22

The Station

Turee Station, 1926 and Greenmount 1927–1929

WAITING FOR Working Bullocks to appear in 1926, Katharine was ready for her next major project. A trip to Turee Station bore much literary fruit: two of her most acclaimed short stories, an award-winning play, and the best novel she would ever write. The way she remembered it, ‘A friend whose husband owned a cattle station in the North-west told me the incident which is the core of “The Cooboo”’.¹ Hearing it ‘so inflamed my imagination that I travelled to an isolated cattle station … to be sure of authentic details’.² In the story Katharine would write, an Aboriginal woman on a cattle muster is hampered by the infant she’s carrying and finally flings him away in frustration and abandons him. The shocking incident has no corroborating historical evidence, and Katharine doesn’t say whether, in gathering ‘authentic detail’, she attempted to verify its truth.

The friend who told the story was Doris Maguire, who had married Joe Maguire of Turee in 1919. Most likely, Katharine knew the Maguires through Hugo, who had worked on a neighbouring station, Ashburton Downs, before the war. Hugo’s stories of station life might also have helped pique Katharine’s interest as she contemplated the subject of her next novel. It was a part of Australia little had been written about and would build on her experience as a governess at Tarella back in 1905.

She set out on the research trip in September 1926, travelling for a week to reach Turee for a ten-week stay. She took 4-year-old Ric with her rather than leave him with Hugo, but she was only full of praise for Hugo in a letter to Hilda; it was ‘wonderful’ of him to let her go on the journey, he wasn’t even jealous she would be spending most of her time with other men. Ric remembers a model T truck picking them up at Meekathara and ‘jolting its way along a track lost in a sea of everlastings’.³

Joe Maguire described the location of Turee in a letter to a British newspaper: ‘We are just 198 miles from Peak Hill, our nearest post office. Our nearest neighbour is 80 miles away, our nearest railway 267, and nearest port 300 miles. We run a cattle station … and do not meet with a great number of people in these sparsely populated parts’.⁴ Katharine got on very well with Joe; he was ‘the most likeable type of Irishman’ despite the ‘little bits of ancient anti-socialist philosophy that he delivers … under the stars when we yarn at night’. He was twenty-two years older than Doris, who, ‘being a city girl’, was ‘nervy and at loggerheads with everything’.⁵ They had two young children, Richard and Peggy.

The homestead was made of corrugated iron and daily life was dominated by heat, dust and flies. ‘Flies crawl all over your food, and you just take them off—the dust storm powders your meat while you eat. And at present—we’re on salt meat, the flour is flavoured with petrol: butter ran out a few weeks ago … and no fruit, almost no vegetables.’ At night, the only light came from candles and carbide gas lamps, not strong enough to read or write. ‘On the cold nights, when I just came up, we used to sit round the fire in the long kitchen & yarn; but now, after the heat & glare & dust of the day, everybody lies out on the verandah. There’s singing & yarning. Sometimes the men play poker or five hundred.’⁶

Each day, Katharine went out riding, ‘henna-ed with dust. Sometimes one of the gins rides with me, sometimes mine host, who is really a bit of the country, and sometimes Mick, a stockman who has lived here all his life’.⁷ The head stockman, an Aboriginal man named Duck, had been at Ashburton Downs when Hugo was there; Katharine wrote that ‘he knows me as “Jim Throssell’s woman”. Otherwise, along the track I’ve been known as “Mrs Huge-o” not that I’m any more colossal than ordinary dear. A little less perhaps’.⁸

She was worried about her health, wondering if it would hold out for the long stay. For the first two months she was okay, writing to Hilda Esson, she had ‘only had one bad head day. Got a bit scared when I was laid low the other day, as a result of normal conditions returning. But here you say to yourself “I can’t be ill. It’s no use”—a week nearly from the nearest town & a doctor’. Then, soon after she wrote that on 1 November, she came down with sandy blight. A bacterial infection which causes the eyes to swell and itch with severe conjunctivitis, it can cause blindness. ‘I could hardly see for a week, felt miserably ill—in a tin shed by the house, sweltering heat.’ It meant she couldn’t go on a ten-day cattle muster, ‘one of the beastliest tricks fate ever paid me’.⁹ In Coonardoo, Phyllis comes down with blight too, after being weakened, her father assumes, by the salt meat and lack of vegetables. ‘Phyllis lay stretched in her dark room, glad to be still, not to have to open her eyes, or move. Overwhelming weakness and sickness obliterated everything for her. She lay for days in the darkness, the hot stillness.’¹⁰ In Ric’s recollection, it was he who had sandy blight while his mother nursed him.¹¹

Aboriginal workers lived 80 metres from the homestead in rough timber and iron huts.¹² Katharine didn’t question their presence on the station, the dispossession and enslavement it presumed. She wrote, ‘I find them poetic and naive. Quite unlike all I’ve ever been told, or asked to believe about them. I’m doing some character studies’.¹³ It was the beginning of a new focus that was to remain with Katharine for the rest of her career. Her ‘City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906) serial has an Aboriginal minor character and she probably met Aboriginal people while living at Tarella Station back in 1905, but she had not shown interest in them in life or literature until now.

WHILE STAYING AT Turee, Katharine wrote the draft of a three-act play, Brumby Innes.¹⁴ The first act is the staging of a corroboree. Joe Maguire’s son, Richard, remembers, ‘My father asked the official boss, Duck and the high lady, Topsy, to turn on a corrobboree on one evening for Mrs Throssell. The men came up and tramped up and down. Showed her how the kangaroos jumped around. She would have been shown some of the rituals’.¹⁵ As much as Katharine prided herself on the authenticity of the scene, the Aboriginal people were surely conscious of ‘putting on a show’ for a white visitor. She wrote ‘it was the most thrilling and dramatic performance I’ve ever seen’.¹⁶

In the play the corroboree is interrupted by Brumby Innes, who drunkenly abducts a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl, Wyalba. In act two, a group of Aboriginal men come to Brumby’s homestead seeking revenge; Brumby opens fire, wounding one. As the wounded man lies on a bed, the neighbouring station owner, John, comes to see Brumby with his niece, May, ‘a pretty, shallow, city-bred girl’, visiting the station for the winter. John wants Brumby to stop stealing his cattle. May flirts with Brumby; when her uncle is out of sight, Brumby rapes her. In act three, four months later, it’s revealed John lied in court about Wyalba’s age to stop Brumby being sent to prison for under-age sex with her. May is now married to Brumby and a prisoner at the station alongside Wyalba; the play finishes with her unsuccessful attempt to escape.

Katharine based the character of Brumby Innes on Albert ‘Brumby’ Leake, who owned a neighbouring station, Prairie Downs. It’s likely he came over to visit the Maguires while she was at Turee.¹⁷ Joe Maguire’s son, Richard, remembers he ‘was very good-hearted and if someone fell down, he’d … pull them up without saying anything more about it … Brumby was part of the folklore. He was an old villain’.¹⁸

Aboriginal people had reason to remember him less fondly. There was an incident at Prairie Downs in late 1925 similar to the events of the play. Leake shot an Aboriginal man named Walgie in the leg and accused Walgie and another man, Spider, of trying to break into his store. Walgie and Spider both testified Leake had been having sex with a 13-year-old girl named Cunie, and had fired shots over their camp when she wouldn’t return to him. According to them, it was a confrontation over this that led to Leake shooting Walgie at the homestead. In March 1926, Leake, like his namesake, was charged with carnal knowledge of a girl under sixteen. The girl made a statement saying she was thirteen; Joe Maguire testified that he knew the girl to be at least seventeen.¹⁹ ‘Owing to the unreliability of the evidence and the absence of proof of the girl’s real age, the bench dismissed the case.’²⁰

Leake also inspired Sam Geary, the villain of Katharine’s novel, Coonardoo, who lives with a harem of Aboriginal ‘wives’ and lusts after Coonardoo herself. The compiler of a collection of material on Leake, Peter Bridge, believes Katharine had an intense hatred of Leake, but from her literary portraits of him it seems truer to say that she was fascinated by him at the same time as condemning his behaviour towards Aboriginal women.²¹

Brumby Innes and Katharine’s novel Coonardoo are both treatments of the theme of interracial sexual relations in the outback. Scholars Wilde and Headon write, ‘The White man’s sexual use of Aboriginal women had long been tacitly recognised as an acceptable behaviour pattern in the isolated outback, where White women were few, but that acceptance had always insisted that such miscegenation was merely a casual consorting with no deeply underlying emotional attachment’. Katharine, along with Vance Palmer in The Man Hamilton (1928) and Men Are Human (1930) ‘presented a much more complicated view of interracial sexuality’.²²

Katharine entered Brumby Innes in the New Triad play competition in 1927 and won. One of the judges, Gregan McMahon, wrote:

I consider Brumby Innes to be in a class by itself. In originality of subject, atmosphere, characterization, virility and technique, it is a very remarkable work, comparable to some of the best of Eugene O’Neill’s, and it is, moreover, essentially Australian. It has been objected that the subject matter is sordid, and on that account the possibility of production should be discouraged. I am assuming that the subject matter of the plays presented is no concern of the judges …²³

In announcing Brumby Innes as the winner, the New Triad reported that, ‘Messrs J. & N. Tait will produce the winning play, which carries, in addition to the Fifty Pounds Prize, an interest in the takings’; subscribers were even promised a discount on admission. Katharine wrote to Vance just after submitting the play that she supposed it would be ‘considered unproduceable’ while also insisting that ‘it could be produced’. It worried her that Hugo ‘doesn’t like the play at all. It’s too brutal he thinks’.²⁴ Louis Esson thought highly of it but was sure an audience would get ‘the shock of their lives’. He felt Katharine had been ‘too sympathetic to Brumby. Nothing can excuse his brutality, not even his “virility”, which is his long suit’.²⁵ The production did not go ahead; the explanation the producer gave Katharine was that the planned season’s opening play was given such unfair reviews that he swore to never stage another Australian play.²⁶

Brumby Innes was published in 1940 by Paterson’s Printing, a Perth company, possibly at Katharine’s expense; it was the only play of hers to be published in her lifetime. She was probably hoping that publication would lead to a production, but she died without ever seeing it on stage. In 1972, three years after her death, the Pram Factory in Melbourne finally staged it, with the production filmed and broadcast on television in June 1973.²⁷

THE NEXT PIECES Katharine wrote out of her experiences and notes from Turee were the short stories ‘The Cooboo’ and ‘Happiness’, both published in the Bulletin in 1927 and frequently anthologised as two of her most acclaimed stories. Both are notable for their narration from the perspective of an Aboriginal woman. Today, it is a choice of viewpoint which would be criticised for cultural appropriation; in its context, it was an act of literary empathy. After these stories, Katharine seems to have decided it would not be feasible to write a full-length novel from an Aboriginal viewpoint, and Coonardoo reverts to her familiar multi-viewpoint narration.

‘Happiness’ is an alternative Coonardoo in miniature. Nardadu, the viewpoint character, is a grandmother who has lived at a station for many years and the story relates her understanding of the troubles at the homestead. For years, John and his sister Megga have run the station together, but after incurring Megga’s wrath for having sex with an Aboriginal woman, John brings home a much younger white bride, Margie. Years of conflict between Megga and Margie culminate in Margie leaving with the children.

A young Aboriginal woman named Coonardoo is mentioned in passing in the story; she would become the title character of Katharine’s most famous novel. Katharine said, ‘One of the native girls who I used to ride with particularly interested me, and it was her stories about her own people that went into the making of Coonardoo’.²⁸ The woman Katharine referred to was Topsy, whose Indigenous name was Kundri.²⁹ Elsewhere, Katharine claimed the novel was true to Topsy’s life ‘in all but the end wh happened to another woman’.³⁰ Topsy and her husband, Duck, had a daughter named Cooboo, who would, coincidentally, grow up to marry an Aboriginal man named Billy Leake, his name taken from Brumby Leake.³¹ The Turee Station manager, John Brown, and his wife, Joe Maguire’s sister, Mary, took Topsy, Duck and Cooboo to Queensland with them on a holiday in 1922. According to a police report supporting the granting of permit to take Topsy and Duck, they had grown up at Turee and spoke English very well.³²

Coonardoo is a tragedy of the repressed love between Hugh, the owner of Wytaliba Station, and Coonardoo, an Aboriginal woman who lives on the station. Katharine claimed to have based Hugh on a particular person she met, and, at some point, he read the novel and came to talk to her, ‘appalled that man’s inner conflict shd have been so revealed’.³³ The novel spans decades, beginning with the childhood of Hugh and Coonardoo and carrying on into their middle age. Like Katharine’s earlier novels, Coonardoo presents an idyllic community under threat. Wytaliba’s harmonious relationships between the whites and blacks have been set up by Hugh’s mother, Bessie. The characters who ‘understand’ the idyll love the harsh isolation of the station life and treat the Aboriginal people with respect; after Hugh marries, his wife, Mollie, does neither. Before she dies, Bessie sets up an impossible dynamic in entrusting Coonardoo with the duty to look after Hugh while also requiring that they not be sexually involved with each other. Bessie and then Hugh’s cardinal rule for the idyll is that—unlike Sam Geary on the neighbouring station—white men must not have sexual relations with Aboriginal women. It is a rule partly borne out of avoiding exploitation but also out of anti-miscegenation. The community is threatened and ultimately destroyed by both the forces of nature—drought—and Hugh’s inability to cope with his repressed desire. As in The Pioneers, it ends with hope in the next generation—in this case, Hugh’s daughter Phyllis is successfully managing the neighbouring station with her husband.

From a literary perspective, Coonardoo is the most accomplished of Katharine’s novels. She developed the plot with greater skill than any of her other works, not filling it with overly complicated developments nor veering into weaker subplots. The drama is gripping as Hugh’s fatal flaws become more apparent over the years and lead to tragedy. The prose is beautiful, less self-consciously evocative than Working Bullocks and less workman-like than the goldfields trilogy which would follow. There are no intrusive communist themes or characters, reflecting not just the isolated setting but Katharine’s own retreat from political activism when she wrote it.

Katharine’s depiction of the mother–son relationship between Bessie and Hugh is biographically interesting. Later known as a ‘doting’ mother herself, Katharine portrays Bessie as a mother tied up in her son’s life, even from afar while he is at boarding school. In the character of Bessie, Katharine imagined life as a widow with an only son five years before it became her own reality.

Soon before she began writing Coonardoo, Katharine met up with Colonel WT Reay’s wife Lucinda and daughter Nan in Melbourne; he was still in London and Lucinda was living apart from him.³⁴ Consciously or not, Katharine may have weaved some of Reay into the character of Hugh. The obvious similarity between the two is their five daughters, ‘the joke of the countryside, “his poker hand”’.³⁵ Hugh’s tortured, repressed love for Coonardoo reflects some of Reay’s behaviour towards Katharine. The arrival of Hugh’s daughter, Phyllis, to work the station with him is another echo. He is delighted when she works alongside him—as Katharine worked in journalism alongside Reay—and devastated when Phyllis starts thinking of marriage. Like Reay, Hugh forbids Phyllis to marry, forcing her to run away to do so.

FOR AN ACCOMPLISHED work, Coonardoo was written with extraordinary speed in three months from April to June 1928. ‘I was three-quarters through with another story [Haxby’s Circus], when she presented herself & took charge. Of course there were sketches for her in my Nor-West [note]books; but I worked fearfully hard, & went through the manuscript at least six times before it left me.’³⁶ The deadline spurring Katharine on was the closing date for the Bulletin’s Australian novel competition, which offered a first prize of £500 and retention of royalties for any book publication after serialisation. Entry was open to writers born or living in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. The entries had to be submitted under pseudonyms; referencing Hugo’s time on a station, Katharine called herself ‘Ashburton Jim’.

In the foreword to Coonardo’s publication as a book, dated 17 March 1929, Katharine defended the authenticity of the novel and gave some insight into the writing process. She claimed ‘the story was written in the country through which it moves’ and ‘facts, characters, incidents have been collected, related and interwoven’. The interweaving of observed material was Katharine’s signature process but in this case some of her material has been taken from other books. Scholar Marion Austin-Crowe writes ‘a great deal of textual material relating to Aboriginal life and culture which appears in Coonardoo can be shown to have been taken almost intact from [Herbert] Basedow’s text, The Australian Aboriginal (1925)’.³⁷ In the foreword, Katharine quotes approvingly a particularly offensive claim from Basedow, an anthropologist, about the ‘low’ place occupied by Aboriginal people on the evolutionary ‘ladder’.

Katharine also revealed that she asked Ernest Mitchell, Inspector of Aborigines, to read the manuscript for accuracy. Katharine may have known him through Hugo as, until 1925, Mitchell had been farming in Benjaberring, near Hugo’s farm at Cowcowing. ‘He has had thirty years’ experience of the [A]borigines’, wrote Katharine ‘and no one in this country has wider knowledge and more sympathetic understanding of the Western and Nor’West tribes’. There wouldn’t have been time to send him the manuscript and receive back his advice before the closing date of the competition; perhaps his feedback came after submission but before publication. ‘Mr Mitchell suggested an omission and several changes of spelling, but said that he could not fault the drawing of [A]borigines and conditions, in Coonardoo, as he knew them.’³⁸

The response to the Bulletin competition was overwhelming; a special van had to be hired to deliver all the manuscripts on the last two days. In all, there were 542 entries.³⁹ The panel of five Sydney-based male judges announced their decision in the 22 August 1928 edition of the Bulletin. Both Katharine’s Coonardoo and Flora Eldershaw and Marjorie Barnard’s A House is Built were awarded first prizes, with Vance Palmer’s Men are Human third. The two winning novels were not quite judged equal: ‘Our first choice is A House is Built, an Australian prose epic of marked literary quality. We find, however, such great merit in Coonardoo, with its outstanding value for serial publication, that we recommend it also as worthy of a first prize’. Despite the judges’ claim of unanimity, their decision suggests a compromise. One of the judges later wrote of the difficult time they had separating the top three entries; the judges thought Men Are Human ‘splendid’ and ‘sincere’ and ‘hailed it as the winner. Then A House Is Built came along. There was no more sincerity in it, but its “canvas” was considered greater. Then Coonardoo came. There was no more sincerity in it either; but it was, perhaps, “stronger”’.⁴⁰

The Bulletin serialised Coonardoo weekly from 5 September to 12 December 1928. Katharine thought the illustrations by Cecil H Percival were ‘awful’, not resembling the country at all, and protested about the Bulletin’s changes to her sentences.⁴¹ The serial divisions were a problem, too, occurring mid-chapter; ‘never was a book so chopped and broken and destroyed’, observed Nettie Palmer.⁴²

With so much publicity about the competition, expectations were high for the winning entries and Coonardoo was read by the large, general readership of the Bulletin, a contrast to the small, literary readership Working Bullocks reached. With its controversial themes and bleak tone, Coonardoo was never going to be a crowd-pleasing serial. The Bulletin received many letters of complaint—some of which they forwarded to Katharine—over her depiction of widespread sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women. Instead of publishing criticisms, the Bulletin noted, ‘Of course, there has been controversy about the authenticity of Katharine Prichard’s Coonardoo. Do the pictures she draws of life in the far Nor’-West tell the truth or are they fanciful?’ From a ‘basket full of evidence’ they quoted one correspondent from the area who thought it completely true saying, ‘The characters fit almost any far-back station’.⁴³ Responding to this claim, the local conservative member of state parliament wrote to the Northern Times, ‘I say that the whole yarn is a libel on everyone in the North and North-West, and most of it is exaggerated and untrue’.⁴⁴ It was reactions like this that explain the defensive foreword Katharine wrote for the book, insisting on its verisimilitude.

Jonathan Cape wrote to Katharine wanting to patch up their relationship with her after the botched distribution of Working Bullocks. She agreed for Cape to have first look at Coonardoo in Britain, but handled it through an agent, Curtis Brown, in the hope of a better deal.⁴⁵ They reached an agreement in January 1929 and Coonardoo was published as a book in June.⁴⁶ The standard terms for her novels—perhaps starting with Coonardoo—came to be an advance of £150, with 15% royalty on the first 7000 sales and 20% for any sales over that.⁴⁷

Receiving its first true reviews after being the subject of debate in the letters pages of newspapers as a serial, Coonardoo was criticised on both ideological and literary grounds. Samuel Rosa, the reviewer for Sydney’s Labor Daily—a Labor Party paper hostile to communists—disliked it. Granting that it was ‘probably the most sympathetic study of a black woman ever written’, he found the characters unconvincing and the plot ‘not impressive’ before ending with the question, ‘Is it really necessary, too, that there should be a persistent atmosphere of gloom in a novel dealing with Australian life in the interior? Is there no humor in such a life?’⁴⁸ There were some positive reviews, including the West Australian, which said ‘the ample promise revealed by the author in her previous novels … has become solid achievement in her story of the black gin’.⁴⁹ However, even the positive reviews generally failed to predict the long-term significance of the novel. Nettie recognised it in an article in September 1929, and argued that when a writer interprets a theme for the first time as Katharine had done, ‘readers are apt to be amazed by the extent of her knowledge and to ignore the aesthetic quality of the work’.⁵⁰

Coonardoo received good reviews across Britain, praising Katharine for its emotional power and its depiction of Aboriginal people. An American edition came out in February 1930. The publisher was William Norton; he had written to Nettie in 1929 saying he wanted to start an Australian list, and she seems to have played a part in him acquiring the American rights to Coonardoo. Norton was unhappy with the quality of the British edition of Coonardoo and ‘corrected the punctuation and typographical errors, expanded the glossary … and gave the novel an attractive new cover featuring cockatoos’, delighting Katharine with his ‘energy and courtesy’.⁵¹ The New York Times wrote:

Coonardoo stands as a forceful piece of social documentation and bids fair to do for Australia what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for America … to make the white race face the facts of its treatment and study of the black descendants of the [A]borigines, through an authentic piece of national literature which raises a parochial problem to the level of the universal.⁵²

WRITERS DON’T CHOOSE which books come to define them. ‘Coonardoo seems to be the most popular of my books’, Katharine said in a 1960 interview, but ‘others of my books I consider of more importance, particularly the goldfields trilogy’.⁵³ Coonardoo broke new ground, stirred debate in its time and ours, and has a harsh beauty appropriate to the landscape it depicts. With good reason, it is the novel Katharine is best remembered for—and yet, it is as controversial today as when it was published, albeit for different reasons.

By the 1980s Coonardoo was taught in Australian high school and university curriculums, damagingly, as a novel which enabled readers to understand the Aboriginal ‘mind’ and the plight of Aboriginal people without awareness of its limitations as a 1920s white depiction of Aboriginal people. Wiradjuri academic Jeanine Leane was upset by Coonardoo in her high school English class because ‘thousands of years of Aboriginal culture and spirituality were being reduced to base instinct’. Her teacher told her not to take it personally, the novel was not about her. ‘But it was … In fact, she was talking about all Aboriginal women. This is because literary representations are never just benign descriptions; they enter into and shape our national discourse.’⁵⁴

Eualeyai/Kamillaroi academic Larissa Behrendt calls the novel a story ‘about white sorrow, not black empowerment’.⁵⁵ Behrendt and Leane both discuss Katharine’s failure to understand the political conditions of Aboriginal people living under settler–colonial oppression or advocate for their empowerment—an ironic failure, given Katharine’s politics.⁵⁶ Katharine critiques the abuse of Aboriginal people by station owners but assumes the station owners’ duty is to show benevolence, rather than liberate the Aboriginal people from slave-like conditions on land which had been stolen from them.⁵⁷

Katharine wrote and published Coonardoo at a time of publicity about Aboriginal massacres. In June 1926, police massacred Aboriginal people in retaliation for the spearing of a station owner at Forrest River, now known as Oombulgurri, 1600 kilometres north-east of Turee in the Kimberly. Katharine’s acquaintance, Ernest Mitchell, investigated the incident and the Wood Royal Commission followed in 1927. The massacre ‘became the catalyst for a wave of concern about the treatment of Aboriginal people in northern Australia’.⁵⁸ In 1928, there was another massacre at Coniston in the Northern Territory and Behrendt writes, ‘This 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’.⁵⁹ However, there is a significant passage in Coonardoo in which the character Saul demonstrates an awareness of these encounters:

‘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 punishing expedition. They still ride out on punishin’ expeditions …’

Saul details a number of atrocities he’s seen, trying to educate Hugh’s wife, Mollie.⁶⁰ The passage suggests Katharine had at least begun to understand the background of injustice and violence. However, this insight doesn’t permeate the rest of the novel, and there isn’t a sense of the ‘fearful reality’ for Aboriginal people of punitive killing sprees by white people. Behrendt asserts that many Aboriginal people worked on pastoral properties ‘in order to be protected from violence on the frontier’—a very different picture to the contented Aboriginal people in the novel who are glad to be living in servitude at Wytaliba.⁶¹ Katharine was so focused on the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women that she missed the extent and significance of the wider violence which preceded and undergirded it. There’s no indication she heard any local accounts of punitive killings and she would have felt, understandably, that it would be inauthentic to transplant details from the far-away Kimberley to the Turee area. Of course, the lack of accounts told to a white woman on a 10-week stay didn’t mean a lack of violence.⁶²

The best response to the problems with Coonardoo is to reframe the novel. Referring to Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) alongside Coonardoo, Leane writes:

I am not suggesting that this work and others like it be scrapped—they are important texts that reveal synchronic slices of settler consciousness of and about Aboriginal people at any given time. But I am challenging the notion that these are Aboriginal stories. They are not.

Any reading of such texts in Australian curricula needs to acknowledge this point. Critical interpretations, both within and outside of school contexts, must also be informed by the growing body of Aboriginal scholarship exploring the politics of representation.⁶³

Coonardoo’s representation of Aboriginal people was ahead of its time in certain ways but was also very much of its time. Katharine would have been disturbed by the knowledge that the canonical status of Coonardoo has perpetuated stereotypes about Aboriginal people. In an interview in 1956, she said ‘there was a movement for recognition of their rights among the Aborigines’ and if she was writing a novel like Coonardoo now ‘it would reflect these developments’.⁶⁴ It is to Katharine’s credit that she at least partially identified this shortcoming in her own novel long before critics raised it. Her writings show an evolving understanding of Aboriginal issues over the decades, with Coonardoo coming at the beginning of her engagement.