'Bronco Jones, part-Aboriginal owner of Emu Station in the north of Western Australia, struggles against the machinations of a businessman and an anthropologist in this satirical portrait of anthropological exploitation of Aboriginal sacred sites.
'Seven Emus Station lies in the wild, red sandstone country back of the north-west port of Dampier. It is the prized property of Bronco Jones, his wife Possum and their bright, honey-coloured brood.
'The wealth of the property lures Appleby Gaunt, 'The Baron' who sweeps Bronco into a series of ruinous financial deals.
'Goborrow, a second-rate anthropologist, seizes the predicament as a means to boost his own credibility, with disastrous results for himself and 'The Baron'.
'An experimental novella, Seven Emus deals with issues of identity, ancestral fidelity and the misguided appropriation of cultural artefacts.' (Publication summary)
'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)
'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)