On 10 November 1984 one of this country’s most paradoxical, complex and truly great individuals breathed his last. Xavier Herbert, without peer as a chronicler of white Australia’s injustice to its Indigenous peoples, died aged 83. Twenty years later, Herbert has been consigned to the hazy recesses of memory; a deep wrong given his role in shaping our awareness of white Australia’s morally dubious history.
Unlike the rather sanitised authors of today who have fallen into the clutches of publishers’ marketing departments and say little of consequence, Herbert had definite views and campaigned relentlessly to bring them to reality.
He was, as his biographer Frances de Groen rightly says, a man who ‘found himself endlessly fascinating and expected others to do so too.’ But, as de Groen notes, Herbert was indeed fascinating, thanks to his ‘incident filled, wandering existence.’
Born in Geraldton, Western Australia in 1901, Herbert’s mother was an interesting woman to say the least. By the time Xavier was born, she had two other children to different fathers, and there is conjecture about the identity of Xavier’s father.
Herbert grew up in Fremantle and the Swan Valley town of Midland Junction, and it was in those years that he first witnessed Aboriginal dispossession. He studied pharmacy and in his early twenties left the West to travel to Queensland, the Northern Territory, Sydney, Melbourne, and the Solomon Islands. Eventually he settled with his Anglo-Jewish wife Sadie in the Cairns suburb of Redlynch.
Herbert graphically describes the tragedy of Australia’s Indigenous and white divide in Capricornia (first published in 1938), an epic novel that spans the first 50 years of white settlement in the Northern Territory.
Unlike many in the writing game, Herbert was not only a storyteller but an activist, who ‘rolled up his sleeves’ for the Indigenous cause. Writing to a friend in 1936 he plaintively observed, ‘You know how I have slaved and suffered and impoverished myself for the cause of aborigines.’
In his two sojourns in the Northern Territory, in the late 1920s and mid 1930s, Herbert made himself unpopular with the local administrators, or ‘tin-pot rajahs’ as he called them. Nevertheless, in October 1935 he was appointed Superintendent of the Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin. His record there was not unblemished—far from it. He was accused of taking a stick-whip to an Aboriginal ‘half-caste’ girl and confessed to assaulting an Indigenous man. But Herbert’s achievements on behalf of those