Redlynch sits at the foot of the coastal ranges about 13 kilometres northwest of Cairns, and it has always been a place of two natures. The cottage faces busy Kamerunga Road and stands directly opposite the old railway station, next to the village pub - thoroughly a town. Yet beyond it spread the sugar-cane fields, and behind those rise the wild ranges running toward Cooktown. The settlement began as Eight-mile, the 1887 terminus of the first stage of the Cairns-to-Mareeba railway, and was renamed Redlynch almost at once. By the 1920s and '30s it had become the heart of a sugar district. Herbert understood this in-between quality perfectly. Like the characters in his novels, the village was not quite country and not quite town - and that liminal nature suited a writer drawn to the edges of things.

Alfred Francis Xavier Herbert was born in Western Australia in 1901 and trained as a pharmacist in Fremantle before a year of medical study in Melbourne convinced him his future lay in words, not medicine. He wrote for Sydney's Smith's Weekly, walked huge distances across northern Australia taking odd jobs, and spent two restless years in England in the early 1930s. There, with Sadie Norden's support, he drafted his first novel, Capricornia. Getting it published took years and considerable struggle, but when it finally appeared in 1938 it won the sesquicentenary novel competition and became a bestseller. It is the one major work Herbert did not write at Redlynch - everything else, he produced here.

After serving in the Second World War, Herbert and Sadie tried dairy farming on the Daintree before buying the Redlynch cottage in June 1951, paid for with a literary fellowship and a war-service loan. The house was meant for Sadie. "She's not settling down," Herbert wrote that August, "just getting a little house in which to put all those things of hers." Neither of them seems to have imagined they would keep it for the rest of their lives. Sadie was, by Herbert's own account, the emotional centre of his existence. "I'd never go on writing anything if Sadie didn't like it," he once admitted. She lodged his first drafts with their bank for safekeeping while he vanished into the hills to write; the cottage and the woman in it were the fixed point his wandering life revolved around.

Herbert was a genuine eccentric. A fitness fanatic decades before jogging was fashionable, he ran the canefields, the railway line, and the hills, and claimed the inspiration for his masterpiece struck him mid-stride. He tinkered with battery-powered DC electricity in pursuit of self-sufficiency. And in the backyard he built a small writer's shed - reputedly cobbled together from two huts hauled in by railcar from the Kuranda Scenic Railway. In that shed, between 1969 and 1974, he wrote and revised Poor Fellow My Country, his sprawling reckoning with Australian identity, the treatment of Aboriginal people, and the land itself. He called the shed his "million dollar dog house." When it was demolished in the summer of 1995-96, the heritage record mourned it as a great loss.

Poor Fellow My Country appeared in 1975 after nearly a decade of work and won the Miles Franklin Award the following year. At roughly 850,000 words, it remains the longest novel ever published in Australia - a single book the length of several. With the prize money, the Herberts finally renovated the cottage: a new bathroom, plasterboard ceilings, imitation wood panelling, aluminium cladding over the old timber. They were cheap, practical choices, made for ease rather than appearance, and the heritage listing reads them as a window into the man's complete lack of social pretension. Sadie died in 1979; Xavier stayed on until shortly before his own death at Alice Springs in 1984. The cottage survives as the only house in Australia tied to Herbert's life and work - significant, the register notes, as much for what it reveals of the person as of the writer.