Here is the book that inspired Baz Luhrmann's Australia, the sweeping classic film of outback Australia. This is a true Australian classic - now available in audio for the first time.
Spanning three generationsâ¿¿ Capricornia tells the story of Australia's North. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asiansâ¿¿ of chance relationships that can form bonds for lifeâ¿¿ of dispossessionâ¿¿ murder and betrayal.
In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworthâ¿¿ clad in serge suits and bowler hatsâ¿¿ 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. Markâ¿¿ howeverâ¿¿ is restlessâ¿¿ and takes up with old Ned Kraterâ¿¿ a trepang fishermanâ¿¿ who tells him tales of the sea and the islandsâ¿¿ introduces him to drinkâ¿¿ and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women - or "black velvet" as they are called. But it is Mark's sonâ¿¿ Normanâ¿¿ whose struggles to find a place in the world embody the complexities of Capricornia itself.