Katharine Susannah Prichard

Australian novelist and founding member of the Communist Party of Australia.

• Born: December 4, 1883
• Place of birth: Levuka, Fiji
• Died: October 2, 1969
• Place of death: Greenmount, Western Australia

Biography

Born during a hurricane in Fiji, Katharine Susannah Prichard took that image as the title for her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane (1963). Her parents were Tom Prichard, a journalist, and Edith Isabel Fraser, a painter, both of whose families had immigrated to Australia in 1853. When Prichard was three, her father moved their family from Fiji to Launceston, Tasmania, and then later to Melbourne, Victoria. Prichard thrived in the rural island setting of Tasmania, and she based her 1928 children’s book, The Wild Oats of Han, on her idyllic childhood there.

At age fourteen, Prichard began attending South Melbourne College on a half scholarship. After she finished her secondary schooling, her family could not afford for her to attend university, so she worked as a governess in rural Victoria and New South Wales instead. From her experience in the Gippsland region of Victoria she drew material for her first novel, The Pioneers (1915), a historical tale that recounts the opening of the region and bristles with sturdy settlers, escaped convicts, cattle rustlers, and other frontier types.

Prichard's father committed suicide in 1907. The following year, at age twenty-two, Prichard went to London as a freelance journalist for the Melbourne Herald. After returning, she served as the social editor of the newspaper’s women’s page. Her second novel, Windlestraws, was published in 1917 but had been written before The Pioneers. Set in the London theater world, its melodramatic narrative relates the adventures of a Russian prince and a dancer.

In 1919 Prichard married Hugo “Jim” Throssell, and they settled in Western Australia. Throssell, a decorated World War I veteran, established a ranch but was plagued by financial problems, which were worsened by the Great Depression. Meanwhile, Prichard devoted herself to politics and writing. In 1920 she became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. Soon after, she published The Black Opal (1921), her first attempt to blend economic theory and fiction. The novel tells how an opal-mining community in Western Australia guards its independence by opposing the evils of capitalism. The following year, Prichard gave birth to her and her husband's son, Richard “Ric” Throssell.

Working Bullocks was Prichard's next novel, published in 1926. Although stressing political ideology as well, it overcomes this limitation to render a sensitive exploration of the mystical relationship between humans and the environment. Three years later, Coonardoo: The Well in the Shadow (1929) was praised as the first honest portrayal of an Aboriginal person in Australian literature. Most critics consider these two novels Prichard’s best work.

Resolutely involved in politics, Prichard helped found several organizations, including the Unemployed Women and Girls’ Association, the Modern Women’s Club, and the Australian Writers’ League. Her fiction writing did not lag, with Haxby’s Circus: The Lightest, Brightest Little Show on Earth (1930) offering a nonpolitical and thoroughly charming tale of Australian circus life. Her next novel, Intimate Strangers (1937), had been completed before her trip to Russia in 1933. In part an honest study of a disintegrating marriage, the narrative loses momentum once the unhappy couple unites to work for a better society. It is generally acknowledged that this novel, which originally ended with the hero’s suicide, may have been partially responsible for the death of Prichard’s husband, who reportedly read the unrevised manuscript while his wife was touring Russia and killed himself before she returned (although his primary motivation is believed to have been the failure of his business as a result of the Depression). A year later Prichard published The Real Russia (1934), a nonfiction account of her travels.

Critics generally consider Moon of Desire (1941), an adventure story centering on the search for a fabulous pearl, to be Prichard's weakest novel. The Roaring Nineties (1946), the first volume of a trilogy about the gold fields of Western Australia, was published next, followed by Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950). Poorly received by some readers because of its didactic elements but praised by others for its political courage, the trilogy traces with historical accuracy an important phase of Australian history. Obvious ideology mars the books, however. Nearly twenty years passed before the publication of Prichard’s final novel, Subtle Flame (1967), whose hero, disillusioned by the Korean War, embarks on a crusade for nuclear disarmament.

Until the advent of the Cold War, Prichard remained a public figure, highly regarded in some circles for her politics and widely respected as a writer both at home and abroad. Stunned in the early 1950s by the wave of anticommunism, Prichard retreated to her home in Greenmount, a suburb of Perth, where she died in 1969. Shortly before her death, Prichard wrote to a friend, “Such a strange, lonely life it is, these days.” During this period, her novels, once published in London and New York, found their main foreign audience in the Soviet bloc.

Described by one critic in the 1980s as a genteel, middle-class, politically naïve woman who clung to communist ideals and ignored the harsh reality, Prichard undoubtedly impaired her fiction by burdening it with propaganda. However, she has since emerged as an important figure in Australian literature whose record of that country’s history, land, and settlers shines more brightly than her ideological exposition.

The Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation was founded in 1985 to preserve Prichard's home in Greenmount, known as Katharine's Place. Since then the house has been listed in Western Australia's State Register of Heritage Places. It is also the home of the foundation's Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre, which hosts numerous writers' workshops and programs, including a youth program and a writer-in-residence program.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Pioneers, 1915

Windlestraws, 1917

The Black Opal, 1921

Working Bullocks, 1926

Coonardoo: The Well in the Shadow, 1929

Haxby’s Circus: The Lightest, Brightest Little Show on Earth, 1930

Intimate Strangers, 1937

Moon of Desire, 1941

The Roaring Nineties, 1946

Golden Miles, 1948

Winged Seeds, 1950

Subtle Flame, 1967

Short Fiction:

Kiss on the Lips, and Other Stories, 1932

Potch and Colour, 1944

N’Goola, 1959

On Strenuous Wings, 1965

Happiness, 1967

Drama:

Brumby Innes, pb. 1940

Bid Me to Love, pb. 1975

Poetry:

Clovelly Verses, 1913

The Earth Lover, 1932

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

The Wild Oats of Han, 1928

Nonfiction:

The Real Russia, 1934

Why I Am a Communist, 1956

Child of the Hurricane, 1963 (autobiography)

Miscellaneous:

Katharine Susannah Prichard: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, 2000 (Delys Bird, editor)

Bibliography

Beasley, Jack. The Rage for Life: The Work of Katharine Susannah Prichard. Current Book Distributors, 1964. Praises Prichard’s fiction for its political awareness.

Colebatch, Hal. “New Light on Katharine Susannah Prichard.” Antipodes, vol. 4, no. 2, 1990, pp. 125–29. Contends that, ironically, by being a communist, the much-honored writer “supported the world’s all-time greatest killer of writers.”

Ferrier, Carole, editor. As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge UP, 1992. A collection letters between a number of Australian writers, including Prichard’s letters to other Australian women writers.

Hay, John. “Prichard, Katharine Susannah (1883–1969).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/prichard-katharine-susannah-8112. Accessed 11 May 2017. A relatively brief but detailed biography of Prichard, originally published in volume 11 of Melbourne University Press's Australian Dictionary of Biography in 1988.

Throssell, Ric. “Katharine Susannah Prichard: A Reluctant Daughter of Mark Twain.” Antipodes, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989, pp. 89–93. Discusses Prichard’s travels and her work’s reception in the United States.

Throssell, Ric. Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard. Angus & Robertson, 1975. A biography by Prichard’s son that sympathetically examines the conjunction of Prichard’s life and her writing.

"What We Do." Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre, Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation, www.kspwriterscentre.com/what-we-do. Accessed 11 May 2017. An overview of the KSP Writers' Centre, the KSP Foundation, and the historical significance of Prichard's house.