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Educational experiences at state schools in railway towns and later at Christian Brothers, Fremantle (the Herbert
children were baptised Catholics), did little to dispel Xavier’s sense of inadequacy despite his success in a junior
literary competition with ‘The Speaking Fish’, his first published story.
Having qualified as a pharmacist in December 1922, Herbert defied his mother and left Fremantle for Melbourne
where he supported himself by dispensing while studying toward matriculation and entry into medical school.
He passed the necessary matriculation subjects by February 1925 and was admitted into the first year of Melbourne
University’s medical course in March of that year, only to fail all the examinations in the following December.
During this period he began to entertain ideas of writing professionally and seems to have had articles on medical
quackery printed in Smith’s Weekly in late 1924 and 1925. ‘North of Capricorn’, his first successful adult story,
was published in the Australian Journal on 1 August 1925. Although his family had moved to Melbourne and his
mother persistently sought to install him in a chemist’s shop, he quit civilisation in search of ‘life’ both for the sake
of ‘living’ and also as material for his fiction.
After a brief interlude in Sydney in 1926, Herbert headed north on his ‘first walkabout’. This marked the
initial phase of his rebirth as a Territorian and a man of the frontier. He reached Darwin in 1927 after an epic hike
from Cairns across the Barkly Tableland. From 1926 to 1930 he amassed a wealth of frontier experience—in the
cane-fields and rainforests of Queensland, in stock camps and on the railway in the Territory, in pearling luggers
and on the government schooner the Maskee in the coastal waters and dispensing in the Darwin Hospital as
government pharmacist. He travelled extensively around the coast of Arnhem Land, visited Melville Island and the
Vernons and in 1928 went to the Solomons, witnessing the aftermath of the Sinarango Rebellion.
In the process of gaining this experience Herbert discovered within himself a profound capacity to empathise
with the plight of the dispossessed and exploited Aborigines. At the same time, however, he also found on the
frontier a context for the unbridled assertion of his masculine identity. The complex literary persona he developed
was to be based on these conflicting impulses. Consequently, his most important works deal with the Australian
frontier and reveal a tension between love for the land and the Aboriginal people on the one hand, and a boisterous
revelling in the violent white male ethos of frontier society on the other. As such they represent an ambivalent
critique of the Australian outback ‘legend’.
The years from 1930 to 1938 saw Herbert struggling to establish himself as an author. He sailed for England
in August 1930 seeking literary success and drafting a novel, Black Velvet, about race relations in the Northern
Territory, on the voyage. He found instead his future wife Sarah (Sadie) Cohen, nee Norden (1899–1979), a London
Jewess unhappily married to a cabinetmaker and returning to England after an abortive attempt to emigrate to
Australia. In London Sadie encouraged him to rewrite Black Velvet so that it began to approach its later form as
Capricornia. When he returned to Australia in late 1932, disillusioned with the British literary scene that ignored
his novel, she soon followed. Thenceforth she provided Herbert with the almost maternal devotion he felt he had
lacked as a child and the vital creative support he needed, especially during the difficult five years of revision and
negotiation before P R Stephensen’s Publicist Press at last published Capricornia.
In January 1935 Herbert fled to Darwin in despair over the fate of his still unpublished novel. He was appointed
acting superintendent of Kahlin compound, with Sadie joining him a little later as matron. Together they worked to
improve conditions for the badly fed, ill-housed Aborigines. In this task their friends the McGinnesses assisted the
Herberts. The job was terminated in June 1936 and after a dispute highlighting political differences with the chief
medical officer, Dr Cook, a former friend, Herbert and Sadie went bush, setting up an Aboriginal cooperative with
the McGinnesses and BulBul, the famous tracker, to mine tin and tantalite in the Finniss River region. Frustrated
by the authorities over the issuing of labour licences, Herbert supplemented his income by work on the Darwin
docks, later accepting the role of organiser for the North Australia Workers’ Union. The success of Capricornia,
which won first prize in the Commonwealth Sesquicentenary novel competition in April 1938, effectively shifted
Herbert’s attention from activism to art. From then on he expressed his concern for social justice largely through
his writing.
Returning to Sydney as the celebrated author of a controversial book exposing the worst aspects of white
colonisation of the Australian frontier, Herbert mixed with left wing writers, gradually distancing himself from
the increasingly fascist and anti-semitic P R Stephensen. By mid-1941 he had broken completely with ‘Inky’ and
his ‘Australia First’ movement. The recipient of the first of several Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowships in
1940 and awarded the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal in 1941 for Capricornia, he strove to produce a
worthy successor to that work. Despite a number of false starts on novels with frontier themes (The King and the
Kurawadi/Yeller Feller/The True Commonwealth and a work about the pearling industry), he published nothing
major for nearly twenty years.
He renewed contact with the Northern Territory during the Second World War After the bombing of Darwin,
Herbert, whose attitude towards and early involvement in the war remain mysterious, went from Caloundra,
Queensland, where he and Sadie had been living in Vance Palmer’s cottage, to Melbourne. In May 1942 he lowered
his age to enlist, like his brother David, in the North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU). A sergeant, he was stationed
with ‘A’ Company at Roper Bar.
Though regarded as a fanatic, he was respected by his comrades for his bushcraft and knowledge of the
Aborigines. He, however, had no respect for his commanding officer, the noted anthropologist W E H Stanner,
referring to the NAOU as ‘Silly Billy Stanner’s Knackeroos’ and later caricaturing him as Fabian Cootes in
Poor Fellow My Country. He was discharged from the Army in August 1944 and appears to have joined Sadie in
Sydney until again quitting civilisation in 1946 for the Daintree region in north Queensland. A few years later he
and Sadie settled in Redlynch, later an outer suburb of Cairns. Woolf Cohen divorced Sadie in 1949 and she and
Xavier married in a civil ceremony in Cairns in 1953.