Introduction

As the seemingly endless credits roll swiftly by at the conclusion of Baz Luhrmann's epic outback film 'Australia', it is easy to miss the acknowledgement to Xavier Herbert's 'Capricornia' and 'Poor Fellow My Country', the two novels that bookended the legendary author's career. Each was a major publishing event in its time and both are as powerfully relevant today as they ever were. 'Capricornia', hailed at the outset as the first Great Australian Novel, won the Sesquicentenary Literary Prize in 1938 and has hardly been out of print in three quarters of a century. By contrast, 'Poor Fellow My Country', despite winning the Miles Franklin Award in 1975 and being hailed by Randolph Stow in The 'Times Literary Supplement' as "an Australian classic, perhaps THE Australian classic", and in the US as "the best novel to have come out of Australia", has not been reissued in almost twenty-five years. This fortieth anniversary edition, however, does a great deal more than restore a missing bookend. 'Poor Fellow My Country' has had a profound effect on Australia's political and literary culture.