3. Capricornia
3. Capricornia
A tale – a moral tale – of two brothers, a half-caste son, of blackfellas and whitefellas, frontier men and women, endless roguery, probing cops, a railway of a sort, crashes, booms and more roguery, booze, unionists, people wanting to get rich … and the sort of book it takes to make us know these things.
Capricornia:
In my edition of Capricornia, the word ‘civilisation’ first appears on page 3, but the first two pages are also focussed on the arrival of this phenomenon in Australia’s Northern Territory. Civilisation? The blacks resisted it more sternly than in the south, Herbert tells us, and his immensely zestful account of life in Port Zodiac (Darwin) and places within a couple of hundred miles thereof makes you wonder whether ‘civilisation’ was the word for what arrived beyond the tropic-line which he uses as his name for the region. Civilisation? The book is also about the Shillingsworth brothers, Oscar and Mark; Oscar dies three-quarters of the way through, while Mark is still there at the end but the family line has been continued by Mark’s yeller-feller (half-caste) Norman, a clever young man with considerable engineering skills who gradually moves to the centre of the book insofar as Herbert’s storytelling allows it to have one.
A paradox about this novel (if that’s its category; I’ll discuss this in a moment) about Australia’s north is that its first draft was written in London. [read more]
