PART II CAPRICORNIA
Chapter 2 The Great Leap Forward
Herbert’s first attempt at a full-length novel was called ‘Black Velvet’. He wrote the book, he said, in an attempt to emulate the contemporary success of Leon Gordon’s White Cargo, a play in which colonials in Africa are ‘reduced to emaciated feverish wrecks after cohabiting with the half-naked half-caste siren Tondelayo’.56 Why not, suggested a friend, try writing something on the same lines set in the Northern Territory?57 And that, judging by the title (‘Black Velvet’ being a Territorian term for the sexual allure of Aboriginal women), is what Herbert set out to do. Whether the resultant novel treated interracial sexuality on the titillating level of White Cargo or dealt more seriously with race relations we will never know, since no manuscript has survived. What we do know is that Herbert set off for London in 1930 with a completed typescript in his luggage, hoping to place the book with a British publisher. In that hope he was disappointed. The only person to show any interest in his work was Sadie Norden, a young Jewish woman he had met on the boat going over. A Londoner, returning home after a failed marriage, it was Sadie who encouraged Herbert to try again after ‘Black Velvet’ was rejected by the publishers. She it was, too, who gave him the seminal advice that helped him transcend the limitations of