SOURCE: Indyk, Ivor. “Pastoral and Priority: The Aboriginal in Australian Pastoral.” New Literary History 24, no. 4 (autumn 1993): 837-55.

[In the following excerpt, Indyk concentrates on the ominous presence of the Aborigine in the pastoral poetry of Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall.]

As Virgil demonstrated, the pastoral form can be made to speak of many things. Yet to the relationship between the pastoral singer and the landscape celebrated in the pastoral song Virgil also granted a certain kind of priority. The first of his Eclogues opens directly onto this relationship by comparing the situations of two shepherds, the one in possession of his land, the other dispossessed. Meliboeus:

Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering beech, While I must leave my home place, the fields so dear to me. I'm driven from my home place: but you can take it easy In shade and teach the woods to repeat “Fair Amaryllis.”¹

As far as their claims to land are concerned, there is little to distinguish Meliboeus from Tityrus. One stays, the other has to leave—but you feel that it could easily have gone the other way, that the “god” that granted Tityrus the continuity of his title might just as easily have done the same for Meliboeus in other circumstances and left Tityrus on the road to exile. Through its images of disorder—the mother goat who abandons her newly born kids, the stags grazing in air—the poem points toward some cataclysmic disruption in the natural course of things, but none of these images is quite as unsettling as this arbitrary stroke, which annuls one shepherd's claim over his land while leaving that of his neighbor intact. “To such a pass has / civil dissension brought us,” exclaims Meliboeus, pointedly referring to the land seizures by which Octavian and those before him had rewarded the loyalty of their soldiers. So great a violation of natural rights could only have as its cause and counterpart in the social realm a disturbance of the magnitude of a civil war.

Australian pastoral is haunted by a similar sense of violation, caused by an upheaval of no lesser magnitude—that of the displacement of an indigenous population by the settlers of a colonizing power. Here, too, it is the figure of the dispossesed whose presence unsettles the affirmations of the pastoral song. Though there have been times when the Aboriginal has played no part in Australian pastoral, this effacement has been limited and partial. For the most part it is the persistence of the Aboriginal figure which is remarkable—appearing sometimes as a shadowy, spectral presence, sometimes dramatically heightened by fear or guilt, more recently as a figure arguing on its own behalf for a revision of the pastoral order—and always as the embodiment of an aboriginal claim, a claim to priority.

Leo Marx's assertion that “the pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery,” has some bearing on the Australian situation.² Like America, Australia shared in the pastoral expectations aroused by the prospects of the New World. But there was this difference: Australia was first conceived by its white settlers as a jail not as a paradise, as a place remarkable for its forbidding and inhospitable character rather than for its promise of freedom and contentment. As the inhabitants of this forbidding place, Aboriginals appear in the poetry of the colonial period as devilish figures in a landscape of damnation. Yet in opposition to the convicts, in their bondage and degradation, the Aboriginals also recommended themselves as the true pastoral subjects—unfettered, innocent of the curse of labor, all their wants supplied by an adequately generous, if not overly abundant nature.

When William Charles Wentworth celebrated the prospects of “Australasia” in 1823, some thirty-five years after settlement, he saw them thus: as “pure native sons of savage liberty / who hold all things in common, earth, sea, air,” as children of “the heath, the mountain and the breeze.”³ But when Wentworth sings of the fruits of cultivation at Parramatta, and the flocks and herds flourishing on the plains west of Sydney, he imagines an Arcadian scene of purely classical lineage, populated not by the representatives of savage liberty but by antipodean versions of Lycoris and Gallus from Virgil's tenth eclogue. Suitable in other respects, the Aboriginals must now be excluded from the pastoral scene because they lack a quality vital to pastoral as it is traditionally understood—the sheep close by, the grapes ripening on the vine, the fields beyond open to the sun—in short, the element of cultivation. Wentworth's ideal, like Jefferson's, is the “freeman,” the small farmers who will cultivate the land and, resting after their labor,

wake the woodlands with their pipe's soft sound while the charm'd fauns, and dryads skulking near, leave their lone haunts, and list with raptur'd ear.⁴

Presumably these fauns and dryads are the Aboriginals, the earlier claimants to the pastoral mantle, charmed from savagery by the settlers' superior song.

This double gesture, which recognizes the Aboriginal as the true pastoral subject only to have the figure superseded by that of the settler-farmer, appears in the poetry of the later colonial period (1840s to 1880s) as a mortal confrontation between two different kinds of pastoral ideal, the one primitive, the other classical in origin, as the poets seek to accommodate a presence which has not dimmed but grown more compelling in time. In both Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall, the two most distinguished poets of this period, the confrontation centers on the pastoral place, the locus amoenus, defined now in Australian terms and presented as the site both of allurement and of death.

In what is probably Harpur's most significant poem, “The Creek of the Four Graves,” a settler and his four shepherds set forth into the Australian wilderness to seek “new streams and wider pastures” for their flocks. Harpur's attempt to capture this new territory in his verse places considerable strain on his poetic resources. In mobilizing the pastoral form, Harpur is evidently unwilling to admit the Aboriginal inhabitants of the wilderness as proper subjects, and he cannot call on his shepherds, who have as yet to feel at home there. The result is unpopulated pastoral, in which the elements of nature take on the roles normally played by humans in the pastoral landscape. It is the sun whose glances flash down the nameless creek between the mountains; the creek is “duskily befringed” with feathery swamp-oaks, turning its pools into seductive eyes; the mountains themselves become sheep as the breeze blows over “their rough enormous backs deep fleeced with wood.”⁵

This magnification and inversion of the pastoral order—inversion, because traditionally in pastoral the natural elements are responsive to human need, whereas here they lead a life of their own, usurping human characteristics—is accompanied by effects which simply escape categorization altogether, nameless energies, strange forces emanating from the land and its features:

… the wide upslanting sea
Of fanning leaves in the descending rays
Danced interdazzlingly, as if the trees
That bore them, were all thrilling,—tingling all
Even to the roots for very happiness;
So prompted from within, so sentient, seemed
The bright quick motion—wildly beautiful.

“Happiness” barely does justice to such electric effects. “Wildly beautiful” comes closer: elsewhere he refers to “the wild magnificence” of the view before the shepherds. Harpur habitually uses the epithet “wild” to describe this uncategorizeable quality of the uncultivated landscape which he clearly finds alluring, fascinating—and also threatening.

For the Aboriginals who murder the shepherds as they sleep are also the embodiment of this wild clement, not pastoral swains, but agents of death, “wild men whose wild speech hath no word for mercy!” (H [The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur] 169). The scene of the murder, on the banks of a creek deep in the bush, is presented as a macabre travesty of the pastoral ideal, one which portrays death as a form of marriage, as a testament to the alluring-threatening force of the wild:

And four stark corses, plundered to the skin
And brutally mutilated, seemed to stare
With frozen eyeballs up into the pale
Round visage of the Moon, who, high in heaven,
With all her stars, in golden bevies, gazed
As peacefully down as on a bridal there
Of the warm Living—not, alas! on them
Who kept in ghastly silence through the night
Untimely spousals with a desert death.

The full impact of this dark Australian idyll is felt when Harpur contrasts it with the kind of scene that the moon and its bevies of stars would normally bless, English in character and classical in lineage,

… a gay clique of maidens, met
In village tryst, and interwhirling all
In glad Arcadian dances on the green.

The “wild” pastoral of the Australian bush and its indigenous inhabitants is by nature undefined, unformed—it is felt as a force working against the traditional pastoral economy, unsettling and negating its priorities. Kendall's surging rhythms, his “lyrics with beats like the heart-beats of Passion,” seem driven by the same kind of energy that invests Harpur's images with their thrilling power.⁶ This beat, “the pulse of wind and torrent” as he calls it (K [The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall] 143), catches up the decorous personifications which inhabit his pastoral scenes, then casts them aside, tripping awkwardly, effete survivors from an outworn tradition. His funereal landscapes are more somber, more gloomy, more desolate than Harpur's, the burying ground of his ambitions as a poet and as a man. Sometimes the dead mourned there are Aboriginals, killed by Aboriginals, as if death was the only history these places had ever known.

It is these funereal landscapes, and particularly in those which hold a dead shepherd's grave where the live shepherd's song should resound, by the creek in the wooded glen or guily, that the challenge to the pastoral aspirations of the would-be Australian poet is most intensely felt. In a celebrated essay Erwin Panofsky traced the shift in the use of this motif, the grave in the Arcadian grove, from its somber monitory application by Guercino to its more melancholy treatment in the hands of Poussin, in the first half of the seventeenth century.⁷ The essay points to a shift in attitude to the power of death at a moment in the history of European art. When the motif appears in Australian pastoral two centuries later, it has a more concrete application. The strong sense one has from the poetry of Harpur and Kendall is that the pastoral site has become a battleground, a site of literary contestation between some “wild” aesthetic, as yet unformulated but whose allure is clearly felt, and the established principles of the pastoral form. But this is to put it in purely formal terms. In reality these sites were bloody battlegrounds, as the squatters, expanding westwards through the nineteenth century, sought to claim for their flocks and herds the hunting grounds and the watering places inhabited by the Aboriginals. Since the Aboriginal and the shepherd were in this respect mutually exclusive types, the conflict between them is registered in the poetry as a derangement at the very foundations of the pastoral order, as when Harpur describes, in “The Spectre of the Cattle Flat,” how in “the elbow of a creek,” a tribe

… was pent, and held at bay,
Till there, like sheep, in one close heap,
Their slaughtered bodies lay.

Or how Ned Connor, who had killed an Aboriginal in full view of his shepherd's hut, looks Narcissus-like into the waters of a brook to find not his own image looking back at him but that of the black man he had slain. Typically, there is an inversion of the conventional features of the pastoral scene, the depths of night for noon or afternoon, a mist-shrouded moon instead of the shaded sun, not a breeze but a wind “like the motion of snakes” (H 220), or one that sobs or wails or weeps, tormenting the woodland so that it groans and mutters “like a monster vexed with dreams” (K 28). The air is filled with the shrieks and screams of the curlew or the mopoke, the howl of the dingo. The creek chafes and moans, or roars in a rapid torrent. And in the center of the scene the grave, “the gorge with a grave in the mouth of it,” in Kendall's memorable phrase:

Never there hovers a hope of the Spring by it—
Never a glimmer of yellow and green:
Only the bat with a whisper of wing by it
Flits like a life out of flesh and unseen.

This is from Kendall's poem “The Curse of Mother Flood,” where the grave testifies not to the conflict between white and Aboriginal but to the murderous deeds of a witchlike “mother,” crimes against nature so horrific that they cannot be spoken of, “Sin without name to it—man never heard of it / Crime that would startle a fiend from his lair” (K 206). The scenes of white and Aboriginal contestation carry the same deep sense of unnaturalness, for they suggest the crime of fratricide, the killing of brother by brother. Harpur insistently associates the grave in the glen with the first grave in the world, “That first bleak scar in the Earth's new mould / Which stretched over Abel in Eden of old” (H 221), thus paradoxically granting the justice of the Aboriginal claim, for as Cain to the white man's Abel, the Aboriginal is recognized as a brother in possession. The association usually requires the Aboriginal to be Cain, the murderous party. Yet here there is another inversion, for the biblical allegory has Cain the cultivator supplanting Abel the herdsman, whereas in the Australian application it is Cain as an earlier type, the nomadic hunter, who threatens the claim of an Abel who is both herdsman and cultivator, in this way reversing the march of civilization.

Inasmuch as it represents a reversal in the supposedly natural order of things, the grave stands as a negation of the ideal of pastoral fulfillment. Where it contains the body of an Aboriginal, it testifies to the passing of an idyllic though primitive way of life; where the body is that of a shepherd, it points to the denial of an Arcadian future. In consequence the grave is usually portrayed as a sterile mound—yet it is never allowed to be wholly so. In “The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave,” Harpur allows one blue flower to spring from “the dry lips of a broken clod,” as if the grave itself, despite carrying the corpse of a white settler, nevertheless represents a primary act of cultivation, the first turning of “the else-unborached primeval sod” (H 220-21), and therefore the first step toward a new cultivated pastoral taken here at the heart of the threatening wild. There is also the sense, implicit in the presentation of the grave, that to die and be buried in the land is at last to be at home in it—for all their sterility, Harpur's graves are “bestrewn with leaves, and withered spraylets” (H 172), and mourned by the trees, so that the land seems to be grieving over its own. In Kendall's “The Glen of Arawatta,” a poem similar to Harpur's “The Creek of the Four Graves” in its focus on a white squatter ambushed by Aboriginals while exploring beyond the limits of cultivation, and in its presentation of a pastoral setting which is alluring and threatening at the same time, the squatter appears at home in the wild, comforted by its beauty, nourished by its fruits, seduced into dreamy recollection by the “sweet though alien sound” of the creeks in its gorges. The lonely grave which holds his body may be a long way from his English village home and its conventional pastoral consolations, but it is a resting place in its own right,

… in soft Australian nights;
And through the furnaced noons; and in the times
Of wind and wet!

It is as if in adopting the perspective of the wild, in being at home in it, he had already died to the old ways, so that the grave marks his passing not from the land but into it, to be celebrated in the poet's song as “a marvel” and a legend. By contrast, in “The Wail in the Native Oak,” when Kendall's wayfarer in the melancholy glen confronts what he takes to be an Aboriginal grave, the fact that it is Aboriginal only heightens his own sense of exclusion from the land, not only because of the guilt he shares for the murderous act committed there but because the grave stands for the tribe which has passed from the place, for the tales and traditions which must remain unknown to him, for an intimate communion with the land which he can never hope to share.

Notes

1. Virgil, The Eclogues and The Georgics, tr. Cecil Day Lewis (Oxford, 1983), p. 3.

2. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1967), p. 3.

3. William Charles Wentworth, Australasia (1823; rpt. Sydney, 1982), p. 5.

4. Wentworth, p. 18.

5. The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur, ed. Elizabeth Perkins (Sydney, 1984), pp. 161-62; hereafter cited in text as H.

6. The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall, ed. T. T. Reed (Adelaide, 1966), p. 84: hereafter cited in text as K.

7. See Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadio Ego: Poussin and the Elegaic Tradition,” in his Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York, 1955), pp. 295-320.