Capricornia

Many years ago, probably more than twenty, I bought a book, I think at an op shop, titled Capricornia by Australian Xavier Herbert. I loved it. I came across another copy somewhere, I think again at an op shop at Maclean on our holiday in November last year. A week or so ago I started to read it again, the decades between reads enough to make it seem fresh for me.

It really is a great book. Although I'm only about 100 pages into the 500, I'm enjoying it immensely. It was first published in 1938 so the writing style is not modern but I find it easy to read. I think it's brilliant.

It is protected by copyright and cannot be reproduced in any part or form except for the purpose of review so let me say this is a review highly recommending all Australians in particular to get hold of it and read it if you have not already done so.

Below I quote a section to illustrate my appreciation, as tiresome as copying the type is, I want to do it for you. One of the main characters is Oscar who married Jasmine and they moved onto a cattle station and had two children, Marigold and Roger.

The year of the Census (1910) was an eventful one for the whole family. The first to whom adventure came was Roger, aged one year. His adventure was the greatest one can experience. He died, or, as Oscar stated on his tombstone, was Called Home. Measles had a voice in the calling.

Bitter trouble in Oscar's home followed the death of Roger. Just prior to it, Jasmine, who was in the unhappy state into which many handsome potent women fall in the early thirties through too closely considering the dullness of the future against the brightness of the past, had been neglecting her home at Red Ochre for what was a frantic endeavour to enjoy the dregs of almost exhausted youth in the social whirl in Town. Oscar had long since dropped out of the social whirl. He would have liked Jasmie to do the same as he often hinted. But when he accused her of neglecting her child and so having been to a degree responsible for its death he did not really mean what he said. He was not speaking his mind but the craziness that the death of the potential perpetuator of his name had induced in him.

Jasmine sprang out of the mourning perhaps bitterer than his and spat at him all that which she had ruminated over for years. He learnt that he was a thing of wood, a thing of the gutter sprung from stock of the gutter (distorted reference to disreputable Brother Mark), risen by chance to be - what?- to be a bumptious fool whose god was property, not property in vast estates such as a true man might worship, but in paltry roods. Bah! His very greed was paltry. He dreamed of the pennies he could coin from cattle dung! ( Poor Oscar! He had always resisted her urging him to secure more land and buy more stock, because, not being a grazier born like the Poundamores who controlled vast Poundamore Downs on account of which they were born and buried in debt, he realized that cattle raising was a business, not a religion, and that as it was he held more country and ran more stock than was warranted by the mean trade he could do. And once he had said quite idly that he wished there were a sale for the cattle dung that lay about the run in tons.) And she spat at him something that would not have hurt a few years earlier or later, namely that he was already old and flacid, while she, who was eight years his junior, was young - yes - young! Young - and Oh God - aflame with life!

Stung to malice, Oscar jeered at her for a faded flower blind to its own wilting through pitiful conceit. She fled from him weeping. Poor blundering ass, quickly stricken with remorse, he went after her and begged forgiveness, and thus only made himself more hateful to her by being weak and her more desireable to himself by causing her to be inexorable. They were never reconciled. A few weeks after the scene, she eloped to the Phillipines with the captain of the cattle steamer 'Cucaracha', accompanied by a cargo of Oscar's beeves. Oscar was shocked, firstly by having lost her, secondly to have lost her in a manner so unseemly, thirdly by having lost her to a man he had regarded as a friend. He had taken Captain Emilio Gomez into his house as a Spanish gentleman. The fellow had turned out to be nothing more than a Dirty Dago.

Without going into detail, the book is about the early social history of Australia's north and the racial  and half caste problem. To me, a privileged white born of middle class far removed from the book's setting, it is insightful and alarming. There's tragedy, brutality and prejudice as well as honesty and humour at every turn. The picture of life in the top end a century ago portrayed by the story line is enlightening and educational.

An Australian Classic.