Capricornia

Capricornia
Xavier Herbert

A saga of life in the Northern Territories and the clash of white and Aborigine cultures – one of Australia’s all-time best-selling novels and an inspiration for Baz Luhrmann’s lavish film ‘AUSTRALIA’.Capricornia has been described as one of Australia's 'great novels', a sharply observed chronicle about life in the Northern Territory of Australia and the inhumane treatment suffered by Aborigines at the hands of white men. The story is immense and rambling, laced with humour that is often as bitter and as harsh as the terrain in which it is set, and follows with irony the fortunes (and otherwise) of a range of Outback characters over a span of generations. Through their story is reflected the story of Australia, the clash of personalities and cultures that provide the substance on which today's society is founded. Above all, however, this is a novel of protest and of compassion - for the Aborigines and half-bloods of Australia's 'last frontier'.Sprawling, explosive, thronged with characters, plots and sub-plots, Capricornia is without doubt one of the best known and widely read Australian novels of the last 70 years. When it was first published it was acclaimed as 'a turning point', an 'outstanding work of social protest'. Its message is as penetrating today as it was in the 1930s when Herbert himself was official 'Protector of Aborigines' at Darwin.

XAVIER HERBERT

CAPRICORNIA

CONTENTS

Introduction

Principal Characters

The Coming of the Dingoes (#u1de48153-0cd6-5447-8f9b-f99363732081)

Psychological Effect of a Solar Topee (#ua55b72f7-8229-5a86-9624-bf1f13f9e3a9)

Significance of a Burnt Cork (#u3f2f2820-d7e0-54bc-964a-b1517780927c)

Death of a Dingo (#ude2d4e11-53e4-5e01-81e0-90c97b35a0a8)

Heir To All the Ages (#uc70758dd-d338-535d-bfc3-fd334f664a84)

The Copper Creek Train (#u80a59ba4-75d9-5f3b-8e7b-a95f6c4a34ad)

Clothes Make a Man (#uf2cae8c0-bee5-514e-87b2-d50c43c7b737)

Mars and Venus in Ascendancy (#u568dbaf2-8f99-5795-bcad-5e0b8fdd4e30)

Fe Fi Fo Fum (#u026510d3-a01f-567c-8d2e-8efb70c043eb)

In the Midst of Life We Are in Death (#litres_trial_promo)

A Crocodile Cries (#litres_trial_promo)

Dawn of a New Era (#litres_trial_promo)

A Shotgun Wedding (#litres_trial_promo)

Peregrinations of a Busybody (#litres_trial_promo)

Machinations of a Jinx (#litres_trial_promo)

Prosperity is Like the Tide (#litres_trial_promo)

Grandson of a Sultan (#litres_trial_promo)

Stirring of Skeletons (#litres_trial_promo)

God in the Silver Sea (#litres_trial_promo)

Let Our Grace be a Prayer for Forgiveness (#litres_trial_promo)

Son of a Gin (#litres_trial_promo)

Song of the Golden Beetle (#litres_trial_promo)

The Gossips Have Been Busy (#litres_trial_promo)

Oh, Don’t You Remember Black Alice? (#litres_trial_promo)

Spinning of Fate the Spider (#litres_trial_promo)

Death Corroboree (#litres_trial_promo)

Singing in the Wilderness (#litres_trial_promo)

Snakes in Arcady (#litres_trial_promo)

The Uninvited Guest (#litres_trial_promo)

In Defence of a Prodigal Father (#litres_trial_promo)

The Devil Rides Horseback (#litres_trial_promo)

Wrath of the Masters of Mankind (#litres_trial_promo)

Esau Selleth His Birthright (#litres_trial_promo)

Murder Will Out (#litres_trial_promo)

Who Killed Cock Robin? (#litres_trial_promo)

Back to Earth (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Xavier Herbert

About the Author

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION (#ucc395e85-cad9-52ce-ae79-e64b7cf21d6b)

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.