Coonardoo

Coonardoo

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.
Coonardoo 1
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.
The Novel 2
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.
Themes and Meanings
Coonardoo is invaluable at its purely descriptive level as an informative social document, chronicling in
remarkable detail the language, songs, traditions, beliefs, and ceremonies of the aboriginal communities of the
period, including accounts of their sensual fertility rites and their harsh circumcision customs for both males
and females. It also provides a vivid picture of life on a remote cattle station, the seasonally changing work of
mustering and droving cattle over vast areas of difficult terrain as well as the domestic routines at the
homestead.
Although the ethnic information, which includes many aboriginal words with English meaning woven into the
text, dominates the early chapters, the book is much more than a socioanthropological study. It presents a
passionate plea for an understanding of the aboriginal communities and respect for their age-old customs and
laws, and makes a powerful attack on colonial prejudices and misrepresentations.
Through a key passage of dialogue between Mollie, Hugh, and Saul Grundy, a white protege of Bessie Watt
who has spent most of his life at Wytaliba, the author states her main thesis: that the typical colonists’ view
of the aborigines as dirty, lazy, and untrustworthy has been shaped by those aborigines they see in towns who
are the victims of white exploitation and corruption and whose degeneration has been caused by the very
people who later condemn them. Coonardoo’s descent from lively and loyal womanhood into total
degradation is a tragic personification of this central theme.
The bitter irony at the heart of the novel is that the white master responsible for her degradation is not a
typically ruthless and arrogant slave driver but a kindly, popular, and apparently high-minded man. The
narrative encompasses many similar social ironies. On an altogether different level, the novel can also be
understood as a tragic and lyrical exposition of the destructive effects of unfulfilled love and sexual
frustration.
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
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(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.