Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  Angus&Robertson

  Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own secondhand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

  They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

  The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

  These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world. – GERALDINE BROOKS

  Dedication

  To my poor destructed country

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Principal Characters

  BOOK ONE

  Terra Australis

  — Blackmail’s Idyll Despoiled by White Bullies, Thieves, and Hypocrites

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  BOOK TWO

  Australia Felix

  — Whiteman’s Ideal Sold Out by Rogues and Fools

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  BOOK THREE

  Day of Shame

  — A Rabble Fled the Test of Nationhood

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Glossary of Aboriginal Terms

  About the Author

  Also by Xavier Herbert

  Copyright

  Introduction

  As the seemingly endless credits roll swiftly by at the conclusion of Baz Luhrmann’s epic outback film Australia, it is easy to miss the acknowledgement to Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country, the two novels that bookended the legendary author’s career. Each was a major publishing event in its time and both are as powerfully relevant today as they ever were. Capricornia, hailed at the outset as the first Great Australian Novel, won the Sesquicentenary Literary Prize in 1938 and has hardly been out of print in three quarters of a century. By contrast, Poor Fellow My Country, despite winning the Miles Franklin Award in 1975 and being hailed by Randolph Stow in The Times Literary Supplement as ‘an Australian classic, perhaps THE Australian classic’, and in the US as ‘the best novel to have come out of Australia’1, has not been reissued in almost twenty-five years. This fortieth anniversary edition, however, does a great deal more than restore a missing bookend. Poor Fellow My Country has had a profound effect on Australia’s political and literary culture.

  After the initial runaway success of Capricornia, Herbert struggled to produce a worthy successor. The novel he began to write at the outbreak of World War II changed direction and title many times — called at various times ‘Yellow Fellow’, ‘True Commonwealth’, ‘The King and the Kurrawaddi’ and ‘Rex Versus Dingo Joe’. It was not an easy time for new beginnings, when the world seemed to be hurtling to its doom. Politically, he was naïve and conflicted, having affiliations both with the Left, through the Fellowship of Australian Writers, and the Right, through the Australia First Movement founded by PR ‘Inky’ Stephensen, Capricornia’s first publisher. The radical nationalism of the Australia First Movement (or ‘Australia Free’, as it is called in Poor Fellow My Country) developed quickly from anti-imperialist to anti-British, and from opposing ‘international’ Bolshevism to espousing Nazism and anti-Semitism. In March 1942 Stephensen and fifteen of his Australia First associates were arrested and interned without trial. Jindyworobak writers Rex Ingamells and Ian Mudie were questioned and their houses ransacked. Herbert was slow to realise how compromised he was by his association with Australia First. But the Intelligence Bureau was watching him; and if it decided he were a threat to national security his freedom would end in an instant. Stephensen remained in detention until the end of the war, and survived after it as a ghost-writer.

  In Capricornia Herbert had focused mainly on the 1920s and restricted the setting primarily to the Northern Territory. The new novel, which eventually evolved into Poor Fellow My Country, starts where Capricornia left off, in Darwin in 1936. But soon he was writing about political events as they were happening, seething with disgust, writhing in a hair-shirt of confusion. He felt the need for a much larger scale of narrative and a less isolationist perspective on the Australian story. Such an endeavour required time and some distance on events to make sense of them; but once the Japanese entered the war and it became a Pacific War, he ran out of time. To save himself from Stephensen’s fate he abandoned the novel and enlisted in the army. The distance he had tried to keep between himself and the events about which he was trying to write collapsed; he became a protagonist, part of the action, stumbling into a career wilderness of lost years. It would be twenty years before he returned to writing Poor Fellow My Country, and it would take him nine years after that to complete it.

  He first heard the phrase ‘Poor Fellow My Country’ in 1936 when he was Acting Superintendent of the Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin. It was a place so ‘unutterably filthy’, the state of the people living there so unutterably foul, that he wept when he arrived. There was no sanitary system, no toilets, and ‘human excrement everywhere’. Everyone was ‘dirty & wretched & lost’.2 They lived in what looked like a garbage dump, under humpies made from bits of discarded roofing, flattened cans and old sacks bound together to provide the final shelter for a supposedly dying race. The windmill did not work, the tank was rusted through, and the well on the beach was hopelessly inadequate to provide sufficient fresh water. ‘Mullaka’, they called him, the Boss of the Compound — the same way that the Aboriginal stockmen address Jeremy Delacy, the cattle-station boss, in Poor Fellow My Country. In the stockyard we see Jeremy cutting out the clean-skin calves, separating them from their mothers and giving them to Aboriginal women to feed — akin to the Stolen Children of the compound whom Herbert also struggled to save from starvation.

  The phrase ‘Poor Fellow’ or ‘Poor Bugger My Country’ is widely used in Top End Aboriginal English. In the context of the compound, Herbert understood it as a keening for Country, a lament for lost Dreaming and lost identity. He identified with the tragedy of that loss deeply, but ambivalently, for it spoke not only to his own sense of illegitimacy, but also to his emotional connection with his life companion, Sadie, who was Jewish. This gave him a spiritual sense of homelessness that was underpinned by a long history of persecution. In the novel, he fractured and dispersed his own sense of self across the characters
: Rifkah Rosen (modelled on Sadie) is a German Jewish refugee, intuitively identifying with the Aboriginal dispossessed, and Aelfrieda Candlemas (modelled on Herbert himself, in female persona) is a writer and reformer, arranged in conflict.

  In the course of his writing life Herbert adopted more than fifty different putative personae, some private and some public; some male and some female; white, black and creole. Sometimes, as the ‘Bastard from the Bush’, he imagined himself at the centre of the Bulletin tradition of radical literary nationalism in the 1890s, a true heir to Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. At other times, he reviled that kind of writing as a glorifying lie to justify the killing and dispossession of Indigenous people — as when he read Cecil Mann’s review in the Bulletin of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (winner of the magazine’s inaugural First Novel Competition in 1928), denouncing its presentation of an Aboriginal woman as a figure of romance, when it was common knowledge in the real world that such a person was incapable of exciting ‘any higher feeling than nauseated pity or comical contempt’. At times like this Herbert thought only of exposing Australians as a pack of ‘lousy bastards’3, and his rage intensified with the knowledge that he was one of them. He was a man of many masks, which goes a long way to explaining the psychological complexity of his fiction.

  The emotional intensity of his historical attitudes adds to that complexity. Born in the year of Federation, he habitually measured his own life against that of the nation. Poor Fellow My Country focuses the period he regarded as the most significantly destructive in Australian history, ending in 1942, the year he joined the army. For Herbert, the expansion of the European war into the Asia-Pacific tragically legitimised Australia’s military involvement. It made his anti-colonial objections redundant and left him vulnerable to shame, which the novel projects emotionally into a subjective historical narrative of the Battle of Darwin, or, more specifically, the response to the Japanese bombing. It is a narrative of the failure of military leadership, panic, desertion, looting, the stampede south that became known as the ‘Adelaide River Stakes’ and the abandoning of the Aboriginal population — the ‘Day of Shame’, as the novel names it, when ‘a Rabble Fled the Test of Nationhood’.

  But the time in which he was now writing also leaked into the narrative, re-ordering memory and re-shaping history. On Australia Day 1972, his concentration was hijacked by the Prime Minister’s speech rejecting land rights and the news that an Aboriginal Tent Embassy had been erected in protest on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra. With the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Darwin a few weeks away, the two events fused in his mind to confirm the essential ‘lousiness’ of the Australian character. The Tent Embassy took him back to the Aboriginal Day of Mourning on Australia Day 1938, reminding him how Stephensen had manipulated that momentous event to launch and publicise Capricornia; he began to think of the ending of Poor Fellow My Country in terms of the symbolism of the Tent Embassy.

  Similarly, in September 1968, he was immersed in writing a love scene involving an artistically talented but unfulfilled part-Aboriginal boy and a tragic Jewish girl, a refugee from the war. The boy had to be of mixed racial parentage in order to embody the ideal of the ‘Creole Nation’, the impossible vision of Capricornia in 1938, which he knew now only a fully reconciled nation could ever achieve. He was obviously thinking of Sadie, and of himself, as an artist. But the girl was also, in part, biblically inspired: she is Sarah, Abraham’s wife, the Mother of the World. At this point in the writing, he invested heavily in the potential of true love — the embrace of mutual otherness — to protect them from persecution. He set the scene in a cave in the bush, and he gave the lovers a campfire, so that its flames might keep the moomboo spirit at bay. It was vitally important that their love be transgressive, reaching across the boundaries of taboo sexuality, and to show the power of transcendence, even if it were finally thwarted by prejudice. In this way he would think his way through the narrative. But to make it true, he knew, he needed to feel it; because in the end feelings are more important than ideas. He was never in doubt that the novel’s emotional underpinning must be a deep and abiding love of the land. The flipside of that emotion was his ferocious hatred of the many powerful and greedy exploiters of his beloved land. This meant that every event in the narrative needed this emotional illumination from within, which made the plotting doubly difficult. In his mind, he was in the cave in the bush. But then, suddenly, he was back at another campsite in a dry riverbed, and he was awakening in the twilight with the utter conviction that he had just seen an Aboriginal man, a Quinkan spirit, leaning over him, and that it was himself, looking into the mirror of his own soul.

  I have it. Remember I was lying in a creek bed in the moonlight after spending the previous night in a painted cave, and a huge aboriginal man stood beside me, so vividly that I saw him even as I woke, the Quinkan . . . Of course he was my boss, my medical superintendent and who is he but my genie [genius], my inner self, the bloke who runs it all.4

  This emotional epiphany happened in 1962: he experienced a trans-rational moment of loving and belonging. And when he returned to plotting the love story in the cave he tried to give it the same structure of feeling.

  The continuing relevance of the novel is not contained in its reinterpretation of a particular set of events or a period of Australian history, however important that may have seemed in the 1970s. It is that it draws us into a process of identity formation whereby we become aware of how we experience nationality, how we experience being white or black or ‘brindle’, how we experience belonging or alienation or asylum, the states of being in between — and how that process affects who we really are, individually and as a people. History is closed and its redemption can only be imagined. But the future is ours to realise and to change.

  Genius, to Herbert’s mind, was a quality of being rather than doing, in essence beneficial to all humanity. Its negative incarnation was Stephensen — the evil genius — inspired by Capricornia, but also by the Nazi idea of ‘blood’ as the substance that binds and determines ‘all life in the nation’.5 When Herbert took his mind back to the spirit place in the riverbed where he delighted in being black, and then felt his way back into the cave in the novel, he was fully aware that he was trying to exorcise the ghost of Stephensen, who now claimed not only to have published but also to have edited Capricornia. Writing Poor Fellow My Country, Herbert was reclaiming his own genius. ‘I wasn’t dreaming. I was wide awake. I saw the face distinctly, the glint of the eyes . . . the shiny blackness of the face . . . like a polished boot.’ It is worth comparing this moment in his last novel to the moment in his first when Norman Shillingsworth emerges from his singing in the wilderness, only to be confronted by an Aboriginal man painted ‘hideously white’ from head to foot and called Bootpolish.

  Despite the subjective nature of the novel’s historical narrative, or perhaps because of it, Herbert conducted more research for this novel than ever before. The historical details, he knew, needed to be absolutely accurate. The National Library sent him Justice Lowe’s Report on the bombing of Darwin (which he had not read when he penned the short story ‘The Last Australian’, published in Meanjin in 1960). He read Brian Fitzpatrick’s radical socialist history, The Australian Commonwealth (1956), Bruce Muirden’s book about the Australia First Movement, The Puzzled Patriots (1968), and various other historical, anthropological and linguistic studies.

  But there were some details that required a thin veil of disguise to avoid libel, because some of the people he wished to expose for their role in destroying the dream of the True Commonwealth were still alive. For different reasons Poor Fellow My Country is similarly vague in its differentiation of Aboriginal societies. Herbert hoped to dramatise how a ‘lack of cohesion’6 in Aboriginal Australia, rather than being a consequence of the European invasion, had in fact enabled its ruthless success. The novel was meant to point toward some kind of coalescence for the future. And, in this way, it was indeed prophetic.
The Aboriginal activism of the late ’60s and early ’70s heightened awareness among Indigenous societies that they would be more politically effective in solidarity. But the aim of Aboriginal activism was not integration; it was self-determination, which meant the restoration of land rights.

  The triumph of Poor Fellow My Country propelled Herbert to political activism on a number of fronts through the ’70s, especially after the sacking of the Whitlam Government — which confirmed for him the continuing colonial status of the nation and the truth of the novel. When the Fraser government proposed the self-management of Aboriginal reserves, the Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen moved quickly with legislation to deny self-determination and protect the corrupt commercial interests of the state. The aim was to override Aboriginal objections to mining at Aurukun and on Mornington Island. Negotiations between the state and federal government stalled. At the height of the controversy, Herbert delivered an impassioned speech to the staff of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the text of which he released to the press under the heading ‘Australia has the Black Pox’, a direct reference to Poor Fellow My Country. The disease he described was racial hatred, a consequence of the many abuses committed against Indigenous people. It would end in all-out race war — ‘unless we give back to the Blackman just a bit of the land that was his, and give it without provisos, without strings to snatch it back, without anything but complete generosity of spirit in concession for the evil we have done him — until we do that, we shall remain what we have always been so far, a people without integrity, not a nation, but a community of thieves’.7 His aim was to terrify White Australia with the most virulent form of hatred he could imagine: a Black Power movement. The only cure for the hatred, the only impediment to race war, he argued, was the return of country; and this was not about land ownership — it was about belonging.

  In the ’30s he had felt that Aboriginal reserves, allegedly intended to protect but really to alienate Aboriginal people from White Australian society, were menageries. In the ’70s, he stood beside Aboriginal author and activist Kevin Gilbert, on the steps of Woden Town Hall, calling not only for the protection of the reserves but for their independence from government administration (or ‘intervention’). That day Gilbert inscribed a copy of his book Living Black: ‘To Xavier Herbert who has helped in the Search and has earned his breath of life in Aboriginal country with the owners, the Aboriginal people.’