Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country republished for 40th anniversary

XAVIER Herbert’s immense, intense, ambitious, flawed novel Poor Fellow My Country still retains its bite.

Xavier Herbert’s book interrogates what he saw as the enduring failure of white Australia.

AN ‘‘Australian classic’’, wrote Randolph Stow in The Times Literary Supplement, ‘‘perhaps THE Australian classic’’. The year was 1976, and the work that elicited the accolade was Xavier Herbert’s immense, Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel Poor Fellow My Country.

Track down the original review, however, and you will find this affirmative vote comes only after a thousand-odd words of deadly accurate critique on Stow’s part. Early on he suggests Herbert’s novel is delirious with speechifying. And he describes the plot — for lack of a better term to describe an incorrigible digressiveness that renders the novel (at 850,000 words, a third longer than War and Peace, and second in length only to Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century novel of letters Clarissa) — as complex in excess of narrative need.

Stow charitably regards the book’s politics as confused, considers its psychology dubious and its characterisation weak. He makes Herbert’s novel sound closer to Wilbur Smith than to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in almost every sense but page length, before swerving back to praise.

The enduring mystery of Poor Fellow My Country lies here, in the gap between the flaws of the work and the visionary grandeur others have discovered in it. Surely the least-read major novel in Ozlit, it nonetheless inspires love in the few who meet its challenge. For every dozen souls who side with Barry Humphries in believing the book would better be calledPoor Fellow My Reader, there is a solitary fan who spends a year luxuriating in the epic and feels that every student in the country should be given time out to do the same.

Whatever the arguments of these opposing camps, there is a single scandal associated with the work: for a quarter of a century it has been out of print. Now HarperCollins has republished the novel under the imprint of legendary Australian publishers Angus & Robertson — a paper brick in a pretty dust wrapper — to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication. Its return obliges us to grapple once again with the difficult inheritance Herbert bequeathed us. We have to answer the question: why bother with an interminable novel written by a ruthless sociopath known to his enemies and supporters alike as ‘‘Australia prolix’’?

The first thing that strikes the reader is the ambition and scope of the undertaking. Herbert spent nine years from 1965 turning the abandoned fragment of a work called Yellow Fellow into a completed immensity. Its cast includes 70 major characters and the novel’s canvas covers swaths of Australia’s Top End and elsewhere. Into its pages are poured the memories of Herbert’s years spent in Darwin, as well as the knowledge and experiences accumulated throughout a long and peripatetic life.

The result is a picture of mid-20th-century Australia drawn on a 1:1 scale. Anthropologists, stockmen, pearlers, politicians, bush doctors, publicans, soldiers and goldminers: an entire masculine typology is fleshed out, and not just the European side of the national ledger. Herbert concentrates heavily on Aboriginal Australia; he reveres the seamless integration of humans with place that distinguishes the continent’s original inhabitants. His various white fictional proxies struggle to overcome a sense of alienation from country. They suffer a sense of perceptual impoverishment, aware of a world of beauty and order trembling just beyond their reach.

If his attentions seem paternalistic in retrospect, or his knowledge of indigenous culture incomplete or incorrect (he blithely elides aspects of Top End tribal mythology when it suits his narrative purposes and draws on some dubious anthropological research), Herbert was far ahead of his time in recognising the equal validity of indigenous world views and in vociferously demanding land rights on their behalf. For all their faults, his misreadings and appropriations opened the way for a more respectful and informed intercultural understanding.

This encyclopedic attentiveness is not extended to women, who are almost invariably harlots or harridans bent on emasculation in these pages. Of the two female characters who escape this blanket condemnation, one is Aboriginal and the other is Jewish, and both are infinitely understanding and accommodating mother figures. To grant Herbert this much, at least, Rifkah, the European rabble-rouser based on the author’s partner Sadie Norden, is so vigorous a figure she threatens to steal the novel outright.

Yet the central role in the novel does not belong to Rifkah, any more than it belongs to Jeremy Delacy, the ‘‘scrub bull’’ of the Top End whose ideas of race and nation come closest to those of his creator, or to ‘‘boy genius’’ Prindy, Delacy’s part-Aboriginal grandson: it belongs to the Australian landscape. Herbert spent many months traversing the Gulf Country and the Dawson Ranges, the Roper and Daly River regions, in an effort to map out the country of Poor Fellow.

This gypsy existence involved numerous solitary journeys in a four-wheel drive, camping and composing under the stars. Sometimes, when inspiration overtook, Herbert would leap from his car and run for miles in the landscape, collecting topography and climate as though his entire body were a recording device. Today we would call him a psychogeographer, and it is fair to say that his descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna are among the book’s most arresting passages.

Herbert’s biographer, Frances de Groen, argues that his treatment of place in Poor Fellow is significantly different from in his early masterpiece Capricornia. This time the author invests the landscape with magical qualities. He renders it vivid and alive to those with eyes untrammelled by Eurocentric ideas of beauty. Using borrowed indigenous myths of the Top End, Herbert establishes a mythopoeic framework within which the forces of light and darkness do battle.

The irony of this Manichean structure is it is designed to contain an utterly contemporary critique. Though Poor Fellow is largely set between 1936 and 1942, its composition was energised by social and political currents of the day. The late 1960s was a time of growing change in Australia as elsewhere. Questions of indigenous rights were beginning to be asked, while the old automatic obeisance by Australians to former and current Anglosphere powers was eroded by the Vietnam conflict and a growing wave of nationalist feeling.

This was the moment, and these the energies, that Herbert sought to grasp. Poor Fellow My Country joins together the ancient myth and modern impulse in such a way as to interrogate what he saw as the enduring failure of white Australia to let go of its old fealties and embrace a legitimately Australian existence. For Jeremy Delacy, the arch didact of the book, this demanded nothing less than a revolution in every aspect of our existence.

Delacy’s part-Aboriginal grandson Prindy is the breathing embodiment of the future creole commonwealth he envisages. Physically beautiful and preternaturally gifted, Prindy carries the novel’s utopian dreams on his shoulders. When we consider contemporary depictions of indigenous youth, it is hard not to feel nostalgia for a moment when such a positive model could be simply embraced.

On many other matters, Herbert was clear-eyed if equally emphatic. His novel deplores the intermittent alliance between church and state that was such a feature of the 50 years after Federation. And it decries the forelock-tugging tendencies of Australian politicians in relation to imperial powers, whether their impositions are military or mercantile. Herbert’s valorisation of indigenous Australians, most visible in the frightening figure of Bobwirridirridi, makes the failures of white Australia only more stark. Poor Fellow never lets us forget that our material wealth has come at the cost of Aboriginal Australia’s dispossession.

So while the 60s and 70s provided the underlying spirit of the work, and the 30s and 40s its narrative framework, the issues raised by Herbert retain their urgency and bite. For all his didacticism, Delacy makes one point that carries the full weight of truth:

We stole this land with murder and mayhem … and we have to reconcile the matter someday, either by acknowledging the fact that we’re bloody handed thieves and being proud of it, or giving back what we stole, and not as an act of charity, but of downright humility.

For all his hypernationalism and disdain for the governing classes, it should be noted that Herbert was less principled when it came to getting Poor Fellow My Country into print. Having been courted by the brilliant young publisher Craig Munro at University of Queensland Press, the author decided to go with the better-paying but British firm of William Collins. Even then, it was only financial assistance from the Australia Council that permitted the book’s appearance — government largesse defrayed printing costs for the 1450-page book.

This new edition contains a brief yet informative introduction by scholar Russell McDougall and a font size thankfully larger than the old Fontana paperback editions, which seem designed to be read with a magnifying glass. It is a pity the publisher didn’t return to Munro’s original plan for he book and divide it into three. A bite-sized Poor Fellow might have attracted a reading audience daunted by its older heft.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Poor Fellow My Country

By Xavier Herbert

With a new introduction by Russell McDougall

Angus & Robertson Australian Classics, 1472pp, $49.99 (HB)