Coonardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard

First published: 1929

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: Late nineteenth century to the 1920’s

Locale: Wytaliba, a cattle station in North West Australia

Principal Characters:

• Coonardoo, an aboriginal girl working at Wytaliba homestead
• Bessle Watt, a widow, the owner and manager of Wytaliba
• Hugh Watt, her son, who succeeds her as owner and manager
• Mollie Watt, his wife, formerly a servant on the west coast
• Warleda, a leading aboriginal tribesman and a cattle drover at Wytaliba, who takes Coonardoo as a second wife
• Sam Geary, the owner of a neighboring cattle station

The Novel

Coonardoo spans several decades in the lives of the black aborigines and their white employers on Wytaliba, a remote cattle station in the harsh and arid region of North West Australia, owned and managed first by the tough and gritty widow, Bessie Watt, and later by her son, Hugh Watt. In the opening paragraph, Coonardoo, the lovely, lithe aboriginal girl whom Mrs. Watt is training as a housemaid, is sitting under some bushes, chanting an aboriginal song about kangaroos.

Underlying a complex and densely packed narrative is the story of the unspoken and largely unfulfilled love between Coonardoo and Hugh. In their childhood, they play and ride together as apparent equals, but when Hugh returns to Wytaliba after completing his education on the west coast, he is clearly the white master and she the black servant. Although Coonardoo, in the meantime, has married Warieda, a leading tribesman, and has borne him children, her devotion to Hugh is unquestioning and wholehearted. To Hugh, however, love between the races is unthinkable.

After Bessie Watt’s death, Hugh is stricken with grief and loneliness. Warieda, according to the tribal custom that allows a man to lend his wife to a friend, sends Coonardoo to comfort and console him. This is the only time that Hugh and Coonardoo make love. Afterward, Hugh is filled with remorse, but to Coonardoo, the relationship is quite natural.

Coonardoo gives birth to Hugh’s son, Winni. Hugh, who by this time is married to Mollie, is secretly proud of the boy but takes great pains to conceal his paternity, while Warieda and Coonardoo, having, like the rest of the tribe, no knowledge of the connection between the sexual act and pregnancy, accept the child as a gift of nature.

Hugh’s marriage turns sour over the years. Eventually Mollie guesses the secret of Winni’s paternity and demands that Coonardoo be sent away. Hugh refuses, and Mollie leaves him, taking their five daughters with her. Warieda dies shortly afterward, and it seems that at last fate has made it easy for Hugh and Coonardoo to get together. Hugh brings her into the house as his servant and makes her life more comfortable, but he does not share his bed with her. Coonardoo is hurt and bewildered by this apparent rejection; it is completely beyond her understanding.

Hugh’s strongly held views against miscegenation are constantly reinforced by the taunts and sneers of Sam Geary, a brash and brutish neighboring farmer who lives with several aboriginal women and who had once tried to snatch Coonardoo from Wytaliba to join his other consorts. The tragic climax of the novel begins when Geary, during one of Hugh’s absences, makes a drunken approach to Coonardoo, who, in a state of extreme sexual frustration, overcomes her fear and hatred of him and submits to his advances. In her perception, there is nothing sinful about this, but Hugh learns of it on his return and becomes mad with rage. In a passage of powerful dramatic intensity he beats her unmercifully and orders her to leave Wytaliba. She clings to him, and, struggling to shake her off, he drags her across a bonfire. She is severely burned.

In terrible pain and totally bewildered by her banishment, she disappears from his life. Hugh is too proud to seek her out. Years later, he learns that she has been spotted, unkempt and sickly, soliciting sailors in the west coast ports. Only then does he begin to face what he has done to her, and to himself. Wytaliba has become increasingly run-down. Without Coonardoo’s presence, he realizes, he has had no will to maintain it. He is eventually forced to sell to Geary and sets off for the west coast to start a new life.

The novel ends as it began, with Coonardoo chanting the kangaroo song beneath the bushes. She has returned to Wytaliba to find it derelict and deserted. Dreadfully diseased and completely worn out, she dies, and the song dies on her lips.

The Characters

The book is packed with colorful and vividly drawn characters whose life stories are traced both in retrospect and through the forward narrative. The characters’ behavior is largely determined by their relationship to the land and, in varying degrees, by the conflict between the moral values of the black and white communities in which they move. The author does not make explicit moral judgments on them but leaves the reader to draw inferences through the contradiction between the way they behave and the way they perceive themselves and are perceived by others.

Bessie Watt, who had taken over the farm when her feckless husband, Ted Watt, fell drunkenly to his death, is a tough and determined manager. She has a deep understanding of the aborigines’ customs and is wise enough to refrain from interfering with them, even when her own principles are offended. Although Hugh has inherited her devotion to Wytaliba and something of her grit, he lacks her flexibility and insight. In a moment of crisis, he wonders if he has something of his father’s weakness within him.

Hugh is essentially a lonely man, and his three opportunities for companionship with white women end in failure. Jessica, a pretty, delicate society girl whom he brings to Wytaliba as his fiancee, soon leaves in disillusionment. Mollie, the plump and homely former servant whom he marries while visiting the west coast, is at first delighted to have a household of her own and becomes a good domestic manager. She isolates herself, however, by her grasping nature and her prejudices against blacks, and she uses the knowledge she gleans about Hugh, Coonardoo, and Winni to return to west coast society. The exorbitant allowance she demands from him to bring up their five daughters and to live in the extravagant style of the former lady of Wytaliba contributes to Hugh’s later bankruptcy.

Years afterward, the eldest daughter, Phyllis Watt, who has inherited her grandmother’s spirit, returns to Wytaliba, and for a time, Hugh is happy with her companionship. He bitterly resents her, however, when she leaves to get married. He has little understanding of the loneliness of the women in his life, or, indeed, of the roots of his own loneliness.

Regarding himself as a man of high moral principle, he never questions the basis of his abhorrence of miscegenation and is unable to acknowledge his feelings for Coonardoo, even to himself, until it is too late. In the final stages of the novel, when he vents the full force of his rage and frustration on Coonardoo, he is devastated to discover within himself a capacity for cruelty as great as in those slave-driving employers whom he despises.

Sam Geary is clearly an unprincipled employer, but it is his very contempt for the traditions of colonial morality which enables him to succeed, on his own terms, where Hugh is doomed to failure on his. The author implies that Hugh’s hatred of Geary, which Hugh himself believes to result from his own high moral standards, is, in reality, provoked by sexual jealousy.

Of all the aboriginal workers who are described, Warieda stands out as the one least touched by white culture. A proud leader of his people and a superb horseman, his life is entirely governed by ancestral values—and so is his death. When a moppin-garra (magician), avenging himself for some imagined injustice in the past, puts him under the spell of death, he believes so completely in the power of magic that he does, indeed, die.

Coonardoo is far more involved with the domestic arrangements in the homestead than is Warieda. Lively and playful as a child, an intelligent and devoted servant in her prime, she has acquired the domestic habits of her white employers and has some understanding of the way they conduct their lives. She is at heart, however, a true child of her tribe, imbued with its traditions, folklore, superstitions, and songs. She can accommodate her love for Hugh within her tribal consciousness and suffers his rejection of her as a lover in silence. When he finally forces her to sever her roots in her community, however, for reasons altogether beyond her understanding, her moral code is shattered, and she degenerates into the travesty of her people which the white colonialists hold up as a stereotype.

Although all the characters can be seen as representative of various social attitudes, there is nothing contrived about their development. The author’s supreme gift is her ability to integrate the sociological with the psychological so that every action, small or large, is understood in terms of an interplay between external and internal factors.

Critical Context

By the time she wrote Coonardoo, Katharine Prichard had gained considerable acclaim as a novelist. Her first novel, The Pioneers (1915), had been awarded a literary prize and had twice been made into a motion picture (in 1916 and 1926).

Coonardoo, which earned the Sydney Bulletin’s award for the best novel of 1928 and was later published in the Bulletin, was among the first Australian novels to present the aborigines as human beings rather than as crude stereotypes. This aspect of the book provoked controversial responses, ranging from delight to disbelief. In her preface to the first edition, the author counters those who had accused her of “romantic invention” by making clear that everything in the novel was based on her own experiences in the region and that Western Australia’s Chief Inspector of Aborigines had confirmed the authenticity of its ethnic details.

The backgrounds to most of Prichard’s novels are, in fact, based on her own experiences. She traveled widely and investigated firsthand. She was particularly interested in communities welded together by their work, especially heavy industries in the outlying areas, such as opal mining (Black Opal, 1921), timber felling (Working Bullocks, 1926) and gold mining (The Roaring Nineties: A Story of the Goldfields of Western Australia, 1946; Gold Miles, 1948; Winged Seeds, 1950).

Coonardoo, a key novel in this major trend in her work, expresses several aspects of the author’s passion for social justice and sexual equality. Her political commitments as a Communist, pacifist, and feminist were more fully in evidence in some of her later novels, notably in her highly acclaimed goldmining trilogy.

Bibliography

Beasley, Jack. The Rage for Life: The Work of Katharine Susannah Prichard, 1964.

Brickman, Henrietta. Katharine Susannah Prichard, 1967.

Miller, E. Morris. Australian Literature: Bibliography to 1938, 1956.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. July 18, 1929.