Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia

By Peter Pierce

Xavier Herbert’s great work Capricornia, subtitled A Novel of Northern Australia, was first published – after much travail – in 1938. It combines two of the most important kinds of narrative in the history of the Australian novel. These are melodrama and the saga. The first may need more introduction, and some justification. The relatively recent critical rehabilitation of ‘the melodramatic imagination’ gives us renovated perspectives from which not only to view Herbert’s work, but also to see him as part of a distinguished Australian tradition. This stretches from Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874) to Manning Clark’s A History of Australia (1962-88), and includes Barbara Baynton, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Hal Porter, Kate Grenville, as well as Herbert.

The melodramatic terrain of Capricornia is ‘a world of dichotomies, where good is beset by evil, victims by predators…where language and gesture are heightened, rage and jealousy are primary motivations and the threat of dispossession is central to the action’ⁱ. That last threat is made actual in the melancholy fate of the Australian Aborigines. Herbert’s anger about and sympathy with their plight invigorates Capricornia, as it does his massive later work, Poor Fellow My Country, which was published in 1975. Melodramatic vision is paranoid, and Herbert sees predators everywhere, the Aborigines not alone among their victims. Arraigned in Capricornia are British imperialists, Australian pastoralists, racists, lawyers, the rich and the politically powerful. It is a dark pageant, imagined with a comic, raging excess. Nearly seventy years after Herbert’s novel appeared came a powerful literary revision of its territory from an Aboriginal standpoint, another novel of grand sweep, humour and indignation – Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006).

Capricornia has more usually been described and understood, not as melodrama, but as part of the tradition of saga fiction that flourished in Australia, especially between the world wars. The constituent elements of this writing includes, primarily, stories of pioneering, of struggles against seasonal and elemental forces (the unholy trilogy of fire, flood and drought), of the constraints and torments of domestic life and of the dispossession of the Aborigines. Saga fiction in interwar Australia was full of minatory tales of how fragile was the hold that could be maintained over places so strange to most, and so far from the settled districts of Australia.

One of the notable features of this tradition was an absence – that is, the initially surprising circumstance that most authors turned away from the very recent and supposedly critical event in the making of the nation, the Great War, whose military action began for Australians at Gallipoli in 1915. Instead, saga fiction typically turned inwards, to the remote parts of the Australian continent rather than to war abroad as well as backwards in time to that pioneering era in which proto-national values supposedly were formed. This was, perhaps, a recoil from the horrors of the war into a less problematic and more distant past. The saga form proved able to contain within its compass elements of historical fiction, travelogue, mythmaking and moral exempla. Indeed, in one important sense, the form was history-making as well, because these narratives of the Australian past – by Eleanor Dark, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Louis Kaye and Brian Penton, among others – were a vital source of information for general readers in an era when the professionalisation of the teaching of Australian history had hardly begun, and expansive narratives were the province of novelists rather than academic historians.

Saga is often the vehicle for peroration by authors. Radical and iconoclastic views can be ventilated even if the larger narrative is patriotic and concerned with nation-building. Capricornia, the most famous of the interwar saga novels, takes advantage of the form’s happy accommodation of discursive and declamatory passages of a subversive temper, even though these might be regarded as contrary to the usually conservative, chronicle structure of a saga. Capricornia developed from the tellingly titled work-in-progress called ‘Black Velvet’ into a panorama of northern Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century. Much of the elaboration and revision of the novel was actually done while Herbert and his wife Sadie were in London from 1930-32. Crucial to the completion of the novel were the efforts of P. R. Stephensen, ultimately unthanked as editor and first publisher of Capricornia. (His flamboyant public career as author of the manifesto, The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1935), founder of the right-wing patriotic Australia First movement, and political internee during the Second World War was not far in the future.)

An expansive note is struck at the beginning of Capricornia in the first chapter, ‘The Coming of the Dingoes’: ‘When New Westminster was for the third time swept into the Silver Sea by the floods of the generous wet season…’ A name and a presumption about the easy imposition of rule British-style are, alike, destroyed by the elemental forces of northern Australia. Thereafter much of the action is set in the newly-established regional centre of Port Zodiac, where Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Aborigines and the bedraggled European vanguard mingle, and along the railway line that stretches towards the south and into the hinterland.

The novel’s roll-call of more than 100 characters includes the Shillingworth brothers, the bastard half-caste son of one of them called Naw-nim, then Norman, the blustering patriot Tim O’Cannon, Andy McRandy, Yellow Elbert and the southern lawyer Bightit. The mock-epic element of Herbert’s narrative is signalled by those over-determining names. The mood of the work is remarkably buoyant, considering how many of these characters violently die. The issue of miscegenation (controversial when Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel Coonardoo (1929) was both awarded a fiction prize and intemperately condemned ten years earlier) is now an unexceptionable commonplace of life in the north. Yet there are savage interpolations about the treatment of Aborigines, notably of life in the Compound set aside for them. Herbert writes: ‘Most Aborigines who had been born in freedom preferred to do their starving in the bush. And all the while the nation was boasting to the world of its Freedom and Manliness and Honesty. Australia Felix?’ Herbert speaks here of what he had known at first hand: for three years, from 1935 until the publication of Capricornia, he was a temporary superintendent of Aborigines at the Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin.

At various points in the novel, its loquacious characters debate a multitude of issues: whether Aborigines are dying out or not, the justice or otherwise of the White Australia Policy (this in a region further from the realisation of such a stern and malign ideal than any in the continent), the fate of an adventurous female pilot (presumably the American Amelia Earhart, who was lost in the Pacific in 1937), the Great War, especially as it affects cattle prices, the feasibility of a railway line all the way south from Port Zodiac to Churchtown (Herbert’s mocking name for Adelaide), the economic cycles of boom and bust in the north, and the extent of the danger posed to Australia by the Japanese. Capricornia is a saga alert to the world elsewhere, as befits a novel set in a port facing in one direction towards Asia, rather than enmeshed within the boundaries of a cattle station, as is the case with Prichard’s Coonardoo.

One of Herbert’s principal polemical speakers is Joe Digger, in private a poet and novelist, who lectures Oscar Shillingworth on the virtues of the Binghis [from the local Aboriginal word binggay, meaning elder brother]: ‘“Their code of simple brotherhood is Christianity to me.”’ Angrily he asks how it is that:

‘All sorts of evil breeds – the sex-mad Hindoos, the voodooing Africans, the cannibals of Oceania, all dirty, diseased, slaving and enslaving races – are being helped to decent civilised manhood by the thoughtful white people of the world, while we of this country, the richest in the world, just stand by and see our black compatriots wiped out. They’ll be like the Noble Redman some day – noble when gone!’

The saga form accommodates such iconoclasm, but how far Herbert’s predominantly metropolitan readers were touched by its moral burden, rather than its exoticism, is hard to determine. More disconcerting might have been Andy McRandy’s enthusiasm for the prospect of a Japanese invasion. By this means, he believes, Australia might truly discover itself: ‘“It’d be the making of us. We need sumpen like that to bring out our character, to make a real true creation of us”’. The test, in reality, was not far away.

With its hectic vitality unabated more than seven decades later, and its desires for a future, regenerate Australia still unresolved, Capricornia is the culmination of the saga novel in our literary history. Herbert’s work is, besides much else, an unmatched testament to Australian nihilism. Capricornia concludes with harsh, mocking sounds, not of the human world, but with these: ‘The crows alighted in a gnarled, dead coolibah near by and cried dismally, “Kah!-Kah!-Kaaaah!”’    

ⁱ Fran De Groen and Peter Pierce, ‘Introduction’, Xavier Herbert: Episodes from Capricornia, Poor Fellow My Country, Non-Fiction and Letters, De Groen and Pierce eds., St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992, xxvii.