The controversial novelist Xavier Herbert (1901-84) led a colourful and itinerant life. Best known for his vast North Australian epics "Capricornia" and "Poor Fellow My Country" (totalling
over a million words), he was also a pharmacist, union organiser, railway fettler, miner, woodcutter and World War II "bush commando". Herbert travelled widely throughout Australia from the
1920s to the 1980s, and his fictional depictions of the far north are bursting with chaotic energy and violence.Herbert's letters reveal not just a troubled ego, but also considerable charm,
a rhapsodic response to the remote wildernesses of the north and a delight in humour - droll, rollicking and earthy - driven always by his seething imagination.
