Poor Fellow My Country is a Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Australian author Xavier Herbert. At 1,463 pages, it is the longest Australian work of fiction ever written, and the longest single-volume novel to have been written in the English language. Poor Fellow My Country won the 1976 Miles Franklin Literary Award (for books published in 1975), Australia's most prestigious such award. It was Herbert's final novel. Plot summary The novel takes place between 1936 and 1942, with a brief epilogue set in 1974, and is set primarily in Australia's Northern Territory. Three social outcasts - Prindy, a half-Indigenous boy; Jeremy, his white grandfather, well-known for his outspoken rants against bigotry and conservatism; and Rifkah, a female Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany - find themselves facing oppression as Australia faces a war and ongoing questions about its place in the world. Book One: Terra Australis Subtitle: "Blackman's Idyll Despoiled by White Bullies, Thieves, and Hypocrites" 1936. Jeremy Delacy is a middle-aged Anglo-Australian who owns a property, Lily Lagoons, in the Northern Territory. Jeremy is an outspoken critic of Australian government and culture. His views often set him apart from his fellow white Australians, especially on the subject of Australian nationalism, as he rejects Australia's fealty to the British Empire, and on the subject of the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. Jeremy supports land rights and reparations to Aboriginal Australians, as he believes that it is morally and culturally wrong to expect them to "integrate" with white society and be reliant on welfare and a culture that is not their own. Jeremy's first wife, Rhoda, and his adult sons are pillars of society in the fictional town of Beatrice (modelled on towns such as Katherine). However Jeremy's second wife, Nanago, is Indigenous, and they live a life largely separated from society. Jeremy has a grandson, Prindy, on the cusp of adolescence, whose mother is Indigenous and whose father is Jeremy's son, Martin. Prindy is technically a ward of the state, like all Aboriginal Australians, and is torn between his two cultures. Prindy is not fully accepted by white society, although because of his light skin and his unusual musical abilities he is often seen as a figure of fascination by white people. At the same time, because he has a white father and has not been raised in Aboriginal culture, he is disconnected from this world also. One of the elders of