The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard by Nathan Hobby

Author:Nathan Hobby [Hobby, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9780522877397
Google: DYxyEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MelbourneUP
Published: 2022-05-17T20:35:05+00:00

Can you see the criminal, sitting up in bed, to interview the female of the species; and later, passing the time of day with the inspector in charge of the job, herself in yellow silk pyjamas & a black silk gown embroidered with golden dragons? It looked like the first act of a play—the verandah hung round with wisteria, & long sprays of dog roses. The only protest I made was that none of your letters, or Hilda’s, should be read, as they were entirely personal.35

The detectives took communist pamphlets and books, private letters, and anything else which seemed suspicious—including Katharine’s copy of Bernard O’Dowd’s The Poet Militant—and then proceeded to the rooms of the Friends of the Soviet Union, stripping them bare, even taking away a photo of Lenin. They confiscated all the copies of the new issue of the Red Star, which hadn’t yet been distributed. The Red Star team—probably including Katharine—refused to be intimidated, setting up a new two-page issue of the newspaper that same day.36 She told McCrae she expected to be arrested any day. ‘But so long as I fight the good fight, what does that matter?’

With the rise of Hitler in 1933, the Comintern had been helping set up anti-war groups which would also serve as a communist front, hoping to bring people into the party. Katharine was asked to establish a Western Australian anti-war committee. Two hundred attended a meeting she organised on 13 May 1933.37 One of the motions on the agenda read, in part, ‘We declare that a new world war would be a monstrous crime against civilisation, and must be prevented at all costs’ and that all elected to the committee pledged to fight against ‘imperialist capitalism, that purveyor to the slaughter house’. Moderates at the meeting, including the League of Nations’ representative, academic Fred Alexander, objected to the anti-capitalist elements of the motion and called for amendments which would allow a broader coalition to be formed against war. The moderates were outvoted and the motion passed.38 The meeting came just before Katharine left on a six-month trip, but on her return she was heavily involved with the organisation, which was to become the Movement Against War and Fascism.

Katharine had placed ads in the newspaper calling specifically on returned soldiers to attend the meeting and register their protest against war.39 Hugo came, and he was one of two Victoria Cross recipients elected to the committee of forty-five.40 He spoke at the meeting, saying ‘he had seen enough of the horrors of war, and that he would do his utmost to prevent his own boy from going to war’.41 In her autobiography, Katharine highlighted Hugo’s support for the organisation as evidence of his ongoing political commitment.42 It was a consolation to her, a sign of where he was headed if he had lived. It is, perhaps, woven into Greg’s conversion at the end of Intimate Strangers after he decides against suicide.

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