Capricornia (First edition, Signed)

A landmark and still-controversial work of Australian social protest fiction, inscribed by the author himself in the year of its first printing.

Xavier Herbert (1901–1984) drew directly on his own experience as an official "Protector of Aborigines" in Darwin in writing Capricornia, composed in London between 1930 and 1932 but not published until 1938. Set in a fictionalised Northern Territory across three generations of the Shillingsworth family, the novel confronts the realities of race relations, dispossession, and the treatment of Aboriginal and Chinese Australians in the north with a directness that was, for its time, without precedent in Australian fiction.

It won the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for the best Australian novel of 1939, and was hailed on publication as a turning point in Australian letters and an outstanding work of social protest. This reputation has been broadly retained, even as contemporary readers and booksellers now rightly note that its depictions of Indigenous and Chinese Australians reflect outdated racial attitudes common of the era. Herbert would not publish another major novel for almost four decades, until Poor Fellow My Country (1975), which won him the Miles Franklin Award.

This copy carries a presentation inscription in Herbert's own hand, dated December 1938 — inscribed within the same calendar year as the book's original January publication, making this among the earliest documented instances of the author's own engagement with a reader or associate following Capricornia's appearance.

First edition, limited to 2,000 unnumbered copies (and 50 numbered copies on rag paper). Inscribed by the author to the title page: "With the compliments of Xavier Herbert, December 1938". Octavo. 595pp. Original orange publisher's cloth. Titling to spine in black. Map to front endpaper. Spine sun faded. Some rubbing and wear to spine ends and corners. Contents age toned (due to paper quality), heavier along edges. 

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Catalogue Number: HH000025