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Xavier Herbert

Revisiting Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia

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May 2009, no. 311

Baz Luhrmann’s epic film Australia may not have won any Oscars or attracted hordes of overseas tourists, but it has had at least one positive outcome. HarperCollins reissued Xavier Herbert’s equally epic Capricornia (1938), one of many acknowledged influences on the film, another being Herbert’s even longer novel, Poor Fellow My Country (1975). While visiting New Zealand recently, I was delighted to see the handsome new edition of one of Australia’s greatest novels prominently displayed in bookshops.

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Xavier Herbert: Letters edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

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October 2002, no. 245
Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Xavier Herbert: Letters' edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

The cover of this substantial volume tells you what’s coming: it features a photograph of Xavier Herbert, sixtyish and fit-looking, standing behind the converted 4WD that constitutes his bush camp and dressed in nothing but a pair of stubbies. His eyes are blazing and a bit mad, his shoulders slightly hunched, and he looks as if he’s been holding forth for some time. To whom? For Herbert, it probably didn’t matter. You can see the man Vance Palmer described in 1941: ‘You feel he’s got a large chaotic world of jetting imagination inside him and it will always be desperately hard for him to write because he’s got a lot to say and he’s got this sort of garrulousness that keeps him talking about his matter instead of brooding on it and giving it form.’

... (read more)

Xavier Herbert: Letters edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

by •
October 2002, no. 245
Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Xavier Herbert: Letters' edited by Edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

The cover of this substantial volume tells you what’s coming: it features a photograph of Xavier Herbert, sixtyish and fit-looking, standing behind the converted 4WD that constitutes his bush camp and dressed in nothing but a pair of stubbies. His eyes are blazing and a bit mad, his shoulders slightly hunched, and he looks as if he’s been holding forth for some time. To whom? For Herbert, it probably didn’t matter. You can see the man Vance Palmer described in 1941: ‘You feel he’s got a large chaotic world of jetting imagination inside him and it will always be desperately hard for him to write because he’s got a lot to say and he’s got this sort of garrulousness that keeps him talking about his matter instead of brooding on it and giving it form.’

... (read more)

Xavier Herbert by Laurie Clancy

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May 1982, no. 40
Don Grant reviews 'Xavier Herbert' by Laurie Clancy

Xavier Herbert is probably the most enigmatic of Australian writers, but there is nothing enigmatic about Laurie Clancy’s treatment of the man and his works in Twayne’s World Authors Series. This is the best assessment of Herbert since Vincent Buckley’s article ‘Capricornia’ (Meanjin, 19, 1960) forced critics to take Herbert seriously as a writer of stature and an experimentalist with the form of the novel, and since Harry Heseltine’s Xavier Herbert (OUP, 1973) drew attention to what Heseltine saw as the ‘deep motive’ of Herbert’s writing in the works that preceded Poor Fellow My Country.

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Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country by John McLaren

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April 1981, no. 29
Russel McDougall reviews 'Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country' by John McLaren
John McLaren’s contribution to the new series titled ‘Essays in Australian  Literature’ is, as the editorial page proclaims, ‘the first extended study of the two major works by Xavier Herbert - his first novel, Capricornia, and his last, Poor Fellow My Country. ... (read more)