Debesa

SHORTLISTED, 2022 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN BOOK AWARDS, THE PREMIERS PRIZE FOR AN EMERGING WRITER
SHORTLISTED, 2021 ROYAL WESTERN AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY, WILLIAMS/LEE STEERE HISTORY PRIZE
This extraordinary and heartfelt story chronicles the lives of the Rodriguez family of Debesa Station in the West Kimberley; their livelihood through difficult times, love of family, place and culture, and the challenges of day-to-day living on a small sheep station amid huge pastoral properties.
Spanning four generations from the 1880s when the author’s maternal great-grandfather, Indian deckhand, Jimmy Casim, met and lived with Nigena woman, Lucy Muninga on Yeeda Station near Derby, Debesa centres on the unlikely partnership of Cindy’s parents: Frank Rodriguez, once a Benedictine novice monk from Spain, and Katie Fraser, who had been a novitiate in a very different sort of abbey – a convent for ‘black’ women at Beagle Bay Mission, 130 kilometres north of Broome.
Together, Frank and Katie Rodriguez established Debesa, where Cindy and her three siblings grew up with the rich cultural heritage of their Spanish, Nigena and English ancestors.