N´goola in Australia

N’goola essay

To be a half caste is a challenging thing, not many people know what is or what it involves. The feeling to be taken from your real parents, this feeling is not something we in Denmark know, but we can imagine how hard it is. To not know the people that brought you to this earth. In this story Katharine Susannah Prichard portrays it well, we get the feeling Mary has, and has sympathy with Mary.

In this short-text Katharine Susannah Prichard presents some main topics, one of them is half-caste. She explains what it means through Mary’s life. She is a half-caste and we see how hard it is to be a half-caste.  We read how she was torn away from her mother cause of her identity. There are a lot of racism against the half-caste and the aboriginals in Australia. A lot of aboriginals were taken away from their parents in this period. People from the rest of the world can only imagine how hard it must had been for the parents, and especially the children. Many children didn´t know their own parents. N’goola is in the outback in Australia, we know it is in Australia, because it was the only place these things took place in the history of earth. She lives in a very poor area, that is very typical for the half-caste in Australia at that time. They lived in the outback, because the whites thought they didn´t belong in the cities because of their race.
If we characterize Mary and look deeper into her as one person and not all the half-caste. She tries to live like the whites, that is why she is always cleaning, she was told that as a white you must have a clean home. When she was confronted with the aboriginal side of hers, she was really confused on how she wanted to live the rest of her life. She has built a life, where she tried to live like a white a person, and maybe she is not ready to just give all of that up. Mary has always tried to get best of the life she was given, when she was taken away from her parents.  Mary is afraid that she would end up like a lot of the aboriginals, if she chooses to “become” an aboriginal, with alcohol problems and unhealthy things like that. She doesn´t want to become like her husband, we read that he has a drinking problem, and she is afraid she is going to end up like him. She is also afraid of losing the habits she has from the whites’ lifestyle. Her husband is a bad influence on Mary. We also read about Mary’s stepfather, he has been looking for N’goola aka. Mary, for about 30 years. So, we can assume he loves her very much, almost like it was his own daughter. He is a good man, and that is why Mary consider becoming an aboriginal. We read about two very different types of aboriginals. The good one, that is represented as her stepfather, and the bad one in the shadow of her husband. She is very split on what she wants to be in the future, but in the end, she reveals herself to the stepfather, that she is the N’goola he has been looking for. She decides that she wants to be an aboriginal, that she belongs to the aboriginal people.