Uncomfortable Australia: Looking back on Xavier Herbert's Masterwork "Poor Fellow My Country"

Although Xavier Herbert blazed a number of trails with his first novel Capricornia, it was only his last novel Poor Fellow My Country that aspired to literature, and that novel succeeded in many ways that challenge the comfortable view of Australia's cultural history that some recent politicians desire. The novel poses some very big questions for Australia. What future is there for a people who have killed off or sidelined the indigenous people and have only a commercial interest in the land it occupies? What has been foregone by the intentional rejection of the knowledge of the indigenous people? What happens when, as Robin Boyd says, Australia has no desire to come to terms with itself?The issues canvassed so colourfully in that novel seem to appear in the national media almost daily, and a rereading has much to offer the discussion of the relationship of white Australians with their land and with the Aboriginal people. Germaine Greer tried reopen the discussion in 2003 with her paper "Whitefella Jump Up", but in "Poor Fellow My Country", the same issues are analysed in great depth and placed in a community of characters we can recognize. If, as Greer suggests, whitefellas are the problem, then Herbert's "Poor Fellow My Country" explains why. It is the author's contention is that "Poor Fellow My Country" is Herbert's only literary work. His previous writing taught him how to create literary fiction in a fashion reminiscent of Dickens, and his last novel deserves recognition for its art as well as for its cultural criticism.