Xavier and Sadie Herbert's Cottage is a heritage-listed cottage at 399 Kamerunga Road, Redlynch, Cairns, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from to 1970s. It is also known as Sadie's House. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 24 January 1997. History This modest timber-framed cottage was purchased in 1951 by Xavier Herbert, an Australian writer whose work has achieved international recognition. It was intended as a home for his wife, Sadie Norden, but was also to remain Herbert's principal place of residence for over 30 years. At the Redlynch cottage, Herbert worked on all of his major works except Capricornia. The cottage is situated in the village of Redlynch at the base of the coastal ranges northwest of Cairns. The area was logged for its cedar from the mid-late 1870s. Selections were taken up in the mid-1880s following the 1886 decision to construct a railway from Cairns to the Atherton Tableland through the area, and the Eight-mile Railway Station was opened in October 1887 as the terminus for the first stage of the Cairns-Mareeba railway. Eight-mile was renamed Redlynch almost immediately, and a small village grew around the station. In the 1920s and 1930s Redlynch developed as the centre of an important sugar-growing district. The cottage which the Herberts later acquired, along with several adjacent similar cottages, may have been constructed in the 1920s, although the present land subdivision was not surveyed until 1938. Alfred Francis Xavier Herbert (1901-1984) was born in Western Australia and educated at Fremantle, where he trained as a pharmacist. In 1925 he moved to Melbourne where he studied medicine for a year. His first published short story appeared in The Australian Journal (Melbourne) at this time and Herbert decided to quit university studies to pursue a writing career. In 1926 he moved to Sydney and joined the staff of Smith's Weekly. In the late 1920s he travelled (mostly walking) around northern Australia and the South Pacific doing various odd jobs, and spent two years in England 1930–32. While in England he completed the initial draft of Capricornia, with the support of Sadie Norden, whom he later married. Late in 1932 he returned to Australia and wrote short stories for journals and newspapers to help bring Sadie to Australia in 1933. After some difficulty, Capricornia was published in Australia in 1938. It won Australia's sesquicentenary novel competition that year and became a