We've recently received word from Bill Day, Research Officer for the Pilbara Native Title Service. Bill travels around the Pilbara, and with his permission, we'd like to share his letter and photos with you.
15.4.02
Dear Friends
I spent a pleasant evening at Turee Creek Station last month (March 2002) with Bruce and Susan Maguire, the third generation of Maguires to own the station. Parts of the homestead where KSP stayed before writing "Coodardoo" are still standing (see photo). I enclose another photo of the foundations of a native worker's hut. I work with an Aboriginal descendant of Topsy Kundi whose daughter was Cooboo (his mother) born about 1918. I like to think Cooboo could have been the inspiration for Coonardoo - they were certainly on the station until the 1950s. Cooboo's husband was Billy Leake, who took his name from Brumby Leake, the inspiration for Sam Geary. There are many of the Aboriginal Leake family living.
Yours
Bill Day
Katharine began her play Brumby Innes (one of seventeen, eleven of which were produced by small theatres and amateur companies) while staying at Turee Creek Station, three hundred miles beyond Meekatharra, on a tributary of the Ashburton River, and finished it back at her home in Greenmount.
In a letter to Vance and Nettie Palmer in 1926, Katharine wrote,
"I've done a play to be called 'The Brumby', or 'Brumby _______' somebody or other. The real thing is here. His name is Leake. It fits so - 'Brumby Leake'. And I've got to find one that won't run me in for libel."
Although it won the Triad Prize after its completion in 1927 (unanimously selected by three judges from 107 entries) it was not performed until forty-five years later in Melbourne in 1972.
Coonardoo was written shortly after Brumby Innes, and has several of the same characters.
'Brumby Innes was inspired by the drover and stockman Brumby Leake, a character renowned in the Kimberleys and who spent his last years at Prairie Downs Station, which adjoins Turee Creek to the east....In Coonardoo Sam Geary is identifiably Brumby Innes,' notes Katharine Brisbane, editor of a 1974 publication of the play. Coonardoo won the Bulletin novel prize in 1928.
Photos by kind permission of Bill Day. The author acknowledges reference to Katherine Brisbane's introduction and Ric Throssel's preface to The National Theatre's 1974 publication of Brumby Innes and Bid Me to Love.
Margot Lowe