My inspiration for Mangadoo came from my time being a committee member of the Nor West Jockey Club in Roebourne, WA, where I was responsible for the clubs Marketing and Sponsorship between 1987 – 1994. The race club was founded in 1863, and its early pioneering members developed a new breed of horse they called the Nor West Bred. The Nor West Bred was an intelligent agile horse specially bred for working in the challenging conditions of what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

In 1989, Cyclone Orson destroyed all the facilities at the Roebourne racecourse. The committee and local businesses quickly banded together to raise over $100,000 so new cyclone-proof facilities could be built at the Roebourne racecourse. At the time I was seeking ways to promote the new race club facilities. I finally decided on the ‘heritage angle’ and the story of the Nor West Bred played a big role and contributed to a very successful opening of the new facilities in 1992.

The actual concept for Mangadoo came to me in 1994 after reading about the mysterious disappearance of a champion Irish racehorse called Shergar and it was rumoured to have been transported to Australia or America. I remembered the story of the Nor West Bred’s and I started to draft out a storyline about how a champion racehorse disappears in England and ends up in a remote region of Western Australia.

During my research I read how around the same period as the Nor West Breds were becoming established in the Northwest of Western Australia, six Irish fenian prisoners made a well organised escape from Fremantle prison and were rescued by a fenian funded whaler called the Catalpa that had sailed from America and then successfully sailed back to America. The knowledge that fenians were actually in Western Australia at that time inspired me and the fenian movement and I wove a fenian plot into the Mangadoo story.

It took me a long time – nearly seventeen years to finally complete the story. It was originally titled Nor West Bred, but I changed it to Mangadoo—a local colloquial word from my childhood that my parents always used to affectionately refer to our village called Mangotsfield in South Gloucestershire and the fact that I realised on my arrival in Australia it sounded strikingly Aboriginal.

Bringing Mangadoo to print as an independent publisher was the initial challenge, but now creating and marketing an audiobook is the final frontier.

— David Morgan
Perth, Western Australia