RUSSELL MCDOUGALL

The Materialization and Transformation of Xavier Herbert A Body of Work Committed to Australia

Birth and Baptism

HEN THE AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST XAVIER HERBERT applied for a War Service Pension in 1975, the Western Australian authori- W ties were unable to verify his existence. The Deputy Commis- sioner requested that he supply his birth certificate. “Of course I do not have one,” he responded, “have never had one.” He had been born, he said, at a time and a place when records often were not kept, a frontier space where established social conventions had given way to makeshift. He had been told that he was born on 15 May 1901, and had always operated on that assump- tion, until now being been informed that he had no official existence at all.1 Many times Herbert imagined the circumstances of his birth. At different times, and for different purposes, he claimed to have been born in Port Hed- land, in Geraldton (which was true),2 at Walkaway (south of Geraldton), on a cattle station on the north coast of Western Australia at the close of the Mur- chison gold rush, at Green River (which is north of Geraldton, around Shark’s Bay), at Dongara (Aboriginal place of the sea-lion), and somewhere in the Kimberley Division. His parents, he said, had disagreed about the place of his birth. But neither could be trusted. In his writing he fractured subjectivity to cast himself in the split personae of father and son: good and bad fathers, Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth, and Norman (“No-name”) Shillingsworth in Capricornia; settler and indigenous elders, Jeremy DeLacey and Bobwirri-

1 Xavier Herbert, to A. Gray (Deputy Commissioner, Military Records), 17 Novem- ber 1975, copy in the author’s possession. 2 Francis De Groen, Xavier Herbert’s Birth: The Documentary Record (Canberra: English Department, University College, Australian Defence Force Academy, 1988). 188 RUSSELL MCDOUGALL  dirridi, and boy-genius Prindy, in Poor Fellow My Country. Mothers, in this schema, are generally mad, bad, absent or irrelevant. As Herbert approached the end of his life, he grew more anxious about his origins, and often had distressing dreams of “chasing trains,” mad journeys of “travelling in the wrong direction and having to change trains,” which he interpreted as clear confirmation of his “psychic disorientation.”3 He recorded his dreams. In one, he was frantic about the possibility of missing a train; and, when he did just manage to catch it, he found it was heading for his birth place. Clearly, for Herbert, the conflict between self-assertion and regression was linked to the question of physical origins. He could not in autobiography “suddenly materialise,” as Ned Krater does in Capricornia’s foundational narrative of “The Coming of the Dingoes.”4 Yet, as a settler-invader, Herbert had reluctantly to identify with the Dingo, as “the one terrestrial animal” of the Dreaming “not strictly indigenous.” Abori- ginal people, he tells us in Poor Fellow My Country, account for this distinc- tion by according the Dingo a special status in their creation stories, as the only creature who arrived already “in the flesh” with the original Earth Mother.5 Yet Herbert preferred to think that his own mother had not wanted him – indeed, had left him “with the blacks,” with the famous King Billy as his minder.6 He then set about converting this supposed betrayal into an emo- tional triumph of tenuous access to Indigeneity. In the face of the unknown, in quest for origins, Herbert invented con- sciously and unconsciously a personal creation myth. It is a myth of dispersal, of being born at a whole range of different places, and even at different times; and it represents the fragmentation of psyche as it invests itself in spirit of place, in multiple sites of imagining, or dreaming. In fact, it has much in com- mon with Aboriginal Creation theology; but there is no evidence that Herbert himself ever made this connection. Elaborating upon the tale of his being left with “blacks” by his mother, and drawing upon the sympathies he later developed for and with Aboriginal people, eventually Herbert came implicitly to believe that his birth had been a

3 Herbert, to Laurie Hergenhan, 13 November 1970, University of Queensland Fryer Library (UQFL) 203, Box 8. 4 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (1938; Sydney: Harper Collins, 2008): 3. 5 Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country (Sydney: Collins, 1975): 35. 6 Xavier Herbert, interviewed by John Iremonger et al., 13 December 1975, Aus- tralian National Library (ANL) TRC 397.