The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard

Australian writer and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969) used to say that the Furies were chasing her, and she was always waiting tensely for the next tragedy to strike. This biography traces her formation in Melbourne, from the genteel poverty of her childhood in the Depression of the 1890s to her father's suicide in 1907 and her radicalisation during the Great War. It reveals for the first time the identity of the mysterious Preux Chevalier, a progressive newspaper editor with whom she has a decade-long affair and who influences her move away from her father's outspoken political conservatism. Her early literary work is inspired by her experiences of Gippsland and outback New South Wales as a governess, setting the pattern for her lifelong project to chronicle the 'back-blocks' of Australia. Her impulsive marriage at the end of the Great War to the Victoria Cross winner, Hugo Throssell, leads her to Western Australia, where her early attempts to establish a branch of the nascent Communist Party are fruitless. Stepping back from politics, a five-year creative peak follows from 1924 to 1929, in which research trips inspire her best known novels, Working Bullocks (1926), Coonardoo (1929), and Haxby's Circus (1930). Re-committing herself to communism in the Great Depression, she is about to return from a tour of the Soviet Union when Hugo kills himself in 1933. In her grief, she doubles down on communism, a frenzied worker for the party through her fifties, the persecution during illegality only reinforcing her convictions. She serves on the Central Committee in Sydney from 1943 to 1946, the period she has been accused of spying for the Soviet Union. After completing what she regards as her magnum opus, the goldfields trilogy (1946-1950), she is wounded by its mixed reception. In the 1960s, she shakes herself out of a literary slumber, finishing her autobiography and embarking on a final, ambitious novel about a peace activist. She completes that novel, Subtle Flame (1967), after a stroke nearly kills her and she has to teach herself to write again with her left hand. To the end of her life in 1969, she seems frailly invincible, a generous woman holding on during the never-ending Cold War to an Australia which has passed and a Soviet Union which never was.