Capricornia — Xavier Herbert

Spanning three generations "Capricornia" tells the story of Australia's North. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians of chance relationships that can form bonds for life of dispossession murder, and betrayal.

In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth clad in serge suits and bowler hats arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. They are clerks who have come from the South to join the Capricornian Government Service. Oscar prospers and takes to his new life as a gentleman. Mark however is restless and takes up with old Ned Krater a trepang fisherman who tells him tales of the sea and the islands introduces him to drink and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women or "Black Velvet," as they are called.

But it is Mark's son Norman whose struggles to find a place in the world, who embodies the complexities of "Capricornia" itself.

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