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From now on Herbert interspersed reclusive bouts of writing with other jobs: dispensing, wood-chopping,
chemical analysis on the Tully Dam hydroelectric scheme and work as an aircraft cleaner and porter at Cairns
airport. Still determinedly proving his masculine identity he learned to fly light aircraft in the 1950s as compensation
for his vain emulation of his father’s fine horsemanship. Now, too, he accompanied Percy Trezise on expeditions
in search of galleries of Aboriginal cave paintings in the Laura district.
Seven Emus, set in the Northern Territory and satirising anthropologists, was published in 1959 and roundly
criticised for its eccentric experimental syntax. Soldiers’ Women, dealing with the sexual behaviour of women
during wartime and revealing Herbert’s misogynist streak, followed in 1961. A selection of Herbert’s stories
from the preceding decades, Larger than Life appeared in 1963, the same year in which Disturbing Element,
his curiously ‘non-specific’ account of his first 25 years, saw print. By exploring material at some remove from
those frontier experiences to which he was most deeply committed, Herbert to an extent freed himself from his fear
of duplicating Capricornia. The next decade saw him reshaping experiences and themes from the late 1930s and
early 1940s in a marathon labour which produced the longest novel written in Australia—some 850 000 words.
Poor Fellow My Country was published in 1975 and won the Miles Franklin Award.
Where Capricornia covers the period from the early colonisation of the Northern Territory in the 1880s up to
1930, Poor Fellow My Country deals specifically with the years from 1936 to 1942 and expresses Herbert’s rage
and despair at what he saw as the destruction of the idea of a ‘true Commonwealth’ based on a quasi-Aboriginal
love of the land, independence from foreign ties and social justice for all Australians. Like Capricornia the novel
is largely set on the frontier, with the retreat from Darwin (Palmerston in the novel) after the Japanese raids,
signifying for Herbert the bankruptcy of Australian nationalism.
Although these two major novels are ultimately pessimistic, they do celebrate aspects of life on the
frontier and immortalise, in fictionally distorted portraits, a wide range of well-known Territorian ‘characters’.
If Reuben Cooper provides the model for Norman, Prindy owes a lot to Val McGinness and arguably also to
Nemarluk. Tim O’Cannon (Capricornia) is based on Tom Flynn, the Banger in charge of Herbert’s fettling team,
GinBul (Poor Fellow My Country) is based on BulBul, and Billy Brew (Poor Fellow My Country) is a thinly
disguised version of Bert Drew, ‘the Donkey King of the North’.
Though awarded honorary doctorates at the University of Newcastle and the University of Queensland, in his
final decade Herbert battled physical decline and grief. Sadie died on 20 September 1979 at Chermside Hospital,
Brisbane, leaving him shocked and bereft.
Although Herbert travelled to Darwin in 1980 as a witness at the Finnis River land claim hearing, encountering
old friends and reviewing memories, and had accepted terms as writer-in-residence at several universities,
he produced no new fiction. The manuscript of Me and My Shadow lay unassessed with his literary executor and
there is no evidence that the rumoured Billygoat Hill ever consisted of more than ideas and scattered notes.
At the beginning of 1984 Herbert left Cairns by Landrover for Central Australia. He set up camp near Ross
River Station in the McDonnell Ranges, a bushman to the end, and died of renal failure on 10 November that year.
He was buried at Alice Springs, close to the heart of the land he loved.
Photographs of Herbert reveal him to have been a tallish man of nuggetty build and rugged appearance.
His intense gaze from beneath rather beetling brows, his obvious athletic prowess (he could run six kilometres
in his 60s) and his preference for casual working clothes that exposed his hairy chest and arms, contributed to a
somewhat daunting demeanour.
He was the subject of countless anecdotes and energetically promoted an irascible self-image, welcoming the
labels ‘ratbag’ and ‘stirrer’ so that often it is difficult to separate the man from the myth. Read together, these ‘Herbert
stories’ convey the impression of a complex, contradictory personality. The evidence of attention-seeking behaviour
in his noisy iconoclasm and prodigious garrulity contrasts with Herbert’s reclusiveness and compassion.
As Bernard Smith points out, Herbert’s significance lies, like Katherine Prichard’s, in his pioneering of the
fictional theme ‘that black and white alike in Australia are involved in a common destiny’.
He remains one of Australia’s most important, if most enigmatic, writers.
L Clancy, Xavier Herbert, 1981; J McLaren, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country, 1981; R & H Walker, Curtin’s
Cowboy: Australia’s Secret Bush Commandos, 1986; P Dougherty, ‘The Final Words of Xavier Herbert’, Bulletin, 29 January 1985;
L Hergenhan, ‘An Australian Tragedy: Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country’, Quadrant, vol 21, February 1977; Heseltine, ‘Xavier
Herbert’s Magnum Opus’, Meanjin, vol 34, no 2, June 1975; A McGrath, ‘Mirror of the North’, in Australians 1938, 1987; Northern Standard
(Darwin), 11 June 1929, 3 May 1935, 7 June 1935, 25 October 1935, 25 February 1936, 27 March 1936, 21 April 1936, 22 May 1936,
16 June 1936; Beatrice Davis Papers, NLA; Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney; Sadie Herbert Collection, Fryer Library,
University of Queensland; Xavier Herbert Papers and Manuscripts in the possession of Ms Robyn Pill, c/- Curtis Brown (Australia); P Trezise
to F De Groen, 14 March 1987; Interview with Kim Stanborough, ex-youth worker (Darwin), 20 January 1987, 31 May 1987 in Sydney; Court
Hearing Transcripts of the Finnis River Land Claim Northern Land Council, Darwin; (Typescript) Finnis River Land Claim, Northern Land
Council, Darwin.
FRANCES DE GROEN, Vol 1.
HERBERT, CHARLES EDWARD (1860–1929), solicitor, politician, judge and Government Resident, was
born on 12 June 1860 at Strathalbyn, South Australia, eldest son of Lloyd Herbert, surgeon, and his second wife
Mary Ann, nee Montgomery. Educated at the Collegiate School of St Peter, Adelaide, Herbert was articled to
his uncle, Henry Hay Mildred, in 1877 and in 1883 was admitted as practitioner to the Supreme Court of South
Australia. He went to Palmerston (Darwin) in October, the only other practitioner in the Northern Territory being
J J Symes. The following year he joined J J Beare’s practice at Moonta, South Australia. On 15 August 1885 in
Adelaide, Herbert married Anna Emilia Augusta, daughter of M R Schomburgk, Director of the Botanic Gardens