Capricornia by Xavier Herbert

First published: 1938

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: From the 1880’s to the 1930’s

Locale: “Capricornia,” Australia

Principal Characters:

• Oscar Shillingsworth, a Capricornian civil servant, later the owner of Red Ochre cattle station
• Mark Shillingsworth, his younger brother
• Norman Shillingsworth, the half-caste son of Mark and an aboriginal woman
• Tim O’Cannon, a railway worker
• Tocky, the daughter of the white Agricultural Superintendant, Humbolt Lace, and the half-caste Constance Differ

The Novel

Capricornia opens with a brief chapter that describes the bloody arrival of the white man in “Capricornia,” Xavier Herbert’s fictionalized version of Australia’s Northern Territory. It serves to establish the themes of the whites’ rapacity and their destruction of aboriginal culture.

Thereafter, the first portion of the novel chronicles the fortunes of the Shillingsworth brothers, who arrive in Port Zodiac, Capricornia’s principal city, in 1904 and take up positions in the civil service. Oscar soon rises in Capricornian society, getting married and then becoming the owner of Red Ochre, a large cattle station. Mark, on the other hand, is dismissed for drunkenness and mean behavior. He fathers a son, Norman, by an aboriginal woman and leaves him for the natives to rear, only recognizing his worth when a grazier offers to rear him as a worker on his station. The child, called Nawnim, or “no-name,” by the aborigines, escapes and comes to live with Oscar at Red Ochre. After killing a Chinese merchant, Mark flees the country, and Oscar finally decides to rear Norman. Since he cannot do so in raceconscious Capricornia, where everyone knows Norman’s identity, he moves his family south.

In this first section, Xavier Herbert begins to show the panorama of life in Capricornia, a place of violence, dissipation, and greed. The plot develops episodically as the author comments on the effects of the coming of the white race in the north.

In the next section, the focus shifts to the stories of Constance Differ and Tim O’Cannon. The daughter of a white man and a black woman, Constance is reared by her father to be above the usual low station of half-castes in Capricornian society. After her father’s death, she is taken in by Humbolt Lace, who takes advantage of her and then, discovering she is pregnant, abandons her. Later, Tim O’Cannon finds her with her baby daughter in an aboriginal camp. When Constance dies, O’Cannon adopts the child, whom he names Tocky, and rears her along with his own mixed-race daughters. Later, he is killed in a railway accident, and Tocky ends up in the aboriginal compound; as usually happens in Capricornia, a deed done for humane ends turns out to be futile.

The focus for the rest of the novel is on the fortunes of Norman. He returns to Capricornia to visit Oscar, who has resumed management of Red Ochre. The major events of this section concern Norman’s discovery of his identity (Oscar has told him that he is part Javanese) and his having to come to terms with his aboriginal ancestry. The section also includes Oscar’s death, Tocky’s escape from the Gospelist mission where she has been sent, her subsequent liaison with Norman, and several spectacular murder trials. Through great expense and the exertions of the lawyer Caeser Bightit, Mark is acquitted of the murder of the merchant, and Norman of the murder of Frank McLash (whom Tocky has killed). At the end of the novel, Mark is married and looking forward to prosperity, and Norman is in charge of Red Ochre. Herbert closes the action, however, on a more somber note, with Norman discovering the bones of Tocky and her baby, who have perished while hiding from the police.

The Characters

The pages of Capricornia swarm with characters. The author does not develop them, though, in much psychological detail. What the reader gets are the externals: development through action and authorial commentary.

One of the chief means Herbert uses to suggest the distinguishing characteristics of many of the characters in the novel—especially the minor ones— is naming. Thus, the reader encounters Judge Pondrosass and troopers O’Theef and O’Crimnell. The local magistrate is Paddy Larsney, and two clergymen are named Randter and Prayter. Through this obtrusive device, Herbert is making a point about the inherent corruption of the local officials and the greed and mean-spiritedness of the inhabitants generally. The emblematic names at times create an almost allegorical quality in the work. They are a constant reminder of the author’s mocking presence.

The only characters that are developed in much detail in the novel are the Shillingsworths, especially Oscar and Norman, and Tim O’Cannon. Each, however, is absent for long sections of the novel. Since the novel is as much about the place as the people, to be away from Capricornia is to disappear from the reader’s attention.

Oscar Shillingsworth emerges from Capricornia as a failure in most of his endeavors, a common fate among characters in the novel. At the outset, he becomes overly conscious of his rising status in Capricornian society and seeks to enhance it through marriage and through the purchase of Red Ochre. Neither action turns out well, since his wife leaves him and the cattle market takes a bad turn. His decision to take in his half-caste nephew represents a departure from the social norms of a society in which half-castes are considered by the whites to be the same as full-blooded aborigines and are therefore victims of fierce racism. Oscar takes Norman south to be educated and tries unsuccessfully to keep him from rejoining him after he has returned to the north. Oscar dies without ever realizing any of his ambitions for himself or for Norman.

Norman is the most complex character in the novel, but again, he is developed through action and authorial commentary rather than through internal characterization. The pivotal event for Norman is his discovery of his true ancestry. Angered, he runs away into the bush, where he is trapped for an extended period by floods. He begins to comprehend the aboriginal attachment to the land, especially after he encounters several of the native blacks and lives for a while with them. Yet while he feels the pull of aboriginal life, he has been reared and educated in white society. As a result, he is never comfortable in either culture, and while he can rail in court against the injustice and racism in Capricornia, he eventually casts his lot with the whites.

In the novel, Norman stands as a symbol of the harm wrought by the white men on aboriginal culture. They rape the land, producing a place unfit for habitation, and they use the native women to satisfy their lust, producing a breed incapable of surviving well in either black or white society.

One of the few sympathetic characters is Tim O’Cannon, who, unlike most of the white men, acknowledges a half-caste as his wife and lives openly with her. He rears his daughters with the expectation, unfounded as it turns out, that they will be able to marry out of their racial predicament. He is one of the few whites in the novel who stands up for the aborigines, but his resistance is futile, and after his accidental death, his wife and children are forced to live on the government compound. As with all the characters of Capricornia, O’Cannon is at the mercy of a capricious fate.

Critical Context

Capricornia is something of an anomaly in Australian literature. It appeared at a time when there was a movement toward social realism in the novel. Despite some realistic description of nature, however, the narrator is much too obtrusive for the novel to fall into that category. It also is related to the saga novel. Ultimately, however, Capricornia is a work that defies easy categorization.

Many critics have granted the novel’s power to move the reader while deploring Herbert’s heavy-handed satire. Others have argued about the novel’s structure, noting that it sweeps the reader forward without focusing consistently on a particular character or line of plot. What has generally troubled critics most, however, is the mixture of humor and fatalism in the novel: Herbert creates a society in which man is both laughable and doomed, no matter what he does. There is a parallel to Joseph Furphy in this regard, but Herbert’s irony is much more savage. The reader looking for redeeming goodness in the world will not find it in Capricornia.

The novel is anomalous, too, in that it is the only one of Herbert’s works to gain general critical approval. Of the later novels, only Poor Fellow My Country (1975) met with any measure of acceptance among the critics, and in that case the responses were sharply divided. It seems likely that Herbert’s place in Australian literature will be assured mainly because of Capricornia.

Bibliography

Clancy, Laurie. Xavier Herbert, 1981.

Heseltine, Harry. Xavier Herbert, 1973.