Poor Fellow My Country

Poor Fellow My Country PDF Author: Xavier Herbert
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
ISBN: 9780732299460
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 1472

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Book Description
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?

Poor Fellow My Country

Poor Fellow My Country PDF Author: Xavier Herbert
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
ISBN: 9780732299460
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 1472

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Book Description
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?

Capricornia

Capricornia PDF Author: Xavier Herbert
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 0730408876
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 805

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Book Description
Spanning three generations, Capricornia tells the story of Australia's north. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians, of chance relationships that can form bonds for life, of dispossession, murder and betrayal. 'Capricornia will always be one of the greatest of Australian novels, a defining work in the search for what it is, or was, to be Australian.' Australian Book Review Spanning three generations, Capricornia tells the story of Australia's north. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians, of chance relationships that can form bonds for life, of dispossession, murder and betrayal. In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth, clad in serge suits and bowler hats, arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. they are clerks who have come from the south to join the Capricornian Government Service. Oscar prospers, and takes to his new life as a gentleman. Mark, however, is restless, and takes up with old Ned Krater, a trepang fisherman, who tells him tales of the sea and the islands, introduces him to drink, and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women - or 'Black Velvet', as they are called. But it is Mark's son, Norman, whose struggles to find a place in the world embody the complexities of Capricornia itself. 'My Capricornia is a hymn book written in adoration of Australia ... the Land of the Unshackled Southern Cross, the Australian earth itself, out of a passionate love of which alone can a true Australian Nation grow.' Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert PDF Author: Xavier Herbert
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 9780702224089
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This ground-breaking first biography explores the contradictions at the core of Xavier Herbert's turbulent life and career (1901-1984). Charting his lifelong quest to discover the reality of his existence and to forge a larger-than-life identity, it highlights Herbert's compulsion to write and illuminates his abiding themes. Labelled at various times "ratbag" and "mug genius" as well as "master writer", Xavier Herbert led a life characterised by controversy and contradiction. His signature books, Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My country (1975), were to change the face of Australian novel writing.

Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert PDF Author: Frances De Groen
Publisher: University of Queensland Press(Australia)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
"The result is an engrossing narrative that highlights Herbert's compulsion to write and illuminates his abiding themes, including those related to sex and women. Also included are many photographs, some never before published."--BOOK JACKET.

Disturbing Element

Disturbing Element PDF Author: Xavier Herbert
Publisher: House of Books
ISBN: 9781743312278
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Often comic, often tragic, Disturbing Element is the story of an Australian literary legend written in his own classic style. Xavier Herbert considers himself the Disturbing Element in the family he claimed never wanted him. Born in 1901 in Western Australia, Herbert grew up amid confusing and sometimes contradictory family legends. Often comic, often tragic, Disturbing Element traces Herbert's life as he changes careers from pharmacist to railway fettler to writer. This is the story of an Australian literary legend written in his own classic style.

A Long and Winding Road

A Long and Winding Road PDF Author: Sean Monahan
Publisher: UWA Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Part literary criticism, part literary detective story, this is the first major study of the work of Xavier Herbert, one of the great Australian novelists of the 20th century. It began as an attempt to answer two questions: Why did a novel as magnificent as Poor Fellow My Country receive so lukewarm a response from much of the critical establishment? And how did a man who sometimes wrote so badly ever learn to write such a novel? In exploring these questions, Sean Monahan provides perceptive new readings of Herbert's major works, and he looks in each of the earlier works for clues to solve the mystery of where the final great achievement came from. This engaging, accessible book makes a substantial and original contribution to an understanding of Herbert's fiction, while at the same time telling the human story of a writer's rocky road to creating a masterpiece.

The Australia First Movement

The Australia First Movement PDF Author: Barbara Winter
Publisher: Interactive Publications
ISBN: 187681991X
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
'Australia First' is a good slogan that has been adopted by several quite different political ideologies. This book deals with the movement that developed slowly from about 1936 and came to an inglorious end in 1942. It grew out of the Victorian Socialist Party and the Rationalist Association. At first it attracted literary figures such as Xavier Herbert, Eleanor Dark, Miles Franklin. When it became heavily political, among its members were former communists and a Nazi Party member; some worked for the Labor Party, some for the United Australia Party (later the Liberal Party). One was a paid agent of the Japanese. Some were connected with Theosophy, some with Odinism, and in Victoria most were Irish Catholics with links to Archbishop Mannix and Sein Fein. Among their close friends were John Curtin, Dr Evatt, Arthur Calwell, Jack Beasley, Robert Menzies, Percy Spender, Archie Cameron. Several had contacts with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and with the Imperial League of Fascists and National Socialists. One had met Hitler and corresponded with General Ludendorff. Two composed and circulated anonymous subversive pamphlets. Others imported Nazi propaganda, one even during the war through the German Consulate-General in New York. At its core was a coterie of elderly men with too much time, too much money, and little common sense. 'Inky' Stephensen was the public face of the AFM and was responsible for the crude and vulgar style of its monthly magazine, the Publicist. But behind it all was Billy Miles, a cynical, arrogant manipulator, who turned it into a vehicle for anti-Semitic propaganda. He who wrote: 'What is the solution to the Jewish question? There can be none while a Jew lives.'Its downfall was precipitated less by its fascist and Nazi tendencies than by its close association with the Japanese. In the end, the internment of AFM adherents was used by both Labor and Liberal politicians as a stick with which to beat each other, until the wrongs and rights of the affair became buried under political abuse.

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 PDF Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133496
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A fresh twenty-first century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive and multicultural sense.

A Certain Style

A Certain Style PDF Author: Jacqueline Kent
Publisher: NewSouth
ISBN: 1742244300
Category : LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Beatrice Davis, 1909-1992, was general editor at Angus and Robertson the main Australian publishing company from 1937 to 1973. There she discovered and published such writers as Thea Astley, Miles Franklin, Patricia Wrightson, Xavier Herbert and Hal Porter becoming a literary tastemaker in the process. A central figure in Australian literature – ‘respected, feared, courted and berated.’ Originally published to great acclaim in 2001, A Certain Style introduced this stylish and formidable woman to thousands of readers and told a history of books and publishing in twentieth-century Australia. This reissue has a new introduction and updates throughout as the author presents a compelling account of a contradictory woman and her times.

Xavier Herbert

Xavier Herbert PDF Author: Laurie Clancy
Publisher: Boston : Twayne Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description