(4 December 1883 – 2 October 1969) was an Australian author and co-founding member of the Communist Party of Australia.
Prichard was born in Levuka, Fiji in 1883, and spent her childhood in Launceston, Tasmania, before moving toMelbourne, where she won a scholarship to South Melbourne College. Her father, Tom Prichard, was editor of the Melbourne Sun newspaper. She worked as a governess and journalist in Victoria then travelled to England in 1908.
Her first novel, The Pioneers (1915),[1][2] won the Hodder & Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize.[3]
After her return to Australia, the romance Windlestraws[4] and her first novel of a mining community, Black Opal were published.
Goldfields trilogy[edit]
Her massive work The Goldfields Trilogy—The Roaring Nineties (1946),[15] Golden Miles (1948),[16] and Winged Seeds(1950)[17] is a major reconstruction of social and personal histories in Western Australia's goldfields from the 1890s to 1946.
Her autobiography Subtle Flame published a few years before her death exhibited the complex legacy she left behind [18]
Prichard died at her home in Greenmount in 1969. Her ashes were scattered on the surrounding hills.
Like her husband, her son Ric Throssell committed suicide, when his wife Dodie died in 1999. He had fought for many years to clear his name after being accused of passing classified information to his mother, or actively spying for the Soviet Union. His 1989 book covering this was called My Father's Son.[19]
The centenary of her birth was celebrated by UWA academics in a collection of essays [20]
