over their usage of the copyright for his earlier novels, and the University of Queensland Press, represented by Craig Munro, whom he rejected when Munro gave him honest feedback including suggesting the novel be published in three volumes due to its size. In July 1974, Herbert signed a contract with William Collins, Sons. The publication process ran into some troubles when a Jewish project manager, Alan Rein, attempted to point out some inaccuracies with the scenes of Jewish life in the novel, to which Herbert - not Jewish himself - took exception. By the time of the novel's publication, the Australia Council for the Arts had been founded, with rapidly increasing amounts of funding available for Australian artists and writers. On the strength of Herbert's name, Poor Fellow My Country was awarded over $20,000 in subsidies to assist with typing and printing, allowing the novel to be sold at $20 - a low amount for a book weighing more than 4 pounds and containing 1,463 pages. On 16 September 1975, the publisher organised a week of festivities in Sydney to celebrate the release of the novel. Herbert and his wife Sadie attended. Herbert was 74 when the novel was published, and it secured his financial security for the remainder of his life. In 1980, the novel was translated into Japanese by Professor Michio Ochi in 11 volumes, under the title of Kawaisô na watashi no kuni . Reception The book sold 30,000 copies within a year of publication and 70,000 within five years, rendering it a success in Australian literary terms. Australian reviewers were mixed but overall positive. The Adelaide Advertiser review was entitled "A Passionate Cry for a Land and a People", while the Courier-Mail called it a "big blockbuster". Historian Manning Clark, in the Canberra Times, titled his review "Artist Turns Angry Prophet". The Sydney Morning Herald ran two conflicting reviews: one entitled "Compelling Power" and the other "Foaming River of Prose". Much criticism centred on the novel's length, with the reviewer for the Nation Review joking about "poor fellow Xavier Herbert's typewriter". Reaction to the book was more muted from some of Herbert's fellow writers. Randolph Stow thought that Poor Fellow My Country might be "the Australian classic" but expressed reservations at the character of Jeremy Delacy, who "is a bore on a colossal scale", and whom Stow believed to be a mouthpiece for Herbert's views rather