and ain't i a woman?: More to history than white men
There is much more to Australian history than white men. Women fought for (and in many cases won) equality, peace and rights for Indigenous Australians, the peoples of the Third World and workers everywhere.
One of these women, better known than most, was Katharine Susannah Prichard.
Born in 1884, Prichard was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), establishing the first West Australia branch of the party. She is best known for her prize-winning writing novels, poetry and plays. Her 24 pieces of work have been published in 15 different languages.
In Prichard's 1957 pamphlet, Why I am a Communist, she described witnessing the repossession of her family's furniture as nine-year-old child in Tasmania. Her father had lost his job and was suffering from depression, so the family's income was small: "Mother's grief stirred me to a realisation of it: of some dark, mysterious trouble. [My parents] struggle no doubt made me naturally sympathetic to others struggling with the same problems which cast such a dark cloud over life."
Working as a journalist in London from 1912 to 1915, Prichard was shocked by the difference between the rich and the poor. She organised toys for children in the slums the "Empty Stocking Fund".
In 1908, she met some Russian left-wing exiles, but had considered them "idealistic". But in 1917, a poster celebrating the Russian Revolution inspired Prichard to read Karl Marx and other communist writers.
"At last, I told myself", she later wrote, "I had found a local explanation of the poverty and injustices in the social system under which we are living, [it was] like discovering a new world. Only when our own and other people have established socialist states will war be abolished, and a spiritual renaissance, based on love and service, unite the peoples of the world in an era of peace and happier days than the doomed generations of capitalism have ever known."
Prichard became an avid peace campaigner after her brother was killed in World War I. Speaking in 1939, Prichard explained: "[H]e was made just a target for exploding shells: his back broken, his dear grey eyes, with their tender quizzical smile, filled with pain: his life smashed, wasted, ended. To what purpose?"
All of Prichard's writings, fictional, and otherwise, reflect her commitment to social justice, equality and socialism. Describing herself as a Marxist Australian writer, she saw her writing as part of her political work.
The first agitational pamphlets Prichard wrote were for the Labour Study Circle in Western Australia between 1919 and 1921: The New Order, The Materialist Conception of History and Marx, the Man and his Work. She wrote extensively for Tribune, the newspaper of the CPA, as well as left-wing papers all over the world.
Widely credited with introducing the "revolutionary worker" into Australian literature, Prichard's novel Coonardoo also challenged white Australia's view of Aborigines.
One of Prichard's greatest achievements was simply standing up for her politics. The leading role that Prichard took in the CPA was unusual for a woman, not only in general society, but also within the party. Prichard became a trailblazer who helped other women to confidently develop political ideas, and fight for them.
In Why I am a Communist, Prichard wrote of her concern for women working in unsafe conditions, with low wages and suffering sexual harassment in what we today would call sweatshops. She contrasted the "filthy lanes and dreary warrens" with the "beautiful homes and gardens of wealthy citizens", asking herself, as she had as a child: "What was the meaning of it? Why did such conditions exist?"
BY ANGELA LUVERA
[The author is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 10, 2002.
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