Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard)

(First published 1929; 2013 edition published by Angus & Robertson)

In two of the three forewords*  to the 2013 A&R Australian Classics edition of “Coonardoo”, we are told that Prichard, in both her own (the third) foreword and the novel that follows, uses terms and makes assumptions that, while widespread in the nineteen-twenties, are not so popular now. Prichard is not criticised for that, nor should she be. Those were the words and the beliefs of the time. Some of them should be readopted by us, even in our woke wisdom. Naturally we should no longer tolerate the genital mutilation of children. Nor can we accept the practice of men abducting aboriginal women or buying them from their fathers and husbands for a couple of blankets. But perhaps we would all be better off if we ceased turning a blind eye to the truth that some of those conducting the mutilation ceremonies and the abductions were black, as were most of the fathers and husbands who took the blankets. It might even be useful to revive the idea that indigenous people should live (more or less) as they want, without their lives being ruined by ‘sit-down’ money, alcohol and the other joys with which they are today beleaguered by virtue-signalling bureaucrats.

Coonardoo (even the name is a problem now) is born on Wytaliba station in Western Australia. Lithe, dignified and loyal, she lives in the ‘uloo’ or camp of her tribe on the grounds of the station. Astonishingly, they all rub along pretty well, black and white. No-one gets a wage; the indigenous people help out on the station, generally working only mornings unless they are mustering. The aboriginal people eat bread and salt beef, but so do the whites. Coonardoo is taught good housekeeping by the frugal, watchful Mrs. Bessie, usually called Mumae, who inherited the farm from her late husband. Mrs Bessie is unnaturally obsessed with her son, Hugh (“Youie” to the aboriginal people of the station) and is determined to leave Wytaliba to him without debt. Mumae has Coonardoo in mind as the ‘good, faithful soul’  to care for Hugh when he grows to the ownership of the station. Although Mumae  – “a little woman, wrinkled and weathered, with eyes of the flame in her, blue-green, clear, shining, unquenchable, she had steered the station through dry years and dust storms, rain flooding the creeks and clay-pans; good seasons and bad” – is generally portrayed as the saintly all-seeing, dogged, woman of the bush she seems to the reader, and indeed some characters, to be in fact rather cruel, stingy and self-righteous; “a regular skinflint.”  She runs Hugh’s fiancé off the property with cold deception, when Jessica’s fault seems to be simply that she’s a bit dismayed when she first comes to the dry, ugly, poor station. We rather suspect that Mumae does not want her adored, docile Hugh to be married at all. Unfortunately, her clever move leaves Hugh free, after her death, to marry vicious Mollie: “But so sour and hostile had her mind become towards Hugh that she found pleasure really, a secret mean joy, in following the suspicion which had risen against him, and piecing the evidence for and against it. There was much more for than against. She realized her knowledge would mean power. It was a whip she could use against Hugh. She knew well enough how to  scourge him with it.”

The women and Hugh (assured, stoic) are all types. The other men are perhaps more rounded. As a percipient writer, Prichard does not want us even to hate the vile nearby station owner, Sam Geary:  “A tall, heavy man, wearing his belt under a loose flabby paunch, Sam still carried himself with a swaggering jollity, and liked to air his argument for polygamy in hot crowded hotel bars, and on sprees, up and down the river. He enjoyed nothing more than to take a dilapidated Bible from his pocket and read aloud the story of Judah, or recite the number of Solomon’s wives and female accessories.”

We positively like kind, hopeless old Saul Hardy from whom Mumae bought Wytaliba for a song when he was broken by drought.  (Even if Prichard is a bit sentimental about him). “Over eighty and deaf, Saul prowled about the garden and yards doing little odd jobs as he pleased. He had brought cattle west from the Queensland border in the early days, and tramped up and down the Nor’-West, droving and loading stores…he was not cut out for a squatter, Saul himself said,  He had been a rolling stone too long to sit down in one place, breed cattle and wait for them to grow. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ he said, ‘but a sitting hen loses feathers.’  Now he was old and could roll no more, his only desire was to sit down on Wytaliba and moult peacefully.”

Cock-Eyed Bob rouses our sympathies, and Hugh’s : “Hugh admired and respected the grit and spirit in that slight, crooked body. He could make allowances for the swagger and lies with which Bob bucked himself up; and watched curiously in half-hearted affection as Bob bent over his instrument, trying to pick up the air Jessica was singing.”

Coonardoo and Hugh have a bond; “She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to, Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. Yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.”  When Hugh is lost, Coonardoo follows and watches over him. She is his fate. “Hugh sat down again. A trembling seized him. He had a swift vision of passion and tenderness stalking him through all the lonely misery of his wandering,”

There are extensive descriptions of horse-breaking, mustering and droving which might perhaps be showing off on the part of the author, but we get the sense of the life of the station and of the station itself as an indomitable, living being. “There was not a breath of wind. The windmills struck hard lines against the sky, their fans motionless, although roofs of the buggy shed, harness-room and smithy shivered in the heat. Stones on the plains, glistening in the clear white light, shimmered and danced together.”

In the latter half of the book there is a shocking betrayal. From the gentle rise and fall of the farm work, the ebb and flow of rural time, comes an appalling upheaval.  It is not quite credible, but is necessary for the final scenes which are all too believable, familiar to us and genuinely horrific.

The whole story is of course an outline of an old Australian way of life, changing with the times. The powerful and touching ending raises this book to five stars.

A final word of warning – do not read the Forewords. They give too much away and the great point of the story is the uncertainty of how all of this is going to play out.

[*Drusilla Modjeska (1990) and Douglas Stewart (1964)] [Editor’s note: On this evidence, Prichard was a better novelist than she was a Communist activist. Better to reflect real life in fiction, than promote social justice fallacies…]