Coonardoo

A powerful novel about race that's become a classic of Australian literature.
A tough, uncompromising novel about the difficult love between a white man and a black woman. Coonardoo is the moving story of a young Aboriginal woman trained from childhood to be the housekeeper at Wytaliba station and, as such, destined to look after its owner, Hugh Watt. the love between Coonardoo and Hugh, which so shocked its readers when the book was first published in 1929, is never acknowledged and so, degraded and twisted in on itself, destroys not only Coonardoo, but also a community which was once peaceful. this frank and daring novel set on the edge of the desert still raises difficult questions about the history of contact between black and white, and its representation in Australian writing.

Auteur

Katharine Susannah Prichard was born in 1883 in Fiji and spent part of her childhood in Melbourne and part in Tasmania before moving to Greenmount, Western Australia, where she died in 1969. Her novels include The Pioneers (winner of the Australian section of Hodder & Stoughton's All-Empire novel competition), Working Bullocks, Coonardoo and The Black Opal, but she also wrote poetry, short stories and a play. She went on the road with the iconic Wirth's Circus to research Haxby's Circus. The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre was established in 1985 at her former home in the Perth Hills.