Xavier Herbert - writer

Miles Franklin Award winner for Poor Fellow My Country (in 1975), Xavier Herbert (1901-1984) was married to Sadie in the Cairns Court House in 1951 and they moved to the Cairns suburb of Redlynch.

In 1951 Herbert and Sadie settled at Redlynch, near Cairns. On 26 June 1953, giving their ages as 47, they married at the Cairns Court House. He was awarded several Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowships and in 1959 published Seven Emus. It had been completed during the war but, initially serialised in the lowbrow Australian Journal, had previously escaped serious notice. A slim novella with quirky punctuation, developed (according to Herbert) to discover and liberate his `style', Seven Emus offered a satirical critique of the anthropological exploration and exploitation of Aboriginal sacred sites in northern Australia. His next novel, Soldiers' Women (1961), purported to be a study of women liberated by the absence or relative scarcity of men during World War II. The least critically popular of his works, it expounded a highly idiosyncratic theory of sexuality. It is none the less a fascinating companion to the classic novel written by Dymphna Cusack (with whom Herbert had a brief