most critical period of Australian history, is up to all of us to use our courage and common sense to fight the gang of millionaires, warmongers, unscrupulous politicians, and their henchmen.’