Ric Throssell (1922-1999) was an author, a playwright, an editor and a diplomat. He was also the only son of the eminent Australian author Katharine Susannah Prichard, (1883-1969), and Wild Weeds and Windflowers, The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1975) is the biography that he wrote after his mother's death.

As a keen reader of KSP's fiction and of Nathan Hobby's recent biography The Red Witch (2022, see my review) I found it very moving to read Throssell's tribute to his mother. It's a straightforward literary biography, placing her books in the chronology of her life, quoting her poetry and her letters to supplement her lifeline. But because of the tragic circumstances of his father's suicide, and of the impact of her political activity on his own career, Wild Weeds and Windflowers is unusually intimate and legitimately defensive in telling her story.

Ric Throssell was only a boy when his father, the war hero Hugo (Jim) Throssell VC (1884-1933) committed suicide during the Depression. KSP was overseas in London after a research tour of the USSR at the time and learned the news from a press report. She was shattered by the loss of the love of her life, and Hugo's financial imprudence meant that the family was now very hard up, with only a meagre pension and substantial debts. The generosity of his father's military friends enabled Ric to go to boarding school, but while he does not dwell on this mournful period from his own point-of-view, no reader can help but imagine how dreadful it must have been for the boy, shocked and bereft while waiting weeks for his mother's return by sea. (It would have taken 7-8 weeks at least.)

Instead he writes about how KSP kept her feelings to herself.

Like the bush creatures she loved, Katherine kept her wounds to herself, hidden away in some secret place until the hurt was healed. She felt too deeply for it to be seen by others. It was impossible for her grief to become a public display. Only to her closest friends would she sometimes speak of the tragedies in her life, and, later, to me. (p.71)

There is a world of emotion in that one word 'later'.

There are numerous references to KSP's kindness and generosity, sometimes with gifts of money that she could not afford. But when Throssel writes of his own feelings, it's to illustrate her tenderness. In 1934, travelling steerage across the Great Australian Bight from Fremantle to Melbourne, Ric suffered dreadfully from seasickness (as most people do on that infamous stretch of water!) but his mother tended to him with loving care:

She bathed my face, tried all her most infallible remedies, gave me barley sugar to suck, anointed my wrists and temples with eau-de-cologne, sang to me:
Rikki-tiky-tavi was a little mongoose,
Brave and strong.
He fought a big snake in the garden
of the world,
All day long, all day long... (p.77)

KSP threw herself into work, writing desperately to bring in some income from short stories.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/08/05/wild-weeds-and-windflowers-the-life-and-lett... ( )