It seems nothing much has changed in the treatment of NT cattle. In Xavier Herbert’s award winning 1938 Territory novel,Capricornia, he included a period of cattle industry boom after WW1 , with exports from Darwin to the Philippines and down south. He wrote that the trade became so good, even the last bellow of a beast was put to use and turned into cash by the beef barons. The claim was made in a chapter headed PROSPERITY IS LIKE THE TIDE- applicable to the present uproar over live cattle exports to Indonesia with strong calls for shipments to be stopped .
Like so many others in the Territory , Herbert disliked the British pastoral company, Vesteys.The union owned Northern Standard in 1924 ran a story from the Sydney Labor Daily headed THE VESTEY BLIGHT IN NORTHERN TERRITORY in which the Vestey family were called '' knights of the cleaver". Lord Vestey, it said, had made a packet selling beef to the British Army and had been rewarded with a peerage .
Several of Herbert’s short stories were run in the Northern Standard ,one being The Rain Maker,in which Coateys ( a play on Vesteys) and Beefjoose (Bovril) were beef barons intent on buying up Australia, a scenario inspired by revelations in the Royal Commission of inquiry after Administrator Dr Gilruth was forced to leave Darwin on a navy gunboat . FOOTNOTE : A January 1949 reprint of Capricornia in our Xavier Herbert collection is ex libris E.J.Fotheringham, 181 Chloride Street, in the great mining town of Broken Hill, NSW . There is a stylised map of Capricornia at the front of the book which includes a rampant goat, such poor beasts said to be subjected to appalling treatment in overseas countries . ( See bubbly Burleigh bouillon ROAD TO MOROCCO post below .)
