Of course, these horses, mules and donkeys are not principal characters, but then neither are most of the white, Aboriginal and Chinese persons on Herbert’s original list. The list, which initially included more than a hundred names, is one indication of that sardonic humour so characteristic of the novel, here directed particularly at the pretensions of those referred to at the end of its first paragraph as ‘Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire’. Another donkey, ‘a big stubborn white beast he called Cullapride’, who features in the novel’s shock ending (though not listed among the main characters), leaves us in no doubt about one of the targets of Herbert’s satire. His attack is not, however, confined to white racism but extends to many other practices and beliefs of Western civilisation, being especially concerned to question contemporary understandings of the savage/civilised binary, as well as to expose the appalling treatment then meted out to indigenous Australians. Herbert’s questioning of the animal/human binary, in listing the names of horses and donkeys alongside those of humans from various racial groups, and referring to them all as principal characters, is part of the novel’s essential egalitarianism, here extended in a way which is still difficult for many to accept.

Even without those of the animals, the names of most of the people on Herbert’s list alert us to many of Capricornia’s central targets, and also to one of the major literary influences on the novel. Like Charles Dickens, Herbert names his characters in ways that immediately tell the reader something about them and their function. As well as adding to the humour, this is also a great help in keeping track of the many characters who come and go across the pages of a lengthy fiction. Accordingly, in Capricornia we meet Judge Pondrosass, State Prosecutor Thumscrough and Police Troopers O’Crimnell and O’Theef, and are left in no doubt about Herbert’s opinion of the way in which the Capricornian justice system operates. Religion does not fare any better, with missionaries and clergymen named Bleeter, Prayter, Randter and Hollower. Unlike Dickens, however, Herbert also gives satirical names to his major characters: two of the central figures in Capricornia are the Shillingsworth brothers, who become romantically involved with the Poundamore sisters, a joke that now of course needs to be explained to those born after the introduction of decimal currency. The sisters are further distinguished by being named Jasmine, a showy, perfumed climber who marries the more conventional brother, Oscar, but soon runs off with a Spanish ship’s captain, and Heather, a strong, hardy perennial who remains faithful throughout the novel to the wandering vagabond Mark Shillingsworth, to be duly rewarded at the end. The other central characters include Mark’s son with the Aboriginal woman Marowallua, originally called No Name since Mark does not acknowledge him, later transmuted into ‘Nawnim’ and then to Norman, and his love interest Tocky O’Cannon who is, in the language of the day, ‘white quadroon’.

As will already be apparent, one of the structural devices used by Herbert is that of parallel and contrasting characters. The fate of Norman, who is adopted by Oscar, taken to Melbourne to be educated and brought up to believe his mother was a Javanese princess, is contrasted with the misfortunes which befall Tocky, her mother Constance Differ and the many other mixed blood characters in the novel. Constance’s white father, Peter Differ, an unpublished novelist who is clearly something of a mouthpiece for Herbert, persuades Oscar to adopt Norman, arguing that Aboriginals are highly intelligent but have been held back by not being taught ‘anything that might raise ’em a bit’. Differ has taught Constance to read but dies before he is able to take her down south; she is then left to the mercy of Humbolt Lace, Protector of Aborigines, and to the romantic dreams inspired by her reading of women’s magazines. When she becomes pregnant with Lace’s child, he plans to marry her off to another half-caste, Yeller Elbert. That goes awry when Elbert accidentally kills Jock Driver, a ‘Pommy-Grazier’, in a fight; Constance is then married off to Peter Pan, an even less desirable partner, and eventually reduced to joining ‘her black sisters in prostituting to the fettlers and passengers of trains’. A few years of this life are enough to destroy her; Tocky, her daughter with Lace, is then adopted by Tim O’Cannon, a railway ganger. O’Cannon puts his faith in money rather than education as the way to ensure the future of his mixed blood children, but when he is killed in a train accident, his family, including Tocky, soon end up in the dreaded Port Zodiac Compound.

Tocky and Norman meet when he returns to Capricornia some years later. Brought up to believe he is from a superior race, the handsome, well-dressed and confident Norman has trouble understanding why people up north react to him as they do. Herbert makes a pointed comparison between Norman and Yeller Elbert, now working in the hospital:

Oscar noted the difference in the two brown-yellow faces, Norman’s full and oval one, with small and soft and curving nose. They compared as the sun and a piece of cheese. It was not only rich attire that made Norman what he looked. He had been fed on the best of food for sixteen years, had slept on decent beds, had walked the earth like a man, not slunk like a mongrel dog with kicks to harry him. Had he stood there naked the comparison would be just the same, though no doubt the stir would have been greater.

Tocky, who has seen Norman at the hospital, meets him again soon after and quizzes him about his parents. To his indignant denial that his supposedly Javanese mother was ‘nother kind blackfella’, she shrewdly responds, ‘“Close-up, eh?”... staring frankly at his dark face’. While the contrast between the privileged Norman and the neglected and uneducated Tocky is not spelt out in the same way as that between Norman and Elbert, the difference in the way they speak makes the point just as strongly.

The secret of Norman’s birth is eventually revealed to him during a memorable Christmas party at Oscar’s cattle station, Red Ochre, by another mixed blood character, Charles Ket, who had hoped to marry Oscar’s daughter, Marigold (a pretty flower which does not smell very nice). Ket, whose grandparents were Aboriginal and Chinese, uses a different strategy to get around colour prejudice when he arrives in Capricornia. Initially, he passes as white and even becomes secretary of the Port Zodiac Sports Club, where he is ‘strict about the colour-bar’ and ‘treated all coloured people with great arrogance’. When his deception is discovered, Ket is cast out of the club and the town; Oscar employs him and eventually makes him station foreman, though we are told this is because he can pay Ket less than if he were white. Rejected by Marigold in favour of a white suitor, the humiliated Ket determines to take Norman down with him.

What happens to each of them in the rest of the novel, however, reinforces Herbert’s message that denial is not the way to solve what was then known as the colour problem. Near the end, after Ket has gone from one disaster to another, we are told that the ‘solution of the one great problem of his life was admission of his caste to himself and carelessness of what others thought of it’. Norman, in contrast, meets another of Herbert’s mouthpieces, the grazier Andy McRandy, who convinces him to be proud of his indigenous ancestry: ‘the day’ll come in your own time when your Old People’ll be recognised as our Old People too, as the Fathers of the Nation, and’ll be raised to a place of honour.’ Andy is also ahead of his time in preaching a message of conservation rather than development, critiquing the proposed Transcontinental Railway as pointless, a message reinforced by the number of characters in Capricornia who die as a result of train accidents.

When Capricornia first appeared, it received a fairly mixed response, but won some major literary awards. In style it broke with the dominant realist tradition of Australian fiction; in content it went against most of the received wisdom of the age, attacking progress as well as prejudice. Literary historian H.M. Green, for example, reviewing Capricornia in Southerly in 1939, thought that ‘The principal defect of a powerful and absorbing book is that its world has been distorted in order to accentuate an indictment of race prejudice and the types that are possessed by it in the far north, so that it presents not a human world but a kind of hell’. He appears to have missed the point that, since the coming of the whites, or ‘dingoes’, to use Herbert’s term, life has been a kind of hell for most of those whose ancestors formerly occupied the land, as well as failing to realise that Herbert’s criticisms extended far beyond ‘the far north’.

In 1960, when academics were finally becoming interested in Australian literature and attempting to construct a canon based on works of universal value, Vincent Buckley published an influential essay on Capricornia in Meanjin, later reprinted in Grahame Johnston’s collection Australian Literary Criticism (1962). Buckley, arguing that Capricornia was about much larger issues than racial prejudice and the mistreatment of indigenous Australians, saw it as dealing with no less a theme than ‘disorder in the Universe’, a disorder reflected in the disordered structure of the novel itself. It is true that Capricornia is full of chance and coincidence, as seen in the naming of its principal town as Port Zodiac rather than Darwin, in the quotations from Omar Khayyam and in so many of its incidents. It is also true that Herbert does not believe in poetic justice, seen most obviously in Tim O’Cannon’s death in a train accident because his foot gets caught in his ‘load of love’, the box of presents he is taking home to his family on Christmas Day. So many of the disasters in Capricornia occur at Christmas that in 1974 it was hard to believe that Darwin had actually been destroyed by a cyclone on Christmas Day.

Herbert’s obvious lack of respect for Christianity and its festivals does not, however, necessarily equate with a belief in a totally hostile universe as Buckley claims. While I initially found his essay persuasive, I have come to see it as far too pessimistic, presenting a negative view of the novel out of kilter with Herbert’s obvious love of the land and his faith in a better future. In 1938 he wrote to Miles Franklin, who greatly admired Capricornia: ‘My only great feeling is my love for this earth; hence that must have been the greatest feeling expressed in Capricornia.’ Significantly, Buckley misreads the novel’s final chapter, writing that ‘Norman sets off with Heather and Mark to live as a society of three wandering among the islands.’ But Chapter 36 is entitled ‘Back to Earth’ and describes Norman’s return to Red Ochre after foiling an attempt to trick him out of the station when a cattle boom is imminent. He finds the cook Cho Sek Ching looking after things and trying unsuccessfully to break in the donkey named Cullapride. Cho’s dismissal of the donkey – ‘Nobody can teachee you nussing. Me finish. Gwan to hellee!’ – would have made a great exit line. But Herbert has one final shock for the reader that, in the interests of those who have not yet read the novel, it would be improper to reveal. 

At the end of Capricornia, while all may not be well for Norman, he is still someone with a stake in the land that had once belonged to his ancestors. Earlier, Herbert has demonstrated that, as a person of mixed blood, Norman has the ability to work with nature rather than just exploit and destroy it. Like his father, Mark, Norman is something of an inventor. Mark’s inventions include a hydro-electric plant powered by the tide that proves rather useless since, ‘owing to the perversity of Nature, the tide was usually not running when the light was most required’. Norman, however, is able to create a permanent water supply on the driest part of Red Ochre by observing and enhancing a natural phenomenon, tiny springs whose water usually just evaporates in the heat. By working with nature rather than against it, he significantly improves the station’s carrying capacity.

In writing Capricornia in the 1930s, Herbert was very much ahead of his time, not only in his advocacy for indigenous Australians but in his concern for the environment. Some seventy years later, much still needs to be done to ensure that all Australians have equal access to education and health care, and we are only just beginning to recognise the dangers of a single-minded concentration on progress. Not surprisingly, by the time he came to write Poor Fellow My Country, Herbert had lost faith in the future of Australia, thanks to the continuing destruction of indigenous cultures and to mining and other developments in the north after World War II.

Reference

Xavier Herbert

Capricornia

HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 608 pp