The Materialization and Transformation of Xavier Herbert: A Body of Work Committed to Australia

Abstract

When the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert applied for a War Service Pension in 1975, the Western Australian authorities were unable to verify his existence. The Deputy Commissioner requested that he supply his birth certificate. 'Of course I do not have one,' he responded, 'have never had one.' He had been born, he said, at a time and a place when records often were not kept, a frontier space where established social conventions had given way to makeshift. He had been told that he was born on 15 May 1901, and had always operated on that assumption, until now being been informed that he had no official existence at all. Many times Herbert imagined the circumstances of his birth. At different times, and for different purposes, he claimed to have been born in Port Hedland, in Geraldton (which was true) at Walkaway (south of Geraldton), on a cattle station on the north coast of Western Australia at the close of the Murchison gold rush, at Green River (which is north of Geraldton, around Shark's Bay), at Dongara (Aboriginal place of the sea-lion), and somewhere in the Kimberley Division. His parents, he said, had disagreed about the place of his birth. But neither could be trusted.