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.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/01/06/the-roaring-nineties-the-goldfields-trilogy-... ( )

The Roaring Nineties is set on the Australian frontier in the 1890s. Sally Gough is the wife of a gold miner, eking out a rough living in the goldfields of Western Australia. It’s a tough life these people live, certainly much different than ours is now; and it’s interesting to watch the characters grow, even as the Australian frontier changes with the advent of the railway and the growth of towns.

It’s a tough book to get through; bleak in many places. As such, it’s a bit of a slog. But despite that, I enjoyed this novel; it’s very realistic and true to the time period (even though I know nothing about colonial Australia or the business of gold prospecting). Sally seems very flat and devoid of emotion; I guess that life on the frontier makes people become stoic in that way. Her focus is her family and she turns out to be a tough, resilient person. Even though her marriage to her husband Morris frustrates her and she if offered the possibility of something more exciting, she proves herself to be very loyal and practical by sticking with her original promise. There’s also a covert feminist theme to this book; so many of the female characters are victims of the men on the goldfields, but Sally is the exception to this rule.

The Roaring Nineties is above all a social commentary culminating with the conflict between the alluvial miners and the big companies that sought to control them. It will be interesting to watch Sally and her family’s lives through the other two books in the series, Golden Miles and Winged Seeds. Apparently, Prichard based her story on the reminisces of two real people, who became the inspiration for Sally Gough and Dinny Quin. It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops. ( )