When 'Coonardoo' was published in 1929 it was greeted with considerable controversy. It tells the story of Coonardoo, a young Aboriginal woman, who is trained from childhood to be the housekeeper at Wytaliba station and, as such, is destined to look after it's owner, Hugh Watt. The love between Coonardoo and Hugh, which so shocked the audience of 1929, is never acknowledged and so, degraded and twisted in on itself, destroys not only Coonardoo, but also a community which was once peaceful.
Introduced by Drusilla Modjeska, this tough, uncompromising novel, daring for its time and 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.
