On the Scarlet Plains

CAPRICORNIA -- Xavier Herbert -- Appleton-Century ($3).

Capricornia is what every frontier story should be -- tough, sprawling, rampant with physical action. This roaring story of the opening of Australia's equatorial north, published already in half a dozen European countries, won its author the Commonwealth Government's Sesquicentenary Prize.

Capricornia begins at the end of the 19th Century, when the Northwest's population was mostly crocodiles, devil crabs, creak-winged jabirus and colored aborigines. Pioneers from South Australia pushed up into a half million square miles drenched to swamp by the wet season, parched to desert by the dry. They were there to stay. When the defeated Larrapunas persisted in guerrilla tactics, the settlers gave them gifts of flour spiced with arsenic.

Yeller Feller. By 1904, when Government Clerks Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth arrived in Port Zodiac (Darwin), the town was a thronging spectrum of racial color. "Going combo" (mixing with the native women) was officially taboo but an enthusiastic reality in a country short on white women and addicted to "black velvet." Soon half-castes outnumbered whites three-to-one. Unrecognized by their white fathers (who felt vaguely double-crossed), they were tolerated as mongrels by the blacks.

Such a mongrel was little Nawnim (No Name), half-caste son of Mark Shillingsworth. Father Mark spent his time between pearl diving, trepang fishing, debtors' jail, bouts with delirium tremens in the local hospital.

Mark's kindly, conventional brother Oscar became a cattle grazier who remembered the lecture of an old combo: "Study the Binghi [aborigine], Oscar, and you'll find he's a different man from you in many ways, but in all ways quite as good." When six-year-old Nawnim, "hardened with food snatched from dogs and salted with sand and ants" was deserted by his father and delivered on Oscar's doorstep, howling and stinking, Uncle Oscar took him in.

Plenty Bandicoot. Nawnim became Norman, was sent to be educated in the caste-free South, accepted his "cigaret-stain" skin as a legacy from his mother (a Javanese princess, Oscar assured him). He returned to Oscar's farm a trained mechanic, looked like a "Rajah." The girls shouted when they saw him, "Oozit . . . Mygawdaineeflash ! " Abysmally unprepared for the Jim Crow strait jacket of Capricornia, he got an idea of his status from the white insults and the black friendliness.

Shocked, maimed and suspicious of the whites at Oscar's farm, Norman planned to get a job on the railroad, started beating his way through the bush to avoid white men's towns. But the wet season with its cockeye bobs (man-eating storms) turned his plans topsy-turvy. Lost for days, his horses gone, Norman was picked up by a band of aborigines and comforted: "Proper good country dis one. Plenty kangaroo, plenty buffalo, plenty bandicoot, plenty yam, plenty goose, plenty duck, plenty lubra [squaws], plenty corroboree [dancing] . . ."

Tocky Tuckers by the Jinjin. Four months later Norman got back to the farm. After Uncle Oscar died, Norman set out 1) to visit the island where he was born, 2) to find his outlawed father Mark.

On the 16th day, when he was following the Jinjin River, "a small swarthy white face popped out" of the woods. It was a runaway half-caste, Tocky, whose "tucker" had been "yams an' lily roots -- an fresh-water tuttles an' fish an' stick-eggs --an' pool lil frogs an' birdses-- an' sometime nussing." Norman feasted her on cold roast bustard, chutney, tinned peaches jam; she became his lubra. Half-caste bastards, they returned to the farm, lived in primitive vigilance against the police-- pregnant Tocky was resolved not to return to the dreaded native compound from which she had escaped.

But it was Norman the police were after. A sack of bones, a riddled skull and Norman's rifle had been discovered at a camp site beside the Jinjin River. Circumstantial evidence pyramided against him. But Lawyer Bightit (who inside an hour managed to resemble bull, lamb, toad, dove, turkey cock, shark, and a huge red spider) miraculously managed to reconstruct the crime exactly as it had happened: during a time when Norman left her alone, Tocky had blasted the brains of a lusting intruder.

Norman returned home, was startled "by the sudden appearance of two crows that swept up from out the broken tank. ... He climbed the ladder, looked inside.

A human skull -- no -- two -- a small one and a tiny one. And human hair and rags of clothes and a pair of bone-filled boots. Two skulls, a small one and tiny one. Tocky and her baby!" Norman's infant had not waited for the midwives of the Binghi-- and had at least escaped the fate of a Nawnim.

Snipes and Nuttaguls. Xavier Herbert's uncombed tale of an exotic land is also frequently a hymn to Terra Australia : "When the multicolored schisty rocks split golden waterfalls-- when the scarlet plains were under water, green with wild rice, swarming with Siberian snipe-- when the billabongs were brimming and the water lilies blooming and the nuttaguls shouting loudest. ..."

The Author. Xavier Herbert, 42, son of a gold prospector and a gold prospector's daughter, was born on Australia's wild northwest coast. He studied medicine in Melbourne, began to write, switched to Sydney and wrote in earnest. City life stunned him. He set out to battle the 4000-mile journey home: sawmilled, stock-rode, cattle-drove, dingo-trapped, came upon his literary promised land--the Northern Territory.

He got little recognition as a writer, got more from the Japanese as a pearl diver, soon earned enough money to take him to London. Two years of European bread lines gave him gnawing homesickness.

Capricornia was written during years of work among the aborigines. Sergeant Herbert is now on active service on his beloved northern coast.

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