Concept

Capricornia (novel)

Résumé
Capricornia (1938) is the debut novel by Xavier Herbert. Like his later work considered by many a masterpiece, the Miles Franklin Award-winning Poor Fellow My Country, it provides a fictional account of life in 'Capricornia', a place clearly modelled specifically on Australia's Northern Territory, and to a lesser degree on tropical Australia in general, (i.e. anywhere north of the Tropic of Capricorn) in the early twentieth century. It was written in London between 1930 and 1932. Highly influenced by the Jindyworobak Movement, it also describes the inter-racial relationships and abuses of the period. It was written before Herbert was acting Protector of the Aborigines in Darwin. The book opens, Although that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others. One probable reason for this is that the pioneers had already had experience of subduing Aborigines in the South and hence were impatient of wasting time with people who they knew were determined to take no immigrants. Another reason is that the Aborigines were there more numerous than in the South and more hostile because used to resisting casual invaders from the near East Indies. A third reason is that the pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire. The story, like other works by Herbert, is immense and rambling, following with irony the fortunes and otherwise, of a range of Outback Characters, over a span of generations.
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