Austbiblica

Xavier Herbert's Capricornia
First published in 1938, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia is an epic-sized novel about life in northern Australia. The place Capricornia is a fictional name for the Northern Territory, and the novel tells of the conflict between its indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants, the violent dispossession of the former, and the newcomers’ inability to live in this place.

The major themes of the novel appear in the first few paragraphs. Our particular interest is in the themes of dispossession and exclusion of the indigenous people. The title of the first chapter, “The Coming of the Dingoes” point to Herbert’s point of view on these issues. His style of writing and the narrative’s “seeming historical objectivity” make for painful reading. Dispossession, violence and exclusion are are facts of life: “the newcomers, the ‘dingoes’ of the text, destroy Black culture without a qualm”. All this is done by “men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency. of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire”.


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