Prichard, Katharine Susannah (1883-1969), was one of the first Australian novelists to gain international recognition. Prichard won an international novel competition with her first novel, The Pioneers (1915), an autobiographical work set in the rural area of Gippsland in the state of Victoria. Her novels and short stories celebrate Australia, and especially Australian working people.
Prichard wrote most of her best fiction during the 1920’s. The Black Opal (1921) tells about opal miners in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales. Working Bullocks (1926) deals with timber workers in the Karri forests of southwestern Australia. Coonardoo (1928) is one of the first novels to treat the Aboriginal peoples of Australia with sympathy and understanding.
Prichard’s later novels include Haxby’s Circus (1930) and Intimate Strangers (1937). The three related novels of the Goldfields trilogy—The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950)—tell about life in the goldfields of western Australia. In addition to her novels, Prichard wrote short stories, plays, and poetry. She also wrote an autobiography, Child of the Hurricane (1963).
Prichard was born on Dec. 4, 1883, in Levuka, Fiji, to Australian parents. Her father was editor of the Fiji Times newspaper. She grew up in Launceston, Tasmania, and then moved to Melbourne, where her father had become editor of the Melbourne Sun. She was a journalist and governess until she traveled to England and Europe in 1908 where she continued to write articles and stories. In 1919, Prichard returned to Australia to marry and settled in Western Australia.
For most of her life, Prichard was active in causes that attempted to help the poor and the oppressed. Her concern for society’s underprivileged and her strong political conscience led her to help found the Communist Party of Australia in 1920. She later stood by her early social and political principles despite intense attacks on her Communist allegiances by fellow Australian writers.
In addition to her writing, Prichard conducted campaigns for world peace and nuclear disarmament. In the 1960’s, she was a major patron of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, the gifted but mentally troubled central character in the popular motion picture Shine (1995). Prichard died on Oct. 2, 1969.
