Katharine Susannah Prichard

Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969), author and communist, was born in Levuka, Fiji, the eldest child of Edith (born Fraser) and Thomas Prichard, journalist. The family returned to Australia when 'Kattie' was three and she grew up in Tasmania and Melbourne. Despite her father's experience of unemployment she completed her secondary education at South Melbourne College, but her mother's illness prevented her attending university; she had to stay home and keep house. Prichard later claimed that this experience sparked her opposition to economic injustice; perhaps it stimulated her lifelong advocacy of woman's right to equality in private and public life.

After working as a governess and schoolteacher, Prichard embarked for England. Between 1908 and 1917 she travelled widely, working as a freelance journalist and briefly for the Melbourne Herald. When her novel The Pioneers won the Australian section of the Hodder and Stoughton All-Empire novel competition, she returned home a celebrity, determined 'to live and write in Australia about the country and its people'. Her travels had brought her in touch with a range of political movements, including a brief engagement with Mrs Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union. The death of her brother in action crystallised her opposition to war and she campaigned actively against conscription. With the formation of a Communist Party in Australia in 1920 Prichard found a vehicle for her socialist and pacifist principles.

In 1919 she wed Hugo Throssell VC, son of a prominent Western Australian family, and went to live in Greenmount, Western Australia. The 1920s were rewarding years, during which their son Ric was born and she wrote her most highly acclaimed novels, Working Bullocks (1926), Coonardoo (1929) and Haxby's Circus (1930). She shared first prize in the Bulletin's novel competition for Coonardoo, which raised an outcry over her sympathetic depiction of Aborigines and the love of a white station-owner for an Aboriginal woman.

A period of intense political activity followed which left little time for writing. Possibly Throssell's suicide in 1933 (while she was in London) contributed to this. However, the observation and experience of suffering during the depression, and the rise of fascism abroad, provided many Australians with the impetus to engage more fully in the action of their times. The Communist Party of Australia now demanded total engagement from its members and Prichard's literary skills made her a valuable Party propagandist. She lectured widely, wrote pamphlets and articles for the Communist press and published The Real Russia (1934), an exercise in counter-propaganda. During the 1930s she helped Cecilia Shelley form the Unemployed Women and Girls Defence Association, and also founded the Western Australian branch of the Movement Against War and Fascism and a Modern Women's Club. Prichard's fame as a writer contributed to her high profile in the Party but her political activity led to her being labelled 'Red Witch' and to denigration of her as a writer. One commentator described her political involvement as an author's search for 'colour', but she was respected and admired among working people for her commitment to working class interests.

Prichard consistently argued for internationalism and also for a distinctly Australian literature which realistically depicted working class concerns. With Jean Devanny, she helped found the Writers' League to promote this ideal and to provide encouragement to writers. It was reflected in her own writing, especially in the goldfields trilogy: The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950). Prichard considered these to be her major work, a paen to the Australian workers which incorporated Communist ideals within a radical nationalist aesthetic; conservative critics praised her realism and humanitarianism while objecting to the intrusion of propaganda in art.

Failing health and the cold war atmosphere led to Prichard being less active in public life during the 1950s and 1960s. She never abandoned her commitment to communism and the need to integrate politics with art. In practice she was often forced to divide her energies between the two. In a span of 50 years she wrote twelve novels, numerous poems, plays and short stories and an autobiography. Her political commitment developed alongside her identification as a nationalist writer, and the complex and sometimes conflicting interaction of these interests and activities contributed to the mystique which surrounds her: some revere her as a great writer and humanitarian and others criticise her as a misguided radical who sacrificed her art to politics. She was influential and charismatic and had a 'rage for privacy' which resulted in the destruction of many of her personal papers before and immediately following her death on 2 October 1969. She was one who aspired to be, in the words of another communist poet, Vic Williams, 'Writer and fighter in one human heart'.

Julie Wells

Ric Throssell Wild Weeds and Windflowers: the Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard 1975.