Bill is hosting AWW Gen 2 over at The Australian Legend, and The Pioneers is the book I promised to read for this important literary week in the Australian Literary calendar. Bill defines this second generation of Australian writing as the period between 1890 and 1918. To my surprise I didn't have a single book by a woman writer for that period, so I decided to chase up Katharine Susannah Prichard's output for these years and found her debut novel The Pioneers. Bill distinguishes post WW1 Gen 3 writers from Gen 2 writers by their preoccupation with social realism in urban settings, and thus places Prichard in Gen 3, but as we shall see, The Pioneers belongs with Gen 2 writing because it features the myth of the Pioneers, men and women working together to carve out a space for themselves from [so-called] virgin country.
Katharine Susannah Prichard was born in 1883 and died 1969, and she wrote 13 novels. In the Preface to The Pioneers, KSP tells us that:

Notes for The Pioneers were made about 1903 when I was twenty and living in South Gippsland. But it was not until 1913, in London, that I was able to take six months off earning my living as a journalist to write the story which had been simmering in my mind for so long.

The book's blurb tells us that The Pioneers went on to win the Australian section of the £1000 Dominion Competition for fiction in 1915. More properly known as the Hodder and Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize for Australasia, (see here) this prize launched KSP's career as a creative writer.
This is the blurb:

Set in Gippsland, Victoria, this powerful story tells of early settlers and of their unwelcome neighbours - escaped convicts who crossed to the mainland from Van Diemen's Land. Davey Cameron, son of a stern and narrow-minded Scots settler, becomes entangled with cattle-duffing convicts and an unscrupulous shanty-keeper. With the growth of his love for Deirdre, the daughter of a convict, the lives of the characters become more involved, and clouds of tragedy begin to form.
The book, a masterly study of human relations, conveys all the excitement, hard work and despair of pioneering days, and the story comes to life against a background of bushfires, scrub-clearing, home-building and the handling of cattle under semi-primitive conditions.

These days, marketers might promote The Pioneers as Rural Romance, which you might guess anyway from that excruciatingly bad cover art by D.L. Allnutt. Poor Deirdre looks as if her arm is dislocated, like a doll with its arm screwed on back-to-front. Davey Cameron's awkward grimace, and her pert expression hints at Difficulties in the Relationship, but the body language suggests that eventually all will be well. Also, there are 'secrets', a trope so clichéd in contemporary commercial 'women's' fiction that the mere mention of the word in a blurb is enough for me to decide that the book is not for me.
However, KSP being KSP, there's a bit more to this novel than a rocky relationship and a secret withheld to the end of the story.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/01/09/the-pioneers-by-katharine-susannah-prichard/ ( )

I'm putting this book down for now. I loved the beginning of the book, but it wasn't as interesting after that.

First novel by Katharine Susannah Prichard which combines realism with melodrama in a story which aims to recognise Australia's past while at the same time forging a new future free of the shackles of that past. See my full review at Whispering Gums: http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/katharine-susannah-prichard-the-p... ( )