Star-crossed lovers

On re-reading Coonardoo

I used to think that Romeo and Juliet was a Bildungsroman gone wrong, and that much the same analysis would apply to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1926 novel Coonardoo, Having recently re-read the novel, however, I have realised that such a reading, though understandable – and who can’t forgive themselves for their earlier mistakes – misses something characteristic of the star-crossed lover narrative.

The essence of such a story, it now seems to me, is that there are two parallel strands, each with its own Hero. From the order in which we encounter them, we might call them major and minor Heroes respectively. Each Hero has a narrative, but the two narratives are out of synchrony with one another. They are wire-crossed lovers, in fact, rather than star-crossed: at cross puposes – their aims and expectations fail to mesh. So we have this sort of situation:

Major Hero – Romeo	Minor Hero – Juliet
City: Act I, i
New place: Act I, v	City: Act I, v
Garden: Act II, ii	New place: Act II, ii
Wilderness: Act III, i	Garden: Act II, v
City: Act V, iii	Wilderness: Act III, iii

What is a new place for Romeo: the Capulets’ ballroom, is part of the city for Juliet – located in a settled polity with which she is familiar, as are her previous scenes, I, ii and I, iii. What is the garden for Romeo: the Capulets’ garden and following, is a new place for Juliet – unlike Romeo, she is new to love. By the time Juliet is married and longing for Romeo to come to her (the garden for her), he has already been exiled (the wilderness).

Romeo has an epilogue – which has to be the city again, of course – in which he kills Paris, now cast as the Villain. It’s the same old violent world again that we saw in I, i, but from the beginning of Act IV the play is Juliet’s story above all. Friar Lawrence is her Donor, the sleeping draught his magical gift; when she awakes, even her death is not synchronised with Romeo’s.

The part of the play involving both Heroes (when looked at from Romeo’s point of view) does seem like a Bildungsroman, now with a prologue – you can see where that misreading comes from – but one’s left with the difficulty that nothing has turned out. True, we have the hint of a new polity formed at the conclusion – the protagonists reunited with their reconciled parents, but it is a solution that excludes those very protagonists. In fact, what we are given is two overlapping narratives each as sardonic in its own way as the narrative of Othello.

How does this apply to Coonardoo? That book tells the story of Hugh Watt, son of a station-owner somewhere in the wilds of the Pilbara or thereabouts, and his conflicted relationship with Coonardoo, an indigenous girl and later woman of about his own age. For students some years ago I summarized the book in the words ‘It’s sex that makes the world go round’, which seems to me still a good characterization. Hugh becomes more uptight, his property is ravaged by drought and disaster, but nothing bad ever happens to Sam Geary, his crude and boorish neighbour with the string of indigenous mistresses and half-caste children. No drought on Sam’s property.

But what I don’t think is that the book is about Coonardoo the woman, or that Prichard explores the indigenous situation in any more than a superficial way; on the contrary, her view of the indigenous characters is coloured by an almost unrelieved orientalism. Coonardoo’s role as sexual symbol (her name is supposed to mean ‘well in the shadows’) and as symbol of the landscape occludes our reading her as a realistic character on the same level as the European actors in the story (she only comes alive when her hunger for sexual contact leads her to submit to Sam). We have all met Jessica, the fleetingly glimpsed character unable to face becoming Hugh’s fiancee; we have all met Bessie and Mollie and Phyllis – Hugh’s mother, wife, and daughter – but I doubt even those of us with extensive indigenous acquaintance have ever met Coonardoo.

More than anything, she reminds me of one of the female leads in Morris’s romances, who stand for value – for life itself, in the end. Generally they remain outside the action until the Hero qualifies to embrace them: just what Coonardoo does for most of the time. Had Prichard read Morris? Very likely, I think. Considering she became a fervent communist by way of a journey through various brands of socialism, he is just the author we would expect her to have read. The episode of al fresco copulation between Hugh and Coonardoo is a very Morris-like touch (The House of the Wolfings, The Wood beyond the World, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, The Well at the World’s End), and Coonardoo may remind us of the well which is life itself in the last of those books named.

It’s perhaps Coonardoo’s similarity with a William Morris character that led me to take the book first as Bildungsroman, just as Morris’s romances are, but in fact it has the same doubled structure that we find in Romeo & Juliet.

We begin with a pre-existing polity, the city: Wytaliba station under the benevolent despotism of Hugh’s mother. Hugh, who has grown up with Coonardoo, is about to leave for school. Coonardoo is hurt: for her it is the wilderness, though her character is peripheral at this stage. Hugh is the major Hero.

The new place for Hugh is inaugurated by his return, to be loaded with responsibility for the property in view of his mother’s imminent death. For Coonardoo, though, Hugh’s return is a reaffirmation of the city.

Hugh’s garden is his time of marital security with Mollie; for Coonardoo a new place, being subjected to a woman ignorant of the station’s ways. Hugh’s wilderness, ultimately revalorized by the appearance of his daughter Phyllis, is Coonardoo’s garden, a phase in which she is installed in the homestead and becomes Hugh’s partner in all but sex. Finally, for Hugh, we are back to the city again – a new polity where the brunt is borne by Coonardoo, brutalized, diseased and dying in the wilderness. As in Romeo and Juliet, the focus has moved away from the major Hero in this last act. It belongs to primarily to Coonardoo.

If Romeo and Juliet were to be star-crossed whatever their good intentions, it can be argued that the same holds for Hugh Watt and Coonardoo. European values belong in Europe; to survive in the wilds of Western Australia, people have to accommodate themselves to the country as its indigenous inhabitants have done (whatever that may mean). Prichard doesn't seem to offer any clear solution, but that appears to be part of her message.

With the clarity of hindsight, I can see it was in just such a situation of disparate desires that I had my own heart broken many, many, many years ago – and perhaps it’s a little bit humiliating to realise now that in that situation my part was that of the minor Hero. Such is narrative.