Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883–1969)
Autore di Coonardoo
Sull'Autore
Serie
Opere di Katharine Susannah Prichard
N'goola, and other stories 4 copie
Straight left: Articles and addresses on politics, literature, and women's affairs over almost 60 years, from… (1982) 3 copie
Fay's circus 3 copie
The Gray Horse 2 copie
Potch and colour 2 copie
Happiness 2 copie
The Curse 1 copia
Why I am a Communist 1 copia
The real Russia 1 copia
Opere correlate
Happy Endings: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women, 1850S-1930s (1987) — Collaboratore — 11 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Prichard, Katharine Susannah
- Altri nomi
- Throssell, Mrs. Hugo
- Data di nascita
- 1883-12-04
- Data di morte
- 1969-10-02
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- Australia
- Luogo di nascita
- Levuka, Fiji
- Luogo di morte
- Greenmount, Western Australia, Australia
- Luogo di residenza
- Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
London, England, UK - Istruzione
- South Melbourne College
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
short-story writer
dramatist
poet
journalist
autobiographer - Relazioni
- Throssell, Ric (son)
Throssell, Karen (granddaughter) - Organizzazioni
- Communist Party of Australia (founding member)
- Breve biografia
- Katharine Susannah Prichard was born in Fiji and spent her childhood in Tasmania, before moving to Melbourne, Australia, where her father, a newspaper editor, was the editor of the Melbourne Sun. She won a scholarship to South Melbourne College and then worked as a governess and journalist. She went on assignment to Europe in 1908 and stayed in London and Paris for several years. Her first novel, The Pioneers, was the winner of a newspaper competition and was published in 1915. After her return to Australia, she published the romance Windlestraws and her first novel of a mining community, Black Opal. She married Captain Hugo "Jim" Throssell, a hero of World War I, with whom she had one son, and in 1920 moved with him to Western Australia, where she lived for the rest of her life. In her personal life, she always referred to herself as Mrs Hugo Throssell. In 1921, she became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia and also founded several left-wing women's groups. In the 1920s, she wrote the two novels that would make her Australia's first internationally recognized writer: Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929). During the 1930s, she campaigned in support of the Republic in Spain and other anti-fascist causes. With the novel Intimate Strangers (1937) she began to promote the cause of peace and social justice. Her massive work, The Goldfields Trilogy -- comprising The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950) -- explored social and personal histories in Western Australia's goldfields from the 1890s to 1946. She also wrote 10 plays, five collections of short stories, two films, and two volumes of poetry. Her autobiography was called The Child of the Hurricane (1964), after the events surrounding her birth.
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 25
- Opere correlate
- 9
- Utenti
- 553
- Popolarità
- #45,138
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 17
- ISBN
- 58
- Preferito da
- 1
My 1991 Imprint Classics edition includes an introduction by Ivor Indyk (now of Giramondo Publishing, founded in 1995), but its cover image from a panel of 'Riverbend' painted by Sidney Nolan, alludes only to the majesty of the forests. It doesn't even hint at the power of Prichard's story. Working Bullocks does feature superb evocations of the natural environment which would win any nature-writing prize today, but KSP wrote social realism with political intent, and this novel exposes the hardships of the working poor who laboured far from cities and towns, in the timber industry.
Chapter 21 'The Karri Forest' in Nathan Hobby's award-winning biography, The Red Witch (2022) tells me that the catalyst for this novel was KSP's motorbike trip to Pemberton with her husband Hugo in 1919.
Perhaps by the 1990s marketing departments sought to capitalise on the prevailing interest in environmental issues with a cover depicting trees, but these earlier covers are more true to KSP's social concerns. They show the teamsters at work...
Set in the early 1920s in the Karri forests southwest of Perth, Working Bullocks is a story of powerful men crushed by a system of body-breaking work, poverty and little prospect of advancement. When we read this story, almost a century later, it is to recognise how brutal working conditions were for the timber workers of that era. Single men in the forests mostly camped out in the bush. They lived on meagre campfire meals with the basics brought from town. They supplemented this diet with what they could catch, rabbits and 'tammas' (Tammar Wallabies). When they could, they came into town for a bath and a decent meal at a boarding house and what passed for a social life at the pub.
Married men lived in crude company housing, so pitiless that KSP's story tells of women and children who died while requests for decent housing were 'being considered'.
(A rake is a form of rail transport: rolling stock coupled together.)
The size of the families reminds us that this was an era without effective birth control. The indefatigable Mary Ann Colburn has 18 children, and a useless husband. She makes ends meet by decades of incessant work, not just the labour of cooking and cleaning for her own brood, but by doing washing, ironing and mending in town. When the story opens, her daughter Deb — barely into her teens — is about to start work in Mrs Pennyfather's boarding house, and like her brother Chris working with Red Burke's bullock team, she will give her wages to her mother. Mrs Pennyfather provides board and lodging and three meals a day for up to 40 men, and it will be Deb's job to make the beds and do the laundry and lay the tables and do the kitchen prep. These scenes are vivid, almost certainly drawn from KSP's observations of women labouring seven days a week in this way.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/01/working-bullocks-by-katharine-susannah-prich...… (altro)