ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’ve departed from my usual practice in reviewing Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo from 1929: I’ve read other opinions about it, both before and after reading it.  I also re-read Mairi Neil’s post about the play Brumby Innes and its place in the history of Australian drama because Prichard first used the theme of the novel in the play.

I did this additional reading because this work has a contentious place in the history of Australian literature.  Coonardoo is the first detailed representation of Indigeneity in Australian fiction, but the author was not Indigenous herself.  So I’ve included both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives in my pre- and post-reading of the work.

While the representation of Indigeneity has changed with the passage of time, and the issue of appropriation is ongoing, this book, written almost a century ago, is the subject of attention and scholarship because it’s written by one of our finest writers. Katharine Susannah Prichard makes an appearance in almost all the reference books I have: Australian Classics, by Jane Gleeson-White; the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (Ed. Nicholas José);  the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (Ed. Wilde, Hooten & Andrews), and also in Jean-Francois Vernay’s A Brief Take on the Australian Novel.  Harry Heseltine writes about KSP extensively in The Literature of Australia (Ed. Geoffrey Dutton).

All of these non-Indigenous authorities refer to Coonardoo, but only some of them address issues of racism.  The Oxford Companion says only that the more polished Coonardoo was joint winner of the 1928 Bulletin novel prize and was praised as the first realistic and detailed portrayal of an Aboriginal.  

The Macquarie Anthology, for example, refers to hostile criticism for its portrait of a loving sexual relationship between a young Aboriginal woman and a white man. Heseltine, however, while stating that the creative treatment is neither sociological, nor patronising, but (at least by intention) tragic, goes on to acknowledge, albeit indirectly, prior occupation of the land on which the story takes place.  Refuting the doctrine of terra nullius, he writes:

It is a matter of some interest that what is probably Prichard’s most complex attempt at characterisation and her most intensely sustained emotional encounter with her material should be inspired by a member of a race whose dreaming, whose search for identity, was accomplished long before white men came to the Australian continent. ( ‘Australian Fiction Since 1920’ by Harry Heseltine, in The Literature of Australia (Ed. Geoffrey Dutton, 1964, ISBN 0140700080, my copy is the 1976 revised edition).

However Larissa Behrendt of the Eualeyai/Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay people analyses Coonardoo more harshly in Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling.  At the conclusion of a lengthy chapter, she writes:

Though some may read Coonardoo as a reminder of the loves lost because of racism, the novel is also a reminder of the unacknowledged legacy of colonisation on Aboriginal women: their inability to freely consent to sexual relations with the white men who had the power of life and death over them was fundamentally constrained.  It is also a reminder that, regardless of any good intention, constructed stereotypes of Aboriginal men and women continue to appear and be perpetuated in even so-called ‘sympathetic’ twenty-first century literature. (Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling, UQP, 2016, ISBN 9780702253904, p.99)

Finally, thanks to Nathan Hobby, whose biography of KSP is forthcoming, I also read Wiradjuri woman Jeanine Leane’s 2016 deeply personal response to the novel at Overland. 

So, what do I think about Coonardoo?

The first thing to say is that KSP is a great writer who was nominated for the Nobel Prize because she wrote about important things. Although some of her work is weighed down by her desire to bring issues to the reader’s attention, in the fiction which I’ve read so far, she tackled the big picture issues of her time: poverty, disadvantage, inadequate health care, disability, and working conditions.  (The Oxford Companion tells me that she also wrote about her desire for world peace and nuclear disarmament, and almost all of the commentators mention her commitment to communism.)  The big issue that she tackled in Coonardoo is IMO best expressed by Jane Gleeson-White in Australian Classics:

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel Coonardoo is the story of an Aboriginal woman, the eponymous Coonardoo, and the struggle of white and Aboriginal Australians to live together and work the vast land of the Kimberley, where their worlds come into intimate contact. (Australian Classics, Allen & Unwin, 2007, ISBN 9781741753417, p106.)

That intimate contact is a story of love thwarted by denial, prejudice and racism.  Coonardoo is an unpaid station hand in the Kimberley, alongside Hugh Watt, the son of the station owner.  Narrated from Coonardoo’s perspective, Hugh’s and that of his mother, the formidable widow Bessie Watt — the story shows how their love emerged, was frustrated and denied, was consummated, and then denied again.

If we put all the wrongs to one side just momentarily, we can recognise that in 1929 Indigenous people were not then telling their own stories as they do today.  Even if they were literate, and most had opportunity only for rudimentary education, the publishing gates were firmly closed against them.  As well, there was a great veil of silence about Indigenous dispossession and disadvantage, and we can assume, I think, that marketing of a novel that fractured that silence was problematic.  Enter KSP, fearless and marketable.  She held power in her pen and she used it as nobody else ever had, to depict her Aboriginal characters as people with emotional lives within a work of popular fiction that admitted the history of wrongs done against them.  Readers could no longer say they didn’t know.

Still, some of the language grates.  All the racist terms that were common parlance in that era are used.  Even though it’s authentic dialogue, the mind fights against getting used to it. It is a persistent reminder that this book demands to be read in context and that the issues within it be addressed.

Gleeson-White’s 2007 summary and interpretation of Coonardoo is impressive, but flawed. (Though to be fair, Australian Classics is a collection of 50 classics, and each entry is covered in only about five pages, precluding great detail for any of them.) She writes about the way Coonardoo grows up with Hugh Watt and they become deeply bonded through their shared love of the land and horses, but how they come to maturity hundreds of miles apart makes no mention of the gulf in their opportunities, and their shared love of the land is not equal in any respect.  Coonardoo’s love of the land is her birthright which has been stolen.  Hugh’s love of the land is a mere possession which derives from a brief moment in linear time. Indigenous people, as I understand it, have a different conception of land: for the millennia in which they have occupied this land it has had what we might call a religious significance and it involves mutual obligation: they belong to and care for the land and the land belongs to and cares for them.  Hugh has no conception of this chasm in their relationship to the land, and KSP probably didn’t either at the time.

But as Larissa Behrendt points out in Finding Eliza, Coonardoo is never accorded the status of an equal partner, which we can see quoted in this passage from Australian Classics.  Hugh has returned from school in Perth with a fiancée so…

…his old ease with Coonardoo has gone, but their rapport remains.  When he eventually takes over Wytabila, his need for Coonardoo has become so overwhelming, complex and fear-filled that he buries it.  ‘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.’ (Gleeson-White, p.106-7).

Prichard’s word ‘childlike’ signals a conception of Coonardoo that is, contrary to Heseltine’s view of it, patronising.  Indeed, Gleeson-White goes on to say that in the twenty-first century, Prichard’s view is necessarily anachronistic, and she quotes Behrendt as saying in 2004 that Coonardoo is ‘a story about white sorrow, not black empowerment.  The book leaves out any possibility that Coonardoo and her community could benefit from the assertion of their own authority or autonomy.’ 

Well, yes, that’s true.  It is patronising.  But would that possibility of such an assertion have been an authentic representation of how things were in the era being depicted? KSP was a writer of realism.  In 1927 KSP also produced a play called Brumby Innes which I have read but not reviewed.  Her portrayal of this awful man, a drunken, violent station owner who exploits his black workers and abuses the women is very much like Sam Geary in Coonardoo who is loathed by characters both black and white.  From my reading of Indigenous-authored literature, it seems to me that there is a grotesque authenticity about this character Geary who ends up taking ownership of Wytabila when drought ruins Hugh and he is not able to ride it out as his mother had done.

However, Prichard’s realism does allow for what may well be the first acknowledgement of dispossession, massacres and other atrocities against Indigenous people in Australian fiction.

Although Behrendt says on p.86 of Finding Eliza that recent history of violent frontier encounters, along with the backdrop it provides to black-white relations, is missing from the pages of Prichard’s novel, the character of Geary is balanced by the figure of the pearler Saul Hardy.  He is a man troubled by the violence he has seen and by the misrepresentation of Indigenous people.  Saul — in his reproof to Hugh’s racist wife Mollie, who’s from a coastal town and believes in the divine right of white men to ride rough-shod over anything aboriginal that stood in their way — tells her in chapter 17:

“You can’t help seein’ the blacks’ point of view.  White men came, jumped their hunting grounds, went kangaroo shooting for fun.  The blacks speared cattle.  White men got shootin’ blacks to learn ’em.  Blacks speared a white man or two—police rode out on a punishin’ expedition. They still ride out on punishin’ expeditions…” (Coonardoo, by Katharine Susannah Prichard, p.105, Pacific Books, Angus & Robertson, 1961, no ISBN, first published 1929, underlining mine.)

Prichard doesn’t go into great detail but it’s quite clear: writing in 1929, she acknowledged violent frontier encounters in her novel.  Saul then goes on to talk about an episode of ‘black-birding’ where the pearler drove a crew of Swan Point boys all overboard at gunpoint when he got to sea.  He also talks about the bounties paid for Aborigines being hauled in to custody, in chains, leather straps round the neck, fastened to their stirrup irons. 

Twenty or thirty I’ve seen like that, and I’ve seen the soles of a boy’s feet raw when he came in.  Never spent eighteenpence a bob on ’em either. Police’d let one or two men hunt for the rest, bring in kangaroo. (p.105)

He talks about the time when he was surprised by armed Blacks and left alone unharmed, and says that they ‘never kill for sport—only for food and vengeance’ and the blacks have plenty of reasons for vengeance.  He’s been in the country for thirty years and he’s seen things:  “No black” he says, ever did to a white man what white men have done to the blacks”. (p.104)

It would be so interesting to know what Prichard’s contemporaries made of this.  Behrendt says that Prichard’s book scandalised readers with its portrayal of a so-called ‘love relationship’ between a white man and an Aborigine. (Behrendt, p.82)  Were they also scandalised by Saul Hardy’s descriptions of atrocities?

Coonardoo was not Prichard’s only fiction featuring Indigeneity.  There is also a short story called Marlene (1938) in the Macquarie Anthology, which I have yet to read.

Author: Katharine Susannah Prichard
Title: Coonardoo
Publisher: Pacific Books (Angus & Robertson, 1961, first published 1929
ISBN: none, pbk., 207 pages
Source: OpShop find.

Availability: out of print.