Poor Fellow My Country

Book excerpt: Poor Fellow My Country is an Australian classic, perhaps THE Australian classic' - The Times Literary Supplement. From Australia's oldest publisher comes the longest Australian novel ever published. The winner of the 1975 Miles Franklin Award is now back in print with a new introduction by Russell McDougall. In Poor Fellow My Country, Xavier Herbert returns to the region made his own in Capricornia: Northern Australia. Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert's analysis and indictment of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today. Herbert parallels an intimate personal narrative with a tale of approaching war and the disconnect between modern Australia and its first inhabitants. With enduring portraits of a large cast of local and international characters, Herbert paints a scene of racial, familial and political disparity. He lays bare the paradoxes of this wild land, both old and wise, young and flawed. Winner of the Miles Franklin award on first publication in 1975, Poor Fellow My Country is masterful storytelling, an epic in the truest sense. This is the decisive story of how Australia threw away her chance of becoming a true commonwealth and it is undoubtedly Herbert's supreme contribution to Australian literature. Will we ever reach the dream of 'Australia Felix' - the happy south land?