AustLit

‘When the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert applied for a War Service Pension in 1975, the Western Australian authorities were unable to verify his existence. The Deputy Commissioner requested that he supply his birth certificate. ‘Of course I do not have one,’ he responded, ‘have never had one.’ He had been born, he said, at a time and a place when records often were not kept, a frontier space where established social conventions had given way to makeshift. He had been told that he was born on 15 May 1901, and had always operated on that assumption, until now being informed that he had no official existence at all.’ (Author’s introduction 187)