Aptly nicknamed "Australia Prolix" by a rival in 1938, Xavier Herbert was a controversial visionary novelist and short-story writer whose long career from 1926 to 1984 registered the major social and cultural developments of his generation. Nurtured by 1930s bush-focused, fascist-flavored, anti-British nationalism, his large ambition was to express as vibrantly, capaciously, and accessibly as possible to a wide popular audience the ambivalent significance of what he believed it meant to be Australian. His most important works, Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975), chart the post-invasion history of northern Australia and are exhortatory and polemical in force. Their complicated melodramatic plots celebrate the survival of Aboriginal cultures and castigate Herbert's fellow whites for their failure to shake off the colonial yoke and create a just, fair, and independent nation--a "True Commonwealth." In their prodigious length, profusion of multicultural characters, and epic overland journeys, they suggest the untamed vastness of the far...