XAVIER HERBERT
CAPRICORNIA
CONTENTS
Introduction
Principal Characters
Psychological Effect of a Solar Topee
In the Midst of Life We Are in Death
Let Our Grace be a Prayer for Forgiveness
Oh, Don’t You Remember Black Alice?
In Defence of a Prodigal Father
Wrath of the Masters of Mankind
Also by Xavier Herbert
About the Author
About the Publisher
VAST and sprawling, of almost epic dimensions in that theme and counter-theme battle for dominance, Capricornia reflects Australia in its failure to create an alternative to the society depicted in its pages. It is a rich Australian cultural archive. Herbert labours over the wide brown plains of the colony of Capricornia and finds characters who are readily identifiable as Australian types. There is an unpretentiousness of style which is often appealing; but an Aboriginal reader may find the narrative painful in its seeming historical objectivity. He or she begins to read the novel and finds scenes of devastation and heartbreak as the newcomers, the ‘dingoes’ of the text, destroy Black culture without a qualm. These ‘dingoes’ are depicted as a terrifying almost elemental force, an aspect of ‘natural selection’, which destroys the old in a process of ‘evolution’ towards a new ‘synthesis’.
But this scientific theory, which provides ontological thrust to the novel, is weakened by a counter-theme of ‘Fate’. Few, if any of the characters possess the gift of analytical thought, or question their place in the universe, and I use ‘universe’ deliberately as Herbert (and critics) has stressed that his narrative is concerned with universal themes. Thus events are seen not as random occurrences but as contradictions between theme and counter-theme: natural selection and Fate. The dominance of Fate in the opening pages of the novel is alarming. Events begin to unfold from the very beginning of white settlement and the arrival of what passes for civilisation in a territory on the outskirts of the British Empire. Capricornia is founded in the heyday of that Empire, in the late nineteenth century, and from inauspicious beginnings it stagnates into the first decades of the twentieth century. This period was not at all a good time for the natives of the colonies. The Indian mutiny of 1857 underlined the problem of the ‘native’, and Capricornia too has its ‘native problem’. By the time we reach the end of the long narrative, the problem has still not been resolved. The natives and a newly engendered ‘Coloured’ race persist in a system from which there seems to be no future relief.
Capricornia is a work of great length. The original editor P. R. Stephenson claimed co-authorship on the basis of his editorial work, and perhaps the underlying sternness of the text owes something to him. Stephenson was a complex character searching for a novel in which to be featured. His politics were bizarre though they seemed not to have alarmed any of his associates. Did they listen avidly or painfully as he espoused neo-Nazism, berated the Jews and accepted the importance of Japan in the world in which the red of the British Empire blooded much of the globe? Also a strong nationalist, he sought for things Australian and found the Australian Aborigines. He declared them essential to Australian nationalism. His position in this matter is quite interesting and from it extends a bridge to those racists in