Books: On the Scarlet Plains

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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.