It’s rather speculative to imagine what Katharine Susannah Prichard would make of Twitter. She had a mixed relationship with technology. She flew in an aeroplane in 1916 when that was novel and dangerous, and travelled by motorbike and car around Western Australia with Hugo in 1919. Late in life she came to enjoy the wireless but disliked the advent of television and lived without many of the “modcons” of the postwar era.

I hope she wouldn’t mind that I’ve created a Twitter account for her, “Katharine S. Prichard”, https://twitter.com/KSP1883. After enjoying snippets of Samuel Pepys’ diary, as well as the tweets of Vita Sackville-West and C.S. Lewis, I decided Twitter would be a wonderful platform to serve up morsels of Katharine’s writing. 140 characters does not give room for context or nuance, but I believe it can give people a flavour of her writing and encourage them to seek out her books.

I’ll be tweeting quotes from across her oeuvre. The idea is to keep it entirely in her own voice.  Where there’s room I’ll give the name of the work as a hashtag, and I’ll also give the year of publication. It’ll often be a case of me live-tweeting whatever work of hers I’m reading at the moment, hence the wild veering across the years so far.

Even the profile for a Twitter account has to keep within the 140 character limit, so I was so pleased to find just the right words to fit the limit from a late article by Katharine, “Some Perceptions and Aspirations” (Southerly, 1968):

My work has been unpretentious: of the soil. Telling of the way men & women live & work in the forests, back country & cities of Australia.

Please come and follow her!