Snowball

by Gavin Casey

Set in a fictitious Western Australian town of the 1950s, it is a story of black-white relations at that time, with particular reference to the fortunes of a family of mixed-blood folk who are trying to find their uneasy way between the tribal Aboriginals of the local Settlement and the whites of the township.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

GAVIN STODART CASEY. "Australian writer and journalist.

In the 1930’s, Casey began to publish stories about the hard life of the miners in the goldfields of Western Australia. He is the author of the collections It’s Harder for Girls (1942) and Birds of a Feather (1943), the story “Down an Inclined Plane” (1945), and the novel City of Men (1950). Casey condemned racial discrimination in the novel Snowball (1958). The novel Amid the Plenty (1962) shows the tragedy of the unemployed in contemporary Australia. The hero of his novel The Man Whose Name Was Mud (1963) is the son of a bankrupt farmer." (http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionar...)

Reviews

[Greg Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

important narrative on a people in transition; intergenerational story of change; fictional but close to the lived truth of many

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another remarkable and forgotten work by an excellent Australian writer. It tells the story of Snowball, an old Aborigine who has mixed-blood children and the difficulties the family has when faced with the prejudices of those days. This was an era when Australia Aborigines had a special status: they could not vote, enter licensed premises to have a drink (or for any other reason) and were restricted to a certain extent from travelling as well, particularly to cities. Casey has drawn some finely-wrought characterizations of the kind of people one might have found in such a small town like this. There are those who sympathize with the condition of the blacks and those who despise them as niggers and do everything they can to keep them separated from the white population. It is an ugly story, one that resonates throughout Australian history, with many of the prejudices seeping down through the decades even into the world of the 21st century.