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Nathan Hobbys The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard takes on the challenging task of sorting out the complicated details of Prichards life as a child, sibling, governess, teacher, friend, lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, traveller, celebrity, journalist, poet, novelist, short-story writer, social activist, public speaker and communist.

Prichard spent critical years as a wife and widow writing fiction in her Western Australian home, but the image of her as an isolated writer captures only a small fraction of an otherwise crowded and committed public life.

Review: The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Nathan Hobby (Miegunyah Press).

It is remarkable that we have had no full-scale independent biography of Prichard to this date. There has been nothing since the work of her son Ric Throssell, who edited two volumes of his mothers writing and published a biography, Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1975).

So The Red Witch is timely. It will prompt what we might call recalibrations of Prichards life adjustments to how we imagine the life and the combined literary and political careers even if it is unlikely to produce any major reassessment of her standing as a writer or, for that matter, a political activist.

It can be read alongside works by figures such as Carole Ferrier and Drusilla Modjeska, and later literary scholars, who have been rediscovering the role of Australian women as novelists, journalists and critics in the interwar and postwar decades.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Leila Waddell, Australian violinist, philosopher of magic and fearless rebel

Prichard is a key figure in Australian literary history, a key figure in Australias intellectual history, and a key figure in Australias left-wing political history.

These are challenging dimensions to summon and sustain in a single narrative, not least a biography that is centrally concerned with the details of its subjects family and friendships, her aspirations and fears, her domestic presence, her colleagues and comrades, and her sexual life.

Hobby manages the shifting focus of these concerns clearly, in such a way that there is no simple separation of public and private spheres. Friends and collaborators were continually struck by Prichards thoughtfulness and sensitivity in the public domain. But there are also few moments of private or intimate life that are free from the tensions and obligations of public, political or intellectual involvement.

Prichard was controversial as a communist activist, for those inclined to discover such controversy, but her friendships and family ties were seldom bound to political allegiance in any narrow way. They were more often defined by the intensity and commitment of the friendship she asked for and offered. Her letters share the passionate language of her fiction and some of its seductiveness, but also its toughness and directness.

The Red Witch is not written for scholars, Hobby explains, despite Prichards ongoing interest for literary critics and historians. It has been written for

a general readership drawn to the peculiar pleasures of biography: the true drama of a life, the glimpses of a lost but familiar world, the recoverable details of the past.

Hobby aims to show a lived life. The biography is largely successful in this aim.

Prichards father, a committed journalist and editor, was an arch-conservative. He was religious, later depressed, and eventually suicidal. The early portraits of him in Fiji with his family at the time of Prichards birth remain entangled in much of the story beyond his life, despite the outrageous distance Prichard travelled from her fathers aspirations.

Prichards early religious entanglements were in dialogue with her father. So were her later departures towards the causes of labour, womens rights and socialism.

Her initiative and originality emerged early in her taking on the tasks of governess, teacher, part-time student, and then journalist. These qualities were evident, too, in her early writing and involvement in local drama societies. Early contacts became lifelong friendships. She remained on close terms with Hilda Bull (later Hilda Esson), Nettie Palmer, and Christian Jollie Smith three women who also had remarkable careers.

In May 1906, with Prichard aged 22, the first episode of her series A City Girl in Central Australia appeared in New Idea. Soon after, she met her Preux Chevalier, W.T. Reay, a married newspaper editor and politician, who, the evidence suggests, became her lover, his presence coinciding with her stays in London, Paris and Australian cities.

Prichard remained a great traveller. Hobby also underscores the significance of Melbourne in Prichards maturation as a writer and in shaping her complicated political engagements. Her family connections and her activities in journalism and literary circles led to influential contacts, from Alfred Deakin to the academic and essayist Walter Murdoch, the poet Bernard ODowd and, later, Miles Franklin.

Prichards politics developed over the same period, through the whole range of socialist philosophies. She embraced pro-suffragist, rationalist and materialist positions, with what Prichard herself later called idealistic naivety.

The Great War confirmed her left-wing politics. She voted no in the second (not the first) referendum on conscription. Her commitment to peace was cemented in place at this stage, not least because of her brothers death in France.

The Russian Revolution would reinforce the directions her politics were taking, although its effect was largely delayed until the 1920s. Prichard was famously a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, but her full political engagement did not materialise until the 1930s and 1940s.

Read more: Stuart Macintyre's rich history of the Communist Party of Australia recaptures a lost political world

Prichards political activity in this period, and right through to the 1960s, is extraordinary. She participated in a wide range of social groups, left-wing and womens associations, the Movement Against War and Fascism, the Writers League, the Australian Peace Council, and many more.

Her support of communism and the Soviet Union remained firm from the 1920s on. In her utopian book The Real Russia (1935), she displays an extraordinary passion and, in her own way, a modernist desire for change.

Prichards career as a novelist began in London, where she wrote Windlestraws, a forgettable light romance (albeit with an intriguing plot) that was not published until 1916, and her first published book The Pioneers (1915), which won Hodder & Stoughtons prize for novels from colonial and Indian authors.

The Pioneers has recently attracted new critical interest for its romantic investments, but also for its complicated portrayal of the Australian bush, its relative quietness, and its structure and characterisation. Prichards potential significance for literature, and Australian literature in particular, was noted in reviews at the time.

Hobby identifies Prichards major creative period as extending from the novel Black Opal (1921) through to Haxbys Circus (1930), a period that incorporates what remains her most read work, Coonardoo (1929), plus major short stories and drama.

Intimate Strangers, published in 1937 after numerous delays and revisions, just misses out in this listing, but its stories of sexual desire and violence and its psychological entanglements remain confronting.

What comes across throughout much of The Red Witch, right through to Prichards death, and alongside her sensuous identifications with nature, region and character, is the unglamorous dimension of the life of a working writer (with the adjective understood in its fullest sense).

The biography records this sense of her, evident from early existing notebooks through to her goldfields trilogy The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950) and her last novel Subtle Flame (1967), published just two years before her death. It also reminds us that Prichards short stories and plays and her poetry are much less known than her novels.

Hobby covers the recent controversies surrounding Aboriginal representation in Coonardoo, but asserts the novels ongoing power. The goldfields trilogy has also attracted recent criticism. The trilogys take on historical scale and its persistent concern with key Aboriginal characters has been re-evaulated. Miles Franklin, its interesting to see, was one of the first to emphasise the central role of both women and Aboriginal peoples in Prichards fiction.

Prichards life was marked by the suicide of those closest to her her father and then her husband, Hugo Throssell and beyond her marriage by threats of sexual violence or rape. Personal life often exposed the tensions between fidelity, desire and intimate relations.

These later elements reappear directly or indirectly in her fiction, making it edgier and more powerful than the work of many of her contemporaries. It is more powerful, too, than any simple celebration of rural or regional Australia, for the two dimensions can be closely linked. There is little in Prichards fiction that sits comfortably with more mainstream investments in the Australian bush.

Prichards marriage to Hugo is, of course, central to the story, although it is placed here in the context of other romances, before and after. If a slow starter, Prichard was not addicted to celibacy, though close relationships seem more important to her than sex itself.

Hobby emphasises tensions and differences within Prichards marriage. Difficult marriages are analysed, sharply, if sometimes comically, in Prichards writing. But she kept returning to the marriage throughout the rest of her career, investing in the bonds of love and intimacy it represented. Her absence overseas when Hugo committed suicide no doubt burnt the story deeply into her sense of self and community.

Nathan Hobby offers a full account of Prichards private and public lives, but if I can read now as a literary scholar rather than a general reader The Red Witch presents only limited interpretations of Prichards fiction. It considers how and why her writing mattered in the past and again today, and the way the distinctive qualities of her literary work are often reproduced in her letters and other writings, but such readings are often present only in a sentence or two.

Similarly, The Red Witch offers only notes towards a sense of Prichards engagement in the intellectual history that her politics and literary aspirations demanded. Her extensive reading of Marx and other political literature is noted, but little of the intellectual or political imperatives of such reading at such a time is explored.

Despite disagreeing with the Communist Partys recent criticism of the Soviet Union, Prichard paid up her membership three days before her death in October 1969. Events such as the Spanish Civil War and Soviet communism itself are sometimes presented as being very remote from readers understanding. (The books referencing system asks a good deal from readers too!)

Read more: Judith Wright, an activist poet who was ahead of her time

The Red Witch joins a cluster of recent publications about Australian women authors from the interwar and post-war decades. This year has given us Georgina Arnotts edited Judith Wright: Selected Writings and Ann-Marie Priests My Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood. Last year saw Eleanor Hogans Into the Loneliness, her account of the unholy alliance between Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates.

Previous years saw new work on Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer, Henry Handel Richardson, Zora Cross, Dymphna Cusack and Aileen Palmer. There was also Arnotts biographical take on Judith Wright, The Unknown Judith Wright (2016), and further back Susan Sheridans Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (2011).

This cluster of titles suggests that we now have a rich archive of stories and studies of these writers lives and their personal and intellectual networks.

And yet my impression at the moment is that the institutional structures and support for such a grouping are disappearing rather than emerging, despite the enthusiasm we see for contemporary Australian fiction in our festivals, bookstores, reading groups, and among new postgraduates. Lets hope The Red Witch attracts new readers, for much of it will be news to many.

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'The Red Witch': how communist writer, intellectual and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard helped shape Australia - The Conversation

(June 12, 2022 / Jewish Journal) In early 1917, shortly after the deposition of the last Russian czar, the Provisional Government of the Russian Empire abolished all restrictions on Jewish civil rights. Until then, Jews were largely restricted to the Pale of Settlement along the Empires western border, faced quotas in schools and experienced other forms of professional, economic and political discrimination. For about half a year, until the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government and brought the Bolsheviks to power, Russian Jews experienced true political and religious freedomat least by the standards of the time.

When the Bolsheviks took control of Russia, that freedom vanished for all of the Empires citizens, including its Jews. Having established a dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communists banned all other political parties. In practice, Soviet citizens now had fewer voting rights than they did under the czar after the 1905 revolution, which had led to the creation of a representative legislative assembly based on a multiparty system.

The officially atheist Communist Party also cracked down on religious practice and institutions. This included imprisoning and even murdering religious leaders, destroying places of worship (or repurposing them for secular purposes) and suppressing religious education. For Soviet Jews, this meant that most synagogues were closed, rabbis were either forced to resign or violently repressed and Hebrew language and religious instruction were effectively outlawed, replaced by an officially sanctioned Yiddish culture that preached the new Bolshevik religion. This was nothing less than a state-sponsored effort to erase Jewish culture and traditions throughout the empire.

Nevertheless, many Russian Jews welcomed Bolshevik rule. They comprised disproportionate numbers in early Soviet governments and state institutionsas did other ethnic groups denied such opportunities in the Russian Empire. Despite newfound prohibitions on their religious, ideological and social practices, in the 1920s Soviet Jews excelled in Soviet political, cultural and professional life.

During the early years of the USSR, Soviet Jews continued to experience the (relative) legal equality first granted them by the Provisional Government. Anti-Semitism was even officially outlawed by the government. In exchange, the Jews had to sacrifice the ability to practice their religion, one of the few rights afforded them by the czars (albeit with various restrictions). However, this de facto legal equality would disappear after World War II, though it remained de jure until the USSRs collapse.

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Shortly after the Holocaust, Stalin initiated what historians have called the black years of Soviet Jewry, during which the government forced Soviet Jews out of prestigious professions and universities, arrested and in many cases murdered Jewish leaders and fomented an atmosphere of anti-Jewish hysteria throughout the USSR. Stalins death in 1953 brought an end to the worst of this official anti-Semitism, but Soviet Jews would continue to face unofficial discrimination and legal inequality. This took the form of university and professional quotas, the widespread dissemination of state-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda under the fig leaf of anti-Zionism and arbitrary refusals by the government to allow them to emigrate. This legal and unofficial discrimination began to wane only during the final years of perestroika and glasnost, before dying along with the Soviet Union.

What does this have to do with Jews in Russia today? Like their ancestors under the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, Jews in Russia and the other nations of the former USSR are free to practice their religion without government interference. Like Jews in the early years of the Soviet Union, they have excelled politically, economically and culturally since the collapse of communism. And in recent years, just like those early Soviet Jews, they have had to sacrifice one kind of freedom for another. Whereas the former had to relinquish their religious freedom for political equality, Jews in Russia today increasingly find themselves losing the political freedom theyand other Russian citizensexperienced after the collapse of the USSR, while successfully defending their freedom of worship.

While the relative political freedom of the Boris Yeltsin era has steadily eroded during Vladimir Putins (and Dmitry Medvedevs) rule, it has taken a nosedive since Russias invasion of Ukraine in February. Since then, the government has shut down what little remained of Russias independent press. It has passed laws allowing Russians to be imprisoned solely for criticizing its attack on Ukraine, which the government calls a special military operation. It has jailed opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza on unsubstantiated charges of extremism and terrorism after first poisoning them.

Russias 150,000 Jews are now watching developments in the relationship between their government and community leaders with baited breath, wondering if (and how) it will affect the unimpaired religious freedom they have enjoyed since the fall of communism. Jewish religious and communal leaders have faced increasing pressure from the Russian government in recent months to publicly support its invasion of Ukraine. Like Moscows Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, most have refused to do so. Goldschmidt, who is also president of the Conference of European Rabbis, is now in exile in Israel. Rabbi Berel Lazar of Chabad, one of Russias two chief rabbis, has called for an end to the madness of the invasion and demanded an apology from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov after he claimed on Italian television that Hitler had Jewish roots.

Thousands of Russian Jews have emigrated since Russias invasion of Ukraine began in 2014. Israel has seen the biggest influx of Russian olim since the fall of the USSR. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was also the countrys first ambassador to the USSR, once said, Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself. If pessimism is a luxury, it is one that the Jews of the former Soviet Union have too often denied themselves to their detriment. As the history of Russia and its Jews has repeatedly shown, even when things have been looking up for a while, they can always get worse again. In the midst of a Russian economy facing its greatest decline in decades, Russian Jews should allow themselves the luxury of pessimism as they plan for their future in (or out) of the country.

Oleg Ivanov is a freelance writer and editor.

This article was originally published by Jewish Journal.

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Russian Jews have long been forced to sacrifice one freedom for another - JNS.org

Throughout my life, I have watched the world become more American. On every continent, people learn English, watch U.S. films, wear blue jeans, and aspire to live in pluralist, capitalist, and individualist societies. The dissemination of American values was one of the happiest facts of the 20th century. But I fear that the 21st century has brought an altogether darker cultural export.

The core American value used to be freedom. Freedom of speech meant no one could drag you to jail for saying the wrong thing. Freedom of assembly meant no one could close down a political party, labor union, or church congregation for sedition. People chose their jobs, their homes, their spouses. America was conceived in liberty, and when countries escaped fascism in 1944, or communism in 1989, they aspired to be more like America.

That was then. Starting in the late 20th century and accelerating terrifyingly around 2015, the United States has switched from elevating individual rights to elevating group rights. It has, in other words, returned to the tribal thinking that its creation was intended to defy. The precepts that drove the campaign for civil rights race doesnt define you, everyone is equal before the law, character trumps skin color are now deemed reactionary and offensive. Ethnic differences (and, to a lesser degree, differences of sex, sexuality, and so forth) are deemed supremely important. They define your place in an imagined hierarchy of privilege and determine what you can say, what college scores you need, and what positions you can occupy.

We can argue about the origins of this tendency. Did it come from the notions of guilt and justification that animated the earliest settlers? (I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.) Did it arrive later, brought by socialist German academics? Or was it an overcorrection, a reaction to the ugliness of slavery and segregation?

Whatever its genesis, the American virus has leaked out and become a global pandemic. Across the West, especially in other white-majority, English-speaking countries, social questions are now seen through the distorting prism of Americas civil rights struggles.

In Britain, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. are (along with Nelson Mandela) among the most familiar historical figures, with hundreds of classrooms and junior schools named after them. Almost any British child can identify them, whereas perhaps one in a hundred could tell you anything about, say, John Locke.

Our vocabulary has become Americanized. People talk of all-white juries as though there are alternatives in chunks of rural Britain. Race relations are presented in Black Lives Matter's terms, although black people in Britain are just 3.3% of the population, less than half as numerous as, say, South Asians.

Even if we accepted the fundamentally illiberal premise of a universal black experience or a universal white experience, there is no real comparison between the American South and the rest of the Anglosphere.

There were very few black people in Britain before 1948. The first arrivals from the Caribbean had, in many cases, served patriotically in World War II and did not regard themselves as immigrants at all. Slavery was abolished in all of Britains colonies a generation before the U.S. Civil War. In the mother country, a court ruling in 1772 had established that any slave brought to Britain was free the moment he set foot on our soil.

Yet, to this day, white conservatives in Britain are trolled with images of burning crosses and Klansmens hoods, while black conservatives are called Uncle Toms and house Negroes. Quite apart from being terrifically rude, what have these things got to do with Britain?

It all comes down to the extraordinary cultural reach of American media. We watch not just The West Wing, House of Cards, and Veep, but nonpolitical dramas and comedies that shape our sense of current affairs, from Billions to The Simpsons.

I have written before about how the understandable American squeamishness about blackface now dictates that white British actors cant play black roles a wholly imported taboo. I have written about how the American Lefts anathematization of the term Anglo-Saxon has spilled over into the United Kingdom.

Some British universities have even, hilariously, picked up the acronym BIPOC though the indigenous people represented by the I are, in Britain, white. Nothing, though, beats Britains BLM protests, which saw largely white crowds shouting, Hands up, dont shoot! at unarmed London coppers.

Even in the U.S., bringing people up with inherited grievances based on how they look strikes me as dreadful. But for the rest of the world to be importing someone elses quarrel is beyond tragic.

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The world is being infected by America's race pathology - Washington Examiner

EXCLUSIVE:

A first-of-its-kind museum dedicated to the victims of communist regimes is opening on Capitol Hill.

The nonprofit Victims of Communism Museum will throw open its doors to the public on June 13. (A press preview is scheduled for Thursday.)

Ambassador Andrew Bremberg emphasized the urgency of the museums message, noting public surveys showing a general acceptance of socialist and communist ideas among young people.

Its imperative that we teach Americans about the victims, failures and holes of communism because Americans reject communism as soon as they learn anything about it, Amb. Bremberg said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times. The problem is that today, many young people just have no idea who Joseph Stalin was or who Mao Zedong was, and they were the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century.

The ambassador, who served as U.S. permanent representative at the United Nations in Geneva from 2019 to 2021, is president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit authorized by a unanimous act of Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Amb. Bremberg said the foundation raised millions of dollars to rehabilitate and build out two floors of its building for the museum, which is within view of the U.S. Capitol, two blocks from Union Station. Then-President George W. Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial statue at a nearby intersection in 2007.

The new museum is opening as a growing number of states have enacted laws requiring that public schools teach about the evils of communism efforts the foundation is supporting by developing a web-based curriculum.

More people are realizing that the experience of communism really hasnt gotten the heavy attention, especially here in the United States, that it needs to educate our citizenry about it, Amb. Bremberg said. A museum is a tremendous way of doing that.

The two-floor museum at 900 15th St. NW seeks to honor the more than 100 million people killed by communist regimes such as the now-defunct Soviet Union and the 1.5 billion people who still live in communist nations like China and Cuba.

The museum consists of a permanent gallery, a temporary gallery and an education space that includes an education hall with documentary videos for school groups.

It also includes a small number of historical artifacts, including photographs and personal possessions, that are a mix of reproductions and items that people in communist nations donated.

Amb. Bremberg said the permanent gallery orients visitors to the lies spread by communism in the 20th century through a digital interactive educational experience for students.

The temporary exhibit showcases more in-depth exhibits on people living and dead whose lives were ruined by communism, he added.

For most Americans growing up, anyone younger than me has no memory or experience of the Berlin Wall falling, said Amb. Bremberg, 43. Thats concerning because they havent learned about it. Thats why we see more Americans interested in communism who think it just hasnt been tried right yet.

Founded by 19th-century German political theorist Karl Marx, communism calls for a single-party, government-run economy in which private property is outlawed. During the 20th century, Marxist regimes imprisoned, tortured and executed millions of people.

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Victims of Communism Museum to open in nation's capital - Washington Times

Defying their Party's official policy, two communist lawmakers in Russia's far east Primorye region on Friday expressed their disagreement over the imperialist war in Ukraine and called President Vladimir Putin to end the military campaign.

We demand the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. We demand an end to military action, legislative assembly member Leonid Vasyukevich said during Fridays session. Vasyukevich, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), said continuing Russias three-month campaign in Ukraine would lead to an imminent increase in military deaths and injuries.

"During a military operation, people become disabled. These are young people who could be of great use to our country," he added.

Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of Primorsky Krai who was present during the meeting, labeled Vasyukevich a traitor and accused him of defaming the Russia army and our defenders, who are in the fight against Nazism. Subsequently, Vasyukevich and his colleague, Gennady Shulga, were ejected from the Legislative Assembly and threatened with harsh measures for speaking out against the war.

Anatoly Dolgachev, the head of the Communist Party in the regional parliament, quickly sought to distance his organization from Vasyukevich, claiming that his demarche had been unsanctioned, and said that his comments besmirch the honor of the CPRF".

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM

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Russia: Communist Party deputies in Primorye region demand an end to Ukraine War - In Defense of Communism