Cirrus@Austlit

'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)