I like to start my reading year with a book I really liked, so I choose carefully from the TBR, selecting a tried and true author guaranteed not to let me down. This year I chose Katharine Susannah Prichard’s fourth novel Working Bullocks, from 1926. It was unputdownable…
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.
They stayed for a fortnight in the boarding house, living ‘among the karri forests…going out every day to watch the timber men at work, and absorbing the spirit of the place’; Katharine said she even drove a bullock team. She recorded snatches of conversation between timber workers, word sketches of characters she met or heard about, details of logging, handling bullocks, and the sawmill operations, stories about capturing brumbies, descriptions of the plants and animals in the area, as well as the experience of being among the trees; she was interested ‘above all in the generative power and wild beauty of the land itself.’ (The Red Witch, p182, details below.)
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…
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- 1926 1st edition, image credit Nathan Hobby
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- Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1956
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- Sirius c 1980
Pemberton 1919
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 fettler’s wife died, after having given birth to a baby in one of the wretched huts of bagging and defective timber, far out near the end of the bush line. Everything in the hut was wet, Jim Anderson, her husband said; neither the roof nor the walls kept out the rain, and everybody who had seen those poor lean-to’s of bagging and rough timber which were the fettlers’ homes could believe it. When the woman was raving, her husband had brought her into the township. There was neither nurse nor doctor in Karri Creek then; he had tried to take her into Jarranup on the rake, but she had died on the way. (P.222)
(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.
Equally vivid are horrific scenes of preventable accidents. Red Burke is haunted by the ghastly death of young Chris Colburn. He abandons his ambitions to build up his own bullock team and goes bush for a very long time. He doesn’t resurface in the town until he has captured a magnificent brumby and wants young Billy Colburn to ride it for him in the bush race that is the highlight of the town calendar. It is on his tentative visit to the Colburns that he notices Deb, the frightened child who saw her brother’s mangled body crushed flat beneath the log. Red and Deb’s elemental attraction to one another becomes the love story that propels this novel through realistic trials and tribulations to its conclusion.
While there are other men who are attracted to Deb, she is no match for Tessa Connolly, the town flirt who has learned in the city to paint her lips and manipulate her admirers into Hollywood scripts. It is Tessa who sabotages Red’s ambition to win the horse race; she is the catalyst for the gossip that surrounds Red when he rescues her from a flood. But there is no justice in KSP’s world where men are no better than working bullocks. Unlike the other women who scrimp and save and labour all the hours of the day, only Tessa manages to become upwardly mobile. Tessa marries up, and she invests her widow’s inheritance so that others work to provide her with a comfortable lifestyle. Shallow, selfish, greedy and manipulative, she is the embodiment of the capitalism that KSP despised, not least because it thrives on exactly those values.
Famously a communist long after the intelligentsia had abandoned Stalin’s regime, KSP wrote the political elements of Working Bullocks to show how working people are complicit in their own exploitation. The men fail to unite in order to stand up to bosses who exploit them, until it’s too late. Their jobs are compromised by mechanisation that kills and maims them but the factory does not stop work for the loss of a finger or a hand. Only when there is a death does the whistle blow to bring the townsfolk running. It is Red who compensates a widow with four children, not the timber company.
Some men are useless because of drink, but others are useless because of work-related health conditions. ‘Axeman’s heart’ appears to have been a form of Ischemic Cardiomyopathy, a condition which even now has a 10-year mortality rate of 60%. An irregular heart beat was caused by the constant impact and vibrations within the body from the repetition of axe blows on timber. Mrs Pennyfather’s husband is crippled by rheumatism, brought on by years of hard, physical labour felling trees.
The union that should have represented the workers’ interests has been corrupted by comfortable salaries coming from union dues and by cosy connections with the bosses. A strike, when it finally comes after an appalling double death caused by a circular saw, fizzles out… because the men are bored with doing nothing. With the exception of Mark Smith, the idealistic political activist, they are men of action, not of thought. As Ivor Indyk says:
It is the fatalistic acceptance by the Karri people, their reluctance to think beyond the immediate situation, which causes Mark Smith, their would-be leader in the political fight, to accuse them of being no better than working bullocks. (p.vi)
Like bullocks plodding along under the lash, they are brutish, driven, oppressed. And Mark — who has travelled the world spreading the promises of socialism — is a failure too. He reads widely, but unlike KSP herself, he does not write to help spread the message.
When was the last time there was an Australian novel that featured workplace deaths? From my reading history, I think it may have been The Bridge (2018), by Enza Gandolfo, about the West Gate Bridge Collapse when 35 men died, and before that Simon Cleary’s The Comfort of Figs (2008), which features a worker falling from the Story Bridge in Brisbane. Workplace deaths and injury recur as a theme in KSP’s oeuvre, and these tragedies certainly still occur today. Worksafe Australia’s preliminary report for 2023 shows that 147 workers were killed at work, and a quick Google search shows Farm Online reporting that in 2022 the agriculture, forestry and fishing industry continues to see the highest rate of deaths at work, despite overall downward trends in work-related fatalities.
Update, later the same day: Nathan Hobby has reminded me of another recent novel about workplace deaths: Dustfall (2018) by Michelle Johnston, about asbestos deaths at Wittenoom.
Nathan Hobby has reviewed Working Bullocks twice, here and here.
You can buy a digital edition of Working Bullocks from Untapped. (Search using author name).
For more about KSP, see my author page here.
References:
The Red Witch, a Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard, by Nathan Hobby, Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing, 2022, ISBN: 9780522877380
Image credits:
- Pemberton 1919: By Unknown author – State Library of Western Australia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3493004
Author: Katharine Susannah Prichard
Title: Working Bullocks
Introduction by Ivor Indyk
Publisher: Imprint Classics, Angus & Robertson, 1991, first published 1926 by Jonathan Cape, London
Cover art: a panel of ‘Riverbend’ painted by Sidney Nolan
ISBN: 9780207171017, pbk., 316 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Penny Bannister Books, Fremantle WA
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
That is a great review of Working Bullocks which I have still not read but will be picking as it’s on my shelves somewhere. KSP has never been given her proper due for she was so commited to her politics and this caused others to reject her on a very shallow basis IMO The paucity of working people’s lives continues and the conditions have not changed much for many men and women in hard low paid employment. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel is another novel that exposes the way in which the worker participates in their own oppression. Sad but true.
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By: Fay K on January 1, 2024
at 5:02 pm
You are so right, Fay, and I am embarrassed to have repeated in my review of The Roaring Nineties that the French academic Jean François Vernay had labelled this book as ‘lustful desire’ within the category ‘Iconoclastic novels containing risky heretical topics’. We forget sometimes, I think, that reviewers, critics and academics have their own political blindspots and prejudices which can influence their opinions. Admiring KSP’s social conscience and the activism in her writing doesn’t mean signing up to her views about communism!
BTW#1 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is on my 1001 Books wishlist…
BTW #2You recommended Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli a little while back and it has just arrived, so I will be reading it soon, thank you for telling me about your experience of reading it.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 5:33 pm
Dear Lisa Hill
Happy new year! Thanks for showing the Imprint Classics edition of Working Bullocks, which I published when at A & R. I agree with you about the book, and your feelings about the cover. This is one of about 40 great titles that Curtis Brown refused to hand over to ETT in 1995, prompting all of these titles to be pulped by HCP. This has been OP since that time, and is now in an ebook form only. Tis the way of the world, relying on big companies…
As it happens I am rebuilding my entire backlist into the “old” Imprint Classics look, a few out now (see attached). Most of the Idriess will reprint into this series look, except the Upfield Bony series, which we are now publishing in German and French as ebooks, with the A & R retro covers; in anticipation of the new Bony TV series to show late 2024.
I’d like to send you regula[https://res-h3.public.cdn.office.net/assets/mail/file-icon/png/pdf_16x16.png]AboriginalMythologyCover24reduced.pdfhttps://1drv.ms/b/s!AuQH_FW6rWrv0VGuV97Jf_uX-4xJrly some of these books, let me know if this interests you.
Best wishes
Tom Thompson ETT Imprint Exile Bay ________________________________
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By: ettimprint on January 1, 2024
at 5:05 pm
Hi Tom, it’s good to hear from you, happy new year!
That’s a very classy looking cover for the new Mudrooroo.
I think you already have my email address… I’m always happy to hear about new books though of course I can’t possibly read and review them all.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 5:38 pm
Will put some in the mail this week!
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By: ettimprint on January 1, 2024
at 5:47 pm
No, no, no… *gasp!* please don’t send me any books any unless I’ve asked for them. I try to schedule the books that publishers send me so that I can read and review them in a timely manner. Otherwise I get overwhelmed and have nowhere to put them!
But press releases by email are welcome any time, and if a book appeals and I have time to do it, I will email back with a request for it.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 5:53 pm
Thanks for the great review, Lisa. Wonderful to have that photo of Pemberton from the same time KSP visited. Re: workers’ deaths in KSP – I keep being reminded of the miners dying of ‘miners’ lung’ in the second and third books of the goldfields trilogy when the engineered stone deaths come up. Another book touching on workplace deaths is Michelle Johnston’s Dustfall (2018), which you and I both loved.
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By: Nathan Hobby on January 1, 2024
at 5:16 pm
Of course, of course it was, I forgot to tag Dustfall but will do it now.
I’m glad you like this, the photo is a bit of a lucky find, eh? (I can’t help wondering if KSP took it herself and it found its way to the library somehow!)
Funny thing, each time I read a KSP novel it becomes my favourite:)
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 5:23 pm
There is also The Dyehouse – factory work in Newtown post-WWII and Tennant’s The Battler’s also deals with ghastly work conditions (& the lack of it).
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By: This Reading Life on January 17, 2024
at 6:17 pm
Thanks, Brona…
It’s a difficult one for tags. First it was workplace deaths, then I made it workplace deaths & injury, because I wanted it to be specific about books that involve deaths at work. (You can see which ones they are if you click the tag.)
But I need something that encompasses working conditions and unemployment, so that it includes, yes, The Dyehouse and The Battlers, and also How Beautiful Are Thy Feet by Alan Marshall.
Any suggestions?
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By: Lisa Hill on January 17, 2024
at 7:09 pm
I thought there was a workplace death or injury in The Dyehouse, but it’s a while since I read it….
As for tags #workingconditions or #workinglife might do the trick? #labourforce #workrights ??
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By: This Reading Life on January 18, 2024
at 7:58 am
Was it Hughie and his experimental dyes? I can’t remember now!
I think #WorkingCondiitons would go well, thanks.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 18, 2024
at 8:04 am
It’s a while since I read Working Bullocks, but it’s a powerful work. It must imply some disillusion with the workers’ cause that KSP quite clearly here describes workers as dumb animals (though not neutered as bullocks are). Huts of wood and canvas prevailed at least into the 1950s – I knew of English migrants sent to work down south being accommodated like that.
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By: wadholloway on January 1, 2024
at 7:08 pm
I think Nathan could help us here… I seem to recollect that later in her life KSP was fed up with the lack of support she had for her political campaigning, perhaps there were signs of disillusionment, not with the cause but with the behaviour of the people whose cause she worked for.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 7:12 pm
This sounds like a terrific read. I wish it was still available in physical form. I detest mucking around with ebook files trying to make them Kindle compatible.
Interesting point about workplace deaths/corporate manslaughter in novels… I can’t think of any apart from the ones you’ve mentioned. My BIL works in construction and was standing next to a colleague when a wet concrete roof collapsed. They were only a matter of metres from each other; his colleague died, my BIL was unharmed. It was very early on in his career and has been understandably pedantic about work site safety ever since. You read about these kinds of stories in the press all the time; they never seem to make it into novels.
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By: kimbofo on January 1, 2024
at 9:07 pm
Seared into my memory is what happened to a friend’s father. She got a phone call at work telling her to come home immediately, and because her frail grandmother had been ailing for a very long time, she thought that she had died. Instead, what had happened was that a boiler in the workplace had fallen down and crushed her father to death.
There are so many accidents that are not really accidents at all, and they happen in places where risk isn’t part of the job description at all.
I think these fatalities don’t make it into novels because so many of our writers are middle class women orientated towards white collar work.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 10:44 pm
How horrific. And yea, I think you’re right about the white middle class authors who just don’t write about this stuff. Mind you, no one really writes office novels either…
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By: kimbofo on January 1, 2024
at 10:58 pm
What about those one dealing with super-bitches?
Oh, and yes, there’s Elliot Perlman’s Maybe the Horse Will Talk which is about sexual harassment in the corporate workplace.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 11:17 pm
Yea, nah… I mean books about people in mundane office jobs who shuffle paper all day and stare at screens. Accountants, admin, etc. I’m excluding journalism, TV companies, law firms and GP surgeries. Those are “exciting” jobs.
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By: kimbofo on January 1, 2024
at 11:21 pm
You’re right, they have drama built in.
Maybe we should rustle up a plot and invite authors to use it, ha ha!
In a data-processing office of the 17th floor of a city building, a window cleaner falls from the floor above and dangles in space outside a clerk’s window. The clerk opens the window to rescue him, and ends up clinging to the same rope…
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 11:26 pm
Love it!
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By: kimbofo on January 1, 2024
at 11:28 pm
Sounds like a great piece of social writing for the time Lisa and wonderful start to your reading year
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By: winstonsdad on January 1, 2024
at 9:20 pm
It’s a good omen!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 10:44 pm
Oh good catch re The bridge Lisa. And, I’d like to read the Cleary some time too. I do like books that deal with worker issues – safety, pay, conditions, security. They need to be kept front and centre because things can slide very easily.
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By: whisperinggums on January 1, 2024
at 11:08 pm
I thought that book was brilliant. It should have won awards all over the place.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 1, 2024
at 11:17 pm
I did too… it so cleverly wove multiple issues through one major story.
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By: whisperinggums on January 1, 2024
at 11:29 pm
How interesting to see all the different covers for this novel.
I’ve enjoyed her trilogy and hope to read others by her too.
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By: Marcie McCauley on January 4, 2024
at 12:35 pm
From the days of great cover design, eh?
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By: Lisa Hill on January 4, 2024
at 1:49 pm