Novel: Poor Fellow My Country

Overview
Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country is a sweeping Northern Territory epic that fuses family saga, political tract, and outback chronicle to interrogate what Australia might be and what it too often becomes. Centered on the relationship between an aging white iconoclast, Jeremy Delacy, and the gifted mixed-descent boy he fosters, Prindy, the novel spans the late 1930s into World War II, when Darwin is bombed and the Top End is militarized. Herbert’s title echoes an Aboriginal English lament, “poor fellow my country”, and the book proceeds as a lament and a prophetic plea, raging against racial injustice, colonial subservience, and bureaucratic cruelty while yearning for an Australia grounded in the land and respectful of its First Peoples.

Setting and Context
The story unfolds across cattle stations, missions, and coastal towns of the Territory, a frontier where Aboriginal law, pastoral capitalism, and the white state grind against one another. Herbert places national debates, about loyalty to Britain, the White Australia policy, the so-called “protection” of Aboriginal people, and the arrival of American power, into this rugged geography, treating country as a living moral presence. The looming war and the sudden shock of the Japanese attacks accelerate existing tensions, revealing the fragility of official authority and the tenacity of local alliances.

Story
Jeremy Delacy, sharp-tongued and uncompromising, has turned his back on imperial pieties and settler complacencies. He rails at governments and missions that preach uplift while enforcing control, and he scorns the Australian habit of deference to distant masters. Into his care comes Prindy, a child whose intelligence, charm, and spiritual receptivity make him a figure of hope for a different future. To officials he is a “half-caste” to be classified and confined; to Jeremy he is a person to be free; to Aboriginal elders he is a boy who may belong in ceremony and country.

The novel follows Prindy’s contested upbringing. Mission authorities and state protectors press to remove him; Jeremy evades, confronts, and out-argues them, gathering around the boy a loose community of dissenters and Aboriginal friends who seek to keep him connected to land and Law. Herbert stages a series of trials, journeys into bush camps, brushes with police, encounters with self-righteous missionaries and cynical station bosses, in which each institution claims to know what is best for the child while revealing its own fear and ignorance.

War intensifies everything. The Territory is seized by uniforms and permits; “enemy aliens” are interned; Aboriginal workers are exploited even as their knowledge becomes indispensable. Jeremy’s heresies look like treason to the wartime state, and Prindy’s very existence becomes a provocation. The climactic passages tie private fate to national panic: evacuation orders, roadblocks, and rumors swirl as bombs fall and lines harden. The hope embodied in Prindy is trapped between competing regimes of custody. The ending is stark, a tragedy that seals Herbert’s indictment of a country unable to care for the child who might have helped save it.

Themes
Herbert pursues the moral claims of land and the necessity of belonging, opposing paternalism with a vision of partnership in which Aboriginal authority is recognized rather than appropriated. He dissects bureaucratic power, its files, euphemisms, and petty tyrannies, and skewers the myth of benign settlement. The novel’s nationalism is paradoxical: it rejects imperial tutelage and white chauvinism while imagining an Australia remade through Aboriginal sovereignty, local knowledge, and fidelity to country. Masculinity, mateship, and frontier romance are recast, their swagger exposed and their tenderness salvaged.

Style and Legacy
Vast in scope and unruly in method, the book mixes satire, lyric description, and political oratory, lingering over landscapes and launching into harangues. Its sheer size accommodates digression and duplicity, but its core remains the fate of a boy and the conscience of a nation. Poor Fellow My Country won the Miles Franklin Award and endures as a provocative monument: excessive to some, indispensable to others, and still aflame with its central cry for justice and home.