Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Xavier Herbert’s Enlightenment : The Solomon Islands Nightmare, 1928
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Before the appearance of his first major book, Capricornia (1938), the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert published approximately forty short stories under different names in a variety of magazines and newspapers.' These are gener-ally regarded as immature, written before he discovered either his voice or his theme, when he was experimenting with different audiences, genres, subjects and pseudonyms, and trying to establish a literary career. Of these early stories, about one quarter have maritime settings, mostly in the Timor, the Arafura, or the Coral Seas. Only two are set in Melanesia: The Ape-Men of Mobongu; in what was then commonly known as Dutch New Guinea, and The Other McLean; in the Solomon Islands. The first appeared in The Boys Weekly in 1927, the second in the Australian Journal (and the Northern Standard the following year).2 In this essay I intend to take a small step toward addressing the fiction of disconnection between Australia and its Pacific neighbours that, until the recent transnational turn in the humanities, Australian scholars have for the most part maintained simply by preferring national to comparative contexts of enquiry. Paul Sharrad has done more than most to extend the Australian frame of reference to include Pacific and south-east Asian cultural production. For that reason, lam pleased to take the opportunity provided by this publication in his honour not only to revisit the facts of Herbert's experience in the Australian-mandated territories of the Pacific in the 1920s, but also to ask what influence it had on his formation as an Australian writer in the 1930s.'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Postcolonial Past & Present : Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies : Essays for Paul Sharrad Anne Collett (editor), Leigh Dale (editor), Leiden : Brill , 2018 15424217 2018 anthology criticism

    'In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau’ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These ‘makers’ include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. ' (Publication summary)

    Leiden : Brill , 2018
    pg. 61–83
Last amended 17 Jan 2019 11:09:30
61–83 Xavier Herbert’s Enlightenment : The Solomon Islands Nightmare, 1928small AustLit logo
Subjects:
  • c
    Papua New Guinea,
    c
    Pacific Region,
  • c
    Solomon Islands,
    c
    South Pacific, Pacific Region,
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