Coonardoo

Coonardoo: The Well in the Shadow is a novel by the Australian writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, first published in 1929. It was entered for The Bulletin novel competition in 1928 under a pseudonym and shared the prize.

The book depicts the country of north-west Australia at a time when white settlers were trying to take control of more and more of its bare plains. Coonardoo, the woman the novel is named for, has been raised from childhood to be the housekeeper of Wytaliba station.

She falls in love with Hugh Watt, the white man who owns the station, and the novel follows that relationship and what the surrounding society makes of it. It was serialised in The Bulletin in fifteen weekly instalments before publication as a book, and it has been read ever since as an uncompromising account of the contact between black and white Australians and of the way that contact has been written about. Prichard set it in the part of the country where she had lived, and the book has been reissued several times.