There has been some controversy as to whether Coonardoo is altogether a work of the romantic imagination. Life in the north-west of Western Australia is almost as little known in Australia as in England or America. It seems necessary to say, therefore, that the story was written in the country through which it moves.
Facts, characters, incidents, have been collected, related and interwoven. That is all. The Coonardoo I knew and used to ride with, for instance, is not the gin whose life-story has been told. And Hugh is not my chivalrous host of those days, to whom, and his charming wife, this book is dedicated with a sprig of wild rosemary.
Geary exists, although the Aborigines Department has dealt with him lately. Recently, too, there has been a regulation to prevent white men from taking rooms for a gin, or half-caste, in a hotel. Nowadays, also, aboriginal stockmen usually receive a small wage as well as payment in kind by rations.
Before Coonardoo was printed in the Bulletin I asked Mr Ernest Mitchell to read the MS. Mr Mitchell is Chief Inspector of Aborigines for Western Australia. He has had thirty years’ experience of the aborigines and no one in this country has wider knowledge and more sympathetic understanding of the Western and Nor’-West tribes. Mr Mitchell suggested an omission and several changes of spelling, but said that he could not fault the drawing of aborigines and conditions, in Coonardoo, as he knew them.
People who see the blacks only along the transcontinental line, or when they have become poor, degraded and degenerate creatures, as a result of contact with towns and the vices of white people, cannot understand how different they are in their natural state, or on isolated stations of the Nor’-West where they are treated with consideration and kindness.
Basedow in The Australian Aboriginal says, “Anthropological relationship connects the Australian (including the proto-Australian) with the Veddahs and Dravidians of India and with the fossil men of Europe, from whom the Caucasian element has sprung.” They are only a few generations removed, after all, Coonardoo and Andromache. “In other words, the Australian aboriginal stands somewhere near the bottom rung of the great evolutional ladder we have ascended.” His and our “racial development was very early disassociated from the Mongoloid and Negroid lines”.
Words of the native songs are treasure really. I am grateful for them to Mr Ernest Mitchell, Mr James Withnell of Mardie and Caratha, and to his sister, Mrs James Muirdick. Only men and women like these good friends of mine who have had almost lifelong association with the aborigines, I think, can be trusted to know the sound and meaning of words in melodies sung by the blacks.
Many of the corroboree songs, or tabee, are in a dead language, it seems. Words in them are not heard in the everyday speech. The aborigines themselves do not know the exact meaning of some, or else are reluctant to give it, superstitious of unravelling the mystery of legends and saga drifted down from remote ages, perhaps. They will tell the general meaning of a song to a stranger, but not words in their rhythmic order. Only people who have had long and intimate association with particular tribes are able to garner these jewels of the primitive imagination and present them as authentic fragments.
About inspirational songs, sung by the yinerrie, inventor of corroborees, or poet and director of ceremonies, as the spirit moves him, there is not the same difficulty. Warieda’s “Song of the Steam Engine” and “Perandalah willy-willeree” are improvisations of recent dates and show the adoption and growth of white man’s words in the native idiom.
K. S. P.
GREENMOUNT
17th March, 1929.