Cirrus@Austlit

'Although Xavier Herbert blazed a number of trails with his first novel Capricornia, it was only his last novel Poor Fellow My Country that aspired to literature, and that novel succeeded in many ways that challenge the comfortable view of Australia's cultural history that some recent politicians desire. The novel poses some very big questions for Australia. What future is there for a people who have killed off or sidelined the indigenous people and have only a commercial interest in the land it occupies? What has been foregone by the intentional rejection of the knowledge of the indigenous people? What happens when, as Robin Boyd says, Australia has no desire to come to terms with itself? The issues canvassed so colourfully in that novel seem to appear in the national media almost daily, and a rereading has much to offer the discussion of the relationship of white Australians with their land and with the Aboriginal people. Germaine Greer tried reopen the discussion in 2003 with her paper "Whitefella Jump Up", but in "Poor Fellow My Country", the same issues are analysed in great depth and placed in a community of characters we can recognize. If, as Greer suggests, whitefellas are the problem, then Herbert's "Poor Fellow My Country" explains why. It is the author's contention is that "Poor Fellow My Country" is Herbert's only literary work. His previous writing taught him how to create literary fiction in a fashion reminiscent of Dickens, and his last novel deserves recognition for its art as well as for its cultural criticism.'

'Non-Indigenous Australian writers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they can risk writing about Aboriginal people and culture and getting it wrong. On the other, they can avoid writing about Aboriginal culture and characters, but by doing so, erase Aboriginality from the story they tell.' (Introduction)

'In today’s global celebrity culture it’s hard to imagine a word more over-used and abused than ‘genius’. It is a slippery word with a long and contradictory conceptual history. Yet, in the Land of the Tall Poppy, self-confessions of genius invariably have paved a broad road to public ridicule and denigration. Xavier Herbert’s notion of genius was not static. It changed throughout his life and it evolved through his writing. He agreed with Carlyle that the first condition of genius must always be a ‘transcendent capacity of taking trouble’ and on this foundation he built his own concept of genius, as the unending ‘capacity for loving’. This article explores what genius meant to Xavier Herbert and how it translated into his fiction, before considering how our sense of genius today influences the way we respond to his most challenging fictions of love and hate, 'Capricornia' and 'Poor Fellow My Country'.'  (Publication abstract)

'Xavier Herbert published his bestseller Capricornia in 1938, following two periods spent in the Northern Territory. His next major work, Poor Fellow My Country (1975), was not published until thirty-seven years later, but was also set in the north during the 1930s. One significant difference between the two novels is that by 1975 photo-journalism had become a significant force for influencing public opinion and reforming Aboriginal policy. Herbert’s novel, centring upon Prindy as vulnerable Aboriginal child, marks a sea change in perceptions of Aboriginal people and their place in Australian society, and a radical shift toward use of photography as a means of revealing the violation of human rights after World War II. In this article I review Herbert’s visual narrative strategies in the context of debates about this key historical shift and the growing impact of photography in human rights campaigns. I argue that Poor Fellow My Country should be seen as a textual re-enactment, set in Herbert’s and the nation’s past, yet coloured by more recent social changes that were facilitated and communicated through the camera’s lens. Like all re-enactments, it is written in the past conditional: it asks, what if things had been different? It poses a profound challenge to the state project of scientific modernity that was the Northern Territory over the first decades of the twentieth century.'  (Publication abstract)