Poor Fellow My Country
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 3rd pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Published in 1975 and awarded the Miles Franklin Award that same year, Poor Fellow My Country stands as the longest novel ever published in Australia — a monumental work of fiction spanning over 1,400 pages that chronicles the turbulent decades leading up to World War II through the eyes of Jeremy Delacy, a disillusioned cattle station owner in Australia's remote Northern Territory. Herbert constructs an epic tapestry of colonial Australia, weaving together the lives of Indigenous Australians, mixed-race characters, and white settlers to lay bare the devastating human cost of racism, dispossession, and failed nationhood. The novel's vast canvas — stretching from the sun-scorched outback to the corridors of political power — presents a scathing indictment of a society unwilling to confront its own moral failings. Xavier Herbert writes with fierce, uncompromising conviction, wielding a prose style that is at once lyrical and combative, richly detailed and deeply polemical. Poor Fellow My Country argues that Australia's original sin — its treatment of Aboriginal peoples — renders its claim to civilisation hollow, a theme Herbert pursues with relentless, almost missionary intensity. Drawing on decades of personal experience in the Northern Territory, he illustrates a nation tragically at odds with its own landscape and conscience. A work of extraordinary ambition and passion, it remains one of the most challenging and essential novels in the Australian literary canon — and a question it poses about identity and belonging still demands an answer.
Author: Xavier Herbert
Format: Hardback
Published: 1976, Collins
Genre: Australian history
Edition: 3rd pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Published in 1975 and awarded the Miles Franklin Award that same year, Poor Fellow My Country stands as the longest novel ever published in Australia — a monumental work of fiction spanning over 1,400 pages that chronicles the turbulent decades leading up to World War II through the eyes of Jeremy Delacy, a disillusioned cattle station owner in Australia's remote Northern Territory. Herbert constructs an epic tapestry of colonial Australia, weaving together the lives of Indigenous Australians, mixed-race characters, and white settlers to lay bare the devastating human cost of racism, dispossession, and failed nationhood. The novel's vast canvas — stretching from the sun-scorched outback to the corridors of political power — presents a scathing indictment of a society unwilling to confront its own moral failings. Xavier Herbert writes with fierce, uncompromising conviction, wielding a prose style that is at once lyrical and combative, richly detailed and deeply polemical. Poor Fellow My Country argues that Australia's original sin — its treatment of Aboriginal peoples — renders its claim to civilisation hollow, a theme Herbert pursues with relentless, almost missionary intensity. Drawing on decades of personal experience in the Northern Territory, he illustrates a nation tragically at odds with its own landscape and conscience. A work of extraordinary ambition and passion, it remains one of the most challenging and essential novels in the Australian literary canon — and a question it poses about identity and belonging still demands an answer.