ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s tenth novel The Roaring Nineties is my first book for 2022, and what an interesting novel it turned out to be!  My first edition ex-Library copy has an interesting history of its own.  Mr and Mrs GJ Pearce of Maitland immortalised their ownership in careful copperplate on the flyleaf but there is also a Maitland Institute Library stamp, accession no. A5012 and a pencil note that it cost 11 shillings and sixpence.  This took me down an intriguing research rabbit-hole where I learned that The Maitland Institute, established in 1859, was one of hundreds of Mechanics Institutes set up to offer adult education to working-class men in Australia.

KSP (1893-1969) with her socialist leanings would have been pleased to know that this, her most important novel, was being read in such a milieu.  However, as I learned from a paper published by the Maitland Historical Society (with photos), by mid-20th century the public library movement had gained enough momentum for new public library legislation to be passed in all Australian states.  The NSW Public Library Act was passed in 1944 and in the ensuing decade, institute collections were taken over by the new public libraries.  If only Mr and Mrs GJ Pearce had noted their date of acquisition we could know whether KSP’s masterpiece survived the initial weeding process and the tensions of the Cold War, or was culled later.

Nathan Hobby, whose bio The Red Witch is due for release soon from Miegunyah Press, tells us that KSP …

… spent a decade on the trilogy, regarding it as her finest achievement, and was deeply hurt by the mixed reception she received from critics (especially for the third volume, Winged Seeds). (See Gold Fever: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Roaring Nineties at Nathan Hobby, a Biographer in Perth.)

But — much as I liked the novel — I am not surprised by that mixed reception, for two reasons:

Firstly. a reminder from Jean François Vernay, who, in A Brief Take of the Australian Novel, notes that KSP was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1932, and then groups her work into three categories:

• Iconoclastic novels containing risky heretical topics: (lustful desire (Working Bullocks, 1926); desire for an Indigenous partner (Coonardoo, 1929, see my review); and female eroticism (Intimate Strangers, 1937);
• Neo-nationalist novels in the romantic tradition and concerned with the wealth that the continent had to offer its settler and indigenous populations: The Pioneers (1915, see my review); Black Opal (1921, see my review) and Moon of Desire (1941);
• Politically inspired novels [which] can be read as a diatribe against corrupt capitalism: her trilogy about the mining industry in WA: The Roaring Nineties (1946); Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950).

I don’t agree that The Roaring Nineties is a ‘diatribe‘.  It is forceful, but it’s neither bitter nor abusive, and it’s neither ironic nor satirical. It’s Australian realism, and it’s deeply humane. Acknowledging the disastrous impact of European settlement on the Indigenous people of the Goldfields, the novel shows the strengths and the weaknesses of individuals pioneering not just chaotic economic development but also an informal system of governance that was doomed to fail.  Because even in the 1890s, parts of any economy were global and the market for minerals in particular depended on foreign capital. Even so, I can see that some readers, especially those who don’t like any kind of politics in their reading, might have been turned off by KSP’s agenda.

I would have found it boring too, except for KSP’s gift for characterisation.

Which brings me to a possible second cause of the ‘mixed reception’: the novel is framed around KSP’s research which included listening to the reminiscences of two old-timers who in the novel KSP calls Dinny Quin and Sally Gough.  This is what gives the tale its authenticity, but it also means that the reader has to press on past a lot of Dinny’s yarning about the early days of the WA Goldfields.  Seven chapters of this starts to wear a bit thin before the story livens up with the arrival of three women on the goldfields.  And then it’s really interesting and had me captivated to the end, but I can see that some readers might abandon it prematurely.

The three arrivals are the attractive but shallow young bride Laura, who is the long term love of successful prospector Alf Brierly’s life.  She enjoys a rise in social status when Alf becomes a mine manager, and becomes a petty snob who never understands how precarious Alf’s position becomes when qualified engineers from overseas begin to replace experienced men who learned on the job. She reminded me of Rosamund Vincy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, another vain and shallow woman who thwarted her husband’s efforts to rise in society while retaining the values of his origins.

Marie is the French wife of Jean Robillard and goes to work like a man beside him.  Marie does not aspire to bourgeois respectability, and there is a wonderful scene where, entranced by the song of a French prostitute and overcome with emotion at hearing her native language, she leads her friends into a bawdy house to listen to it.  She explains that the French have a different view of prostitution, which she says, keeps the family together. But *chuckle* the women do not tell their husbands where they’ve been, and there are some droll scenes when this ‘discretion’ is almost exposed.

Then there is the central protagonist Sally Gough, the Australian-born wife of the Hon Morris Fitz-Morris Gough who came out from England to make his fortune, and didn’t.  A perennial failure as a husband, father and provider, he comes from a titled family and the relationship between Sally and Morry is about class and its expectations. Despite roughing it on the fields, he still retains ideas about what his wife should do.  He objected to her supporting him with her boarding-house when he lost all their money in a failed mine investment, and — having abandoned her for two years while he went prospecting — objects again when she finally turns up in Coolgardie and when he’s not there to meet her, earns herself a job with Mrs Fogarty who runs the pub.

Women — too often absent from The Grand Pioneer Australian Narrative — are shown in The Roaring Nineties to have initiative, courage, a readiness to adapt and a determination to achieve economic independence, especially Sally.  She recognises Morry’s flaws and that the great romance and elopement is fading, and she is going to get by on her own, with or without him.  Her efforts are compromised by pregnancies that result from sporadic reunions with her husband, and she succumbs to the filthy conditions with a bout of typhoid fever, but the role she has played in feeding and occasionally nursing single male prospectors means that the diggers’ code of honour protects her and enables her to get back on her feet.  I’ve been to Kalgoorlie where on an historical tour I learned a lot about the number of brothels, but I never heard a word about the women who cooked and fed the miners with nourishing meals that improved the health of the township and provided an alternative to pub meals which led to alcohol abuse.

Sam Mullet and Eli thought the dining-room was a good scheme.  They promised to round up the boys to have meals at Mrs Gough’s, and offered to help getting the bough-shed ready for customers.  They fixed up a trestle and forms, put a sheet of corrugated iron round the open fireplace, and built a table from butter boxes, on which Sally could prepare and serve meals.  (p.205)

It is in this rudimentary Café de Bush that Sally — outdoors in all extremes of weather — cooks and does the washing up in kerosene tins, for 20-30 men, breakfast and dinner, every day.

The other feature of a contemporary visit to Kalgoorlie is that en route to Perth, the traveller sees the the longest fresh-water pipeline in the world running along beside the road all the way.  It’s 566 kilometres long, and it’s the source of a water supply that did not exist at the time of KSP’s novel.  The Roaring Nineties is prefaced by a grotesque incident in which prospectors force a Wongi woman to reveal a water source by tying her up and feeding her salty meat. Her desperation for water breaks her determination to protect the water source for the rest of the Wangkatha people, and it symbolises the way that their survival was at risk from the moment that gold was found. Through the character of Kalgoorla, KSP shows how the Wangkatha came into town because they were starving, and Sally acknowledges to herself that Kalgoorla only helps in the kitchen because it is a way to get help for her people.  And while wealthy Laura retreats to Perth for the birth of her first child, Sally has her first baby with the help of ‘rough diamond’ Mrs Molloy and Kalgoorla, who also enables Sally’s return to work by caring for the infant.

But KSP also shows the impact of the desperate shortage of water on the intruders.  Uncontrolled numbers of people venturing into uncharted desert territory often had fatal results, and Morris almost dies of it.  There were also frequent outbreaks of typhoid fever due to the unhygienic conditions under which people lived and worked.

Wild Cassia (WA Dept of Primary Industries)

KSP’s conversations with those old-timers show in the numerous small details that grace this novel.  Teenager Paddy Cavan brings Sally a bunch of wild Cassia with tiny flowers, like golden boronia, which you could smell for miles along the dry creek beds where it grew.  And after a cyclone destroys Sally’s Café de Bush, Dinny finances Morris to set up a new boarding house and helps dig the foundations for it, binding the posts with galvanized iron bandages to protect them from the ravages of white ants.  

KSP’s grasp of the big picture changes in the economy and society is impressive. The signs of permanence in the town emerge: a school is built and the railway comes, bringing social division with it as selective invitations are issued to the well-to-do, in contrast to previous celebrations where everyone was welcome.  Alf Brierly builds a proper house for Laura not only in contrast with Sally’s primitive accommodation but also to show the way gold-fever made people abandon long-held social values such as concern for their families.  Sally concludes ruefully that the motivation for Morry’s always-fruitless search for gold is that he wants to restore his social position in England and that’s what makes him abandon his values.

As the economy transitions towards foreign investment in reef-mining, there is a stoush over the rights of the diggers to mine the alluvial gold, there are strikes for better pay and there is wild-cat speculation too. The law of the self-governing goldfields which operated through ‘roll-ups’ where the diggers gathered to adjudicate disputes, comes into conflict with new legislation in faraway Perth…

The fact of the matter was, miners and prospectors were a law unto themselves then: the law that mattered most in the scattered camps cut off from the rest of the world, the unwritten law of the fields.  And wealthy strangers, wandering aristocrats and mining magnates, who depended on the goodwill of the working miners and prospectors knew it.  They were glad to fraternise with these men who could make their way through the grey seas of scrub flowing beyond the horizon in every direction: men who could discover gold in the great red bluffs and stark ridges, hundreds of miles away. (p.285)

Radical ideas from William Morris and Frederick Engels emerge in pub talk, and even the Kalgoorlie Miner recognises the principle at stake if the diggers lose their right to alluvial gold.

‘It has been a principle on the goldfields of all the colonies that the alluvial gold, the easily obtained gold, is the property of the nomadic population who will get it out quickly and distribute it, while the reef or lode gold, entailing heavy expense and machinery, could be leased to the mining companies.  (p.294-5)

Mining seems to beget political issues to this day.  In our own time we saw the mega-rich frustrate reforms to the Mining Tax which would have seen the Australian people recompensed for mining that takes place on land that belongs to all of us.

The Roaring Nineties is a lively introduction to the trilogy which is followed by Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950), both on my TBR and I hope to read them before the biography of KSP finds its way to me!

References:

• ‘A Place for the People, by Keryl Collard, Head Librarian of the Maitland Public Library system, Maitland Historical Society Bulletin, Nov. 2019
• Jean François Vernay, in A Brief Take of the Australian Novel, Wakefield Press, 2016.
• Gold Fever: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Roaring Nineties, at NathanHobby.com

Image credit:

• Wild Cassia (WA Dept of Primary Industries and Regional Development: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/rangelands/desert-cassia-senna-artemisioides-subsp-x-coriacea-western-australian-rangelands

Author: Katharine Susannah Prichard
Title: The Roaring Nineties (The Goldfields Trilogy #1)
Publisher: The Australasian Publishing Co by arrangement with Jonathan Cape London, 1946.
ISBN: none, hbk first edition, 411 pages,
Source: personal copy, purchased via Abebooks