SOURCE: "Barbara Baynton and the Dissidence of the Nineties," in Overland, No. 22, December, 1961, pp. 15-20.

In terms of the Legend, the Australian period of the nineties was distinguished by its fervent celebration of a robust nationalism, particularly manifested through its belief in the value of the Australian personality; but "periods" have an untidy habit of contradicting themselves, and there is also discernible in the writings of the nineties an undercurrent of revolt against the barbarous fate of being an Australian. The ambivalent attitude is admirably represented in A. H. Adams' poem "The Australian," with its attempt to reconcile the contradictions in the contemporary national perceptions.

The same tendency can be found elsewhere, sometimes surprisingly. Even so convinced a nationalist as Henry Lawson often shows a critical wryness when he is presenting typically Australian attitudes. That quality provides the cutting edge which makes a masterpiece of "The Union Buries Its Dead" and which intensifies the desolate scorn of "A Day on a Selection."

The attitude of revolt is plainly present in the Miles Franklin of My Brilliant Career, swinging her shillelagh against the stifling barbarities of cockiedom. The same tendency is revealed in the Norman Lindsay of Redheap, turning back after thirty years to attack the small-town puritans of the nineties. The book's weaknesses, even more clearly than its strengths, reveal the force of the rebellious tendency. Lindsay cannot achieve the detachment which his satire needs. Inner compulsions drive him to a wildness of caricature; he must flay his detested wowsers with improbable comic inventions—and he thereby reveals the headiness of an anger still effervescing after thirty years in the bottle.

Barbara Baynton represents this element of revolt against self-confident Australianism—less clearly perhaps than some others, partly because her fiction is intensely subjective, and partly because there is so little of it. Virtually all that survives of her writings is contained in two volumes. One is her novel Human Toll, which includes some of her most effective and characteristic writing, but which is too uncertain in the management of structure to be fully successful. The second is the little book called Bush Studies (1902), made up of the six short stories on which her claim to a place in the Australian canon mainly rests.

The bibliographies indicate the existence of a third volume called Cobbers, published by Duckworth in 1917; but this is, in fact, a re-publication of Bush Studies, with the addition of two other stories. The title is obviously a publisher's attempt to cash in on war-time sentimental interest in the Anzacs. No publisher is likely to achieve again a title so superbly unsuitable.

Perhaps we can best begin a consideration of the nature of Barbara Baynton's work by looking at the outline of the four stories in Bush Studies which are most characteristic of her writing methods. I regret this resort to so pedestrian an approach; but Baynton's work is so little known and so hard to come by that it would be unfair to assume the reader's familiarity with it—and some knowledge of the nature of its contents is necessary if the reader is to follow the implications which I find in it, and shall later discuss. Would that some enterprising publisher would restore Bush Studies to the availability which it deserves!

The first story in the book—"A Dreamer"—allows freer rein than her taut grimness usually permits to a sentimental tendency underlying Barbara Baynton's work. It is concerned with a woman returning to the bush-home of her childhood in order to see the mother from whom she has been long parted. She is surprised to find no-one at the station to meet her, so that she must make the three-mile journey on foot. Not a long distance, certainly; but the track is vague and difficult, the night is dark, rain is pouring down, and the creeks are in dangerous flood. The woman must fight every yard of the way, held to her task by the intensity of her desire to see her mother again and by the equally intense need to protect the child which she carries in her womb. Barbara Baynton's vivid practicality of description compels the reader to fight that journey almost step by step with her heroine. Eventually she battles her way to the right side of the creek, and reaches the house—to find that her mother has died some hours before.

That is no snappy, 0. Henry surprise-ending. A detail placed early in the story warns the reader what to expect. The tautness with which we follow the journey is intensified by our pre-knowledge of its futility.

"Squeaker's Mate" is concerned with a selector and his wife. The man is a repulsive creature—feckless, bone lazy, dull, callously selfish. The woman knows what he is but retains her love for him. She holds the farm together, fighting to establish residential claims to the selection by shouldering the main burden of the work. When the story opens the two are felling a tree with a cross-cut saw. The man soon wearies of the work, and wanders off on a transparent excuse. His wife, rather than waste the time of his absence, attacks the tree with an axe. As it topples, she lingers a moment too long in an attempt to free the trapped axe, and a snapped branch breaks her back.

The man on his return is too densely self-centred to realise what has happened. It is left to neighbors coming on the scene to get her to the house, to summon medical help, and eventually to make the husband recognise the situation. Even then he is indifferent. In a characteristic sentence, Baynton says "They (the neighbors) told him in whispers what they thought of him, and left."

Now the wife must lie on her bunk and know that the farm which she has heroically constructed is slipping through her husband's feckless hands. He sells off half his sheep to the local butcher. Then he disappears to the nearest town on a spree, leaving primitive food and a supply of water within reach of his wife. When he returns, he insists upon moving her from the shack to a near-by lean-to. Then he disappears again to town. He returns with a red-haired and pregnant barmaid whom he installs in the shack.

The wife's bitterness is the more intense because she has borne no child. With a characteristic irony, Baynton points out that, had she calculated the dates, she would have realised that the barmaid was not bearing the husband's child either.

Now there begins a long cold war between the couple in the shack and the wife and her fiercely loyal dog in the lean-to. It reaches a climax when the husband goes off after a bolting horse. He is away some hours. The day is hot and the barmaid exhausts her supply of water. She is too afraid of snakes to go to creek for more. She knows that there is water beside the wife, but she is afraid of her too. Eventually her thirst becomes too much for her, and she ventures into the lean-to. As she stoops for the water, the wife seizes her rival—even in her crippled condition, her work-toughened muscles are too strong for the flabby town-girl.

As they struggle, the man returns and frees his mistress by smashing a pole across his wife's arms. The barmaid rushes off in the general direction of town—the presumption is that she will be lost in the bush; and the wife's dog leaps to attack her assailant.

In an attempt to persuade her to call off the dog, the husband kneels on the bunk, assuring his wife that he cares only for her. The story ends with the dog fastening his teeth in the man's hand and dragging him back from the bunk.

"Scrammy 'And" begins with an affectionately humorous portrayal of eccentric character—a kind of writing which Baynton has essayed on one other occasion, in Human Toll, each time with notable success. The eccentric here is a hatter, brought alive for us through a long monologue with his dog—or, rather, a dialogue, for Baynton supplies the answers of the dog as his master interprets them.

In the course of this passage the situation is established for us. The hatter works for a selector to whom he is strongly attached, and whose wife he regards with a hostility bred from jealousy and the prejudices of the professional misogynist. The couple, when the story opens, have gone off to town, where the wife is to have her baby. They are due back at any moment, and the hatter awaits their return anxiously.

The sharpness of his anxiety is due to his fears of a sinister figure known as "Scrammy 'And"—the nickname refers to the hook which replaces one of his hands. This unprepossessing person has been lurking about the hatter's hut, and it seems likely that he has learnt the hatter's closely guarded secret of a hoard of sovereigns, his life's savings, which he counts over each night with lingering glee. The hatter has wishfully convinced himself that Scrammy 'And has gone off, but it is clear to the reader that the dog scents his presence in the shadows beyond the hut.

The hatter retires to his bunk, where he dies of a sudden heart attack—this episode is economically and dryly presented, with no nineteenth century licking-of-the-lips on the theme of death.

Now Scrammy 'And advances from the shadows, and a complex and vividly presented campaign follows, between the dog and the would-be thief. Eventually the thief forces an entry through the hut's roof, wounds the dog, finds the dead body, and flees in terror. For another day and a half, the dog remains on guard, protecting his master against the possible return of Scrammy 'And, and against the flies which he will not allow near the body.

His vigil ends when the selector and his wife re-appear. The man is at once aware of something amiss, for Scrammy 'And has released the sheep from their enclosure in an attempt to draw off the dog by the call of his pastoral duties. The selector goes to investigate, and the story ends thus:

He entered the hut through the broken doorway, but immediately came out to assure himself that his wife had not moved. The sight inside of that broken-ribbed dog's fight with those buzzing horrors, and the reproach in his wild eyes, was a memory that the man was not willing that she should share.

"The Chosen Vessel" is certainly the most firmly built of Baynton's stories, and the best known, although most readers will have met it under the title of "The Tramp," the name used when it was reprinted, towards the end of Barbara Baynton's life, in Dr. Mackaness' Australian Short Stories (1928). In that version an incident has been excised, rendering the original title unsuitable.

The story begins with the wife of a shearer, who is away from his home, performing the task of penning the calf for the night—a frightening task for her (she is a town girl), because she must face the maternal anger of the cow, who disapproves of this separation.

On this day she is settling the calf earlier than usual, for she has been disturbed by the appearance at the hut of a tramp, who has not been deceived by strategems designed to convince him that there is a man in the house, and whose eye has suggested lustful intentions. She proceeds to make the house as fast as she can. She forces the handle of a spade under the bar of the front door, and drives the blade deep into a crack in the floor, and similarly barricades the back door. Then she retires to bed with her baby, and waits.

Soon the tramp can be heard stealthily working his way round the hut. He finds the loose log in the wall, held only by a wedge, and attacks it with his knife. The woman throws her arms round the baby so as to shield its vital parts. The sound outside mysteriously ceases. Then a horseman can be heard galloping down the track. She picks up the baby and tries to rush out, but her own barricades delay her, and by the time she reaches the track, the horseman has passed; the tramp, who has foreseen her movements, is waiting in the shadows of the trees.

The scene is shifted to the home of a Catholic farmer who has just quarrelled with his mother. The electoral candidate favoured by the priest is too much a "squatter's man" to be accepted by the farmer, and for once he refuses to vote as a good son of the Church, despite his mother's persuasions. He rides down belatedly to the town to cast his vote. On the way he sees through the trees a woman draped in white carrying a baby. Obviously this is a vision of the Virgin Mary, sent to warn him. He rides on, casts his vote for the Catholic candidate, and then hurries to the priest to report the miracle. Having heard the tale, the priest bursts out: "Great God! and you did not stop to save her! Have you not heard?"

The viewing-point shifts again to a boundary-rider approaching the woman's house, observing eight sheep killed apparently by a dingo. Seeing the crows dipping towards earth and rising again, he deduces that there is a sheep destroyed there with a lamb still alive, for "even a dingo will spare a lamb sometimes." He is only metaphorically right. What he finds is the strangled body of the woman, her hand still clutching the dress of the babe, which is stirring from its sleep and beginning to grow frightened of the unnatural figure beside it.

Many miles further down the creek a man kept throwing an old cap into a water-hole. The dog would bring it out and lay it on the opposite side to where the man stood, but would not allow the man to catch him, though it was only to wash the blood of the sheep from his mouth and throat, for the sight of blood made the man tremble. But the dog also was guilty.

In the anthologised version of the story, the episode of the Catholic voter is omitted. It seems likely that either the editor or the authoress, looking back in a softened mood, felt that the sectarian assumptions of the episode were undesirably offensive to Catholic readers. One's first impulse is to regret this destruction of a strikingly devised incident, effectively echoing the story's rhythmic emphasis of the maternal instinct.

Yet, in fact, the excision improves the story. The incident weakens an important element in the tale's concentrated power, because it breaks from the claustrophobic setting of the hut in the bush; and its too-devised irony dissipates the tight-lipped terror of the tale's atmosphere.

This accidental remedying of a technical misjudgment interestingly illustrates the enormous difficulty of the storyteller's art. The episode is, in itself, a brilliantly imaginative touch; it fits snugly to the rhythm of idea underlying the story. Yet, for reasons that seem tenuous, it is wrong. What author, having been visited by so happy-seeming an inspiration, could have seen that it was wrong, without the intervention of chance?

This rehearsing of Barbara Baynton's plots cannot, of course, give much indication of the quality of her stories; indeed it may merely suggest a comically thumping emphasis on the gruesome and on melodrama—and that is not all the effect of the stories. Baynton's power arises from the controlled strength of her narration, and from the sense of truth built up by the rightness of her detail.

Occasionally—she is, after all, an Australian writer of the nineties—Baynton falls into cliche. Rather more often she is trapped by another common fault of her period; there is a too-obvious relishing of the intended well-turned phrase which is in fact conventional. These are, however, minor blemishes. More usually she writes with a spare muscularity, the weight borne firmly on verb and noun, with little of the dissipating flourish of adjective and adverb.

She has an unusually sure power of visualisation. She does not create her story in broad sweeps of the imagination, as writers of her type generally do; she sees it detail by detail with an assured concreteness. That spade driven in beside the door is typical of the practical firmness with which she grips her narrative. She does not obviously seek to build up atmospheric effect. She simply sees what is happening and conveys it with the austere directness of her style at its best; so that the reader must sit behind her eyes and see with their feminine, pouncing accuracy.

I have not, then, retailed the outlines of her plots in order to suggest the quality of her stories. I have been seeking rather to suggest something about their nature. Even from these outlines it should be clear that these stories are the literature of nightmare. They are akin to the stories of Algernon Blackwood and Richard Middleton, and other writers of a popular genre of the period. Perhaps they are more closely akin to the work of Emily Bronte—although there is no metaphysic of good and evil behind Barbara Baynton's stories, as there is behind Wuthering Heights.

It is noticeable that certain nightmare symbols tend to recur in these tales—and all of them recur again in the novel Human Tol. There is, for example, that lonely bush shack, besieged by a terrifying and invisible figure, who is also a terrified figure. There is the loyalty of the dog contrasted with the treachery of man. There is an insistent dwelling on the fierce, and often futile, power of the maternal instinct. A child's birth must be dragged in to "Scrammy 'And"; and in "Squeaker's Mate", the bitterness of the barren woman must be underlined. There is a re-iterated emphasis on man's brutality towards woman. Sometimes this is an essential element in the story, as in "Squeaker's Mate"; more often it is an incidental detail forced into the story by some compulsion within the writer's mind. For example in the opening movement of "The Chosen Vessel," Baynton writes:

She used to run at first when the cow bellowed its protest against the penning-up of its calf. This satisfied the cow, also the calf, but the woman's husband was angry and called her—the noun was cur. It was he who forced her to run and meet the advancing cow, brandishing a stick, and uttering threatening words till the enemy turned and ran. "That's the way," the man said, laughing at her white face. In many things he was worse than the cow, and she wondered if the same rule would apply to the man, but she was not one to provoke skirmishes, even with the cow.

This is a story written with an obviously deliberate economy of style. There was no need to create the figure of the husband—his absence from the house is all the story demands of him. How vividly that passage does create him; and how significant is the unnecessariness of that creation, revealing a compulsive sub-conscious movement of Baynton's mind.

Observing these recurrent nightmare symbols, and the frequently slight need for their presence, one almost inevitably asks, "What would Freud make of this?" I don't care much what the answer may be; for I suspect that when the psychoanalyst reconstructs a writer's sub-conscious from the evidence of his published work, he is usually blissfully and unprovably wrong. The significant point is that we do ask the question, that we here feel that we are moving in Freudian country, that the essential motive behind Barbara Baynton's writing is some need to free a burdened subconscious by the relief of symbolic expression.

Although this is the literature of nightmare, it is, at one point, strikingly unlike the work of such writers as Blackwood or Middleton. With them the nightmare terror springs from the touch of unreality which they deliberately import into the story, the shiver of the supernatural vibrating from some slight detail which is nevertheless the core of the story's atmospheric effect. Barbara Baynton is an Australian writer, and she is true to the most persistent characteristic of that breed: she firmly roots her stories in the soil of the actual. She creates the line of the story, and its symbolic detail, from the pressure of nightmare impulse; but she creates the sort of things which do happen. Her episodes are the events of life-as-it-is. Her characters—at least her men—are often pushed to the limit of the probably evil; but they are not pushed over that limit. They are not Heathcliffes, unacceptable on the level of the actual.

Moreover her episodes and her characters grow from the soil of the environment with which she is concerned. You can feel the Australian bush about them, shaping them into the forms which they assume. Baynton obviously knows bush-life with a deep intimacy and with something of the insider's pride—though perhaps she hates it, too. One can sense that she belongs to the freemasonry of the bush. One can feel her giving the lodge-grip, as she writes "The hospitality of the bush never extends to the loan of a good horse to an inexperienced rider," or as she relates the scorn of Billy Sky wonkie for the city artist who had painted his horses drinking. The painter had called his picture "The Lake"—it wasn't a lake, it was a dam; and he had shown the horses sharing the water with frogs—fancy horses drinking water covered with frog's spit. Baynton loathes the abominable Billy—but surely she belongs to his lodge.

The terror and revulsion which Baynton is expressing belong, then, to the bush-life which is present in her work with a convincing actuality. What, then, are the qualities in that life which have pressed the writer into revolt against it? We can best pick up the clue to the answer to that question, if we look at the two remaining stories of Bush Studies. These are not terror stories, but simple farces of observation, almost without plot. Outwardly they are sardonically comic; inwardly they are filled with a savage revulsion of feeling.

"Bush Church" concerns a parson's visit to an isolated out-back settlement. The first person the parson falls in with happens to be the local loafer and joker, Ned. Scenting a leg-pulling opportunity, Ned offers to visit the selections in the district and advertise the parson's intention to hold a service at the squatter's homestead on the following day. Then Ned spreads the news that the squatter has brought up a Government inspector who is going to try to break the selector's claims, and that there is to be a meeting at the homestead. The selectors and their families duly turn up, armed with their papers and ready to battle for their rights—only to find that the waggish Ned has let them in for a church service. The subsequent proceedings are thoroughly farcical.

The feeling of the story can best be conveyed by quoting a few typical passages:

An older girl, bare-footed and dressed in a petticoat and old hat, was standing near a fire before the wide opening that served as a doorway to the humpy. She had a long stick and was employed in permitting an aged billy-goat to bring his nose within an inch of the simmering water in the bucket strung over the fire… The thirsty billy was sneaking up again to the water, and she let him advance the prescribed limit before she made the jab that she enjoyed so thoroughly.

The clergyman gave out the text and the sermon began. Jyne's children commenced to complain of being "'ungry" and a fair-sized damper was taken from a pillow-slip. This, together with two tin tots and a bottle of goat's milk was given to Jinny and she was told to do "thet sharin".

For a short space only the voice of the preacher was heard, as, in studied stoicism, he pursued his thankless task. Occasionally they looked at him to see "'oo 'e wus speakin' ter," but, finding nothing directly personal, even this attention ceased.

Liz leaned across to Tilly Lumber and asked, "Fowl layin'?"

"Ketch 'em a-layin' at Chrissermus".

"Billy Skywonkie" is less comic and with bitterer undertones. A woman has accepted a post as housekeeper at an outback sheep-run. After a long train journey through desolate country in the company of drunken drovers, she is met at the siding by Billy Skywonkie, the rouseabout. (The nickname refers to the weather-prophecy in which Billy is reputedly skilled, but the present drought has proved too much for his prognostic powers.)

On the drive back to the homestead Billy makes a wide detour to visit the local wine-shop for refreshment and flirtation with the slut whom it houses. In all that rich gallery of sordid bush-shanties which is one of the glories of our national literature, this is the outright winner for sheer squalor.

They drive on with pauses for reference to the bottle which Billy has bought at the shanty. When they reach the homestead, it proves almost as sordid as the shanty. Soon the boss arrives, and indicates bluntly that the woman is too old for the real duties of the "housekeeper's" position.

Again the story's nature may best be conveyed by a few quotations:

He shouted an oath of hatred at the crows following after the tottering sheep that made in a straggling line for the water … "They putty well lives on eyes! Blanky bush chinkies! I call 'em No-one can't tell 'em apart".

There is a reason for this violent Sinomania. Billy is married—de facto, at least—to a half-caste Aboriginal, and ashamed of it. So he compensates by a violent contempt for the Chinese and for the whites who make use of their girls.

" 'Know what I'll do to Lizer soon as she begins to start naggin' at me? … Fill 'er mug with this,' and the shut fist he shook was more than a mugful."

This is mere braggadocio. When Lizer does open up, Billy mutely accepts it. "On a block lay a flitch of bacon, and across the freshly-cut side the dog drew its tongue, then snapped at the flies. 'That dog will eat the bacon,' she said.

" 'No!' answered the [Chinese] cook.' 'E no eat 'em—too saw.'

"It was salt; she had tried it for breakfast."

Whence arises the savage distaste which almost smothers the comedy of these stories? It is not, be it noted, the outsider's revulsion, the contemptuous snobbery of the townee towards the uncivilised rustic. Baynton does not look at that bush congregation through the eyes of the visiting parson; she has more contempt for his ineffectuality than for the selector's barbarity. Indeed there are moments of admiration, in these stories, for the bush-dwellers' steady stoicism and for their mastery of the practical crafts of their vocation. Barbara Baynton is a member of the Lodge. One senses that, if an outsider had attacked the bush-dwellers, she would have closed ranks in their defence.

But a strength of anger is plainly there, and it is directed against the peasant element in Australian bush life. Baynton is by no means the only writer who has been driven into an extremity of satiric rage, a compulsive thrashing contempt, when he or she has been confronted by the Australian peasant.

The force of the anger arises from the writer's feeling that the peasant element shouldn't be there. It is a denial of the Australian Legend; one of the articles of faith of that legend was the belief that Australian rural life was not a peasant's life, that the free and self-reliant Australian had broken away from the peasant's humilities and humiliations. When Furphy, for example, presents us with his contemptuous portraits of Sollicker, the feudal underling from Sussex, or the comic Chinese boundary-riders, he is clearly implying that they represent the peasant decadence from which native Australian life is free.

Now it is true that, on the stations and cattle-runs, the men of Australia had achieved an unpeasant-like initiative and independence. It is further true that on this rock the Australian pride is ultimately based. But it is not true that there was no peasant element in Australian rural life. It was there in the selectors of the dry country, in the near descendants of the convicts, in the Irish immigrants. When the Australian writer found himself confronted by this peasant survival he reacted with satiric fury, because it denied the Australian's proud vision of the sort of man he believed himself to be.

Once one has observed the obvious peasant element which Baynton satirises in "Bush Church" and "Billy Skywonkie," one realises that the same element is present more subtly in the terror stories. It is there in the naked matter-of-fact violence of lust which these stories portray (the lusts—for women and money—are the lusts of all men; it is the naked matter-of-fact violence which has a peasant quality). It is there in the inevitable sordidness of extreme poverty, in the easy acceptance of cruelty, in the brutal masculine domination over women. One can find the same qualities recorded in other peasant literatures, but with this difference: the European delineator of peasant life accepts these qualities as a matter of course, and seeks the more imaginatively interesting qualities which underlie them. The Australian is so affronted by their recrudescence in the land of freedom that he cannot get beyond them.

The terror in Baynton's stories partly arises from these peasant qualities in the life she knows; but it partly arises from another element which is more exclusively Australian—the sense of the crushing isolation of bush-life. It is noticeable that Baynton creates situations which emphasise that isolation. The recurrent image of innocence besieged in the islanded shack—surely through that image there speaks the authentic voice of the bush-woman, freeing her spirit of the fears and resentments which her isolation breeds.

There is something else too, I believe, less palpable, less easy to establish by documentation: a sense of spiritual darkness emanating from the land itself, a feeling of a primeval cruelty fed by the sunlight which glares instead of glowing, by the sombre grey of the bush which some obstinate Europeanism within us insists should be green, by the brown weight of the plains, by the harshness of man's struggle against nature.

That sense of a spiritual darkness emanating from the land itself touches Australian writing again and again; and almost always it seems to come from a deeper layer of the mind than the easy optimism, the simplicity of faith, which are more constantly present. There is a sense in which Patrick White is more traditionally Australian than is generally supposed. The feeling which I have been describing finds effective expression in the terror stories of Barbara Baynton.

You may claim that I am here guilty of a blatant contradiction. I have said that Baynton's terror-impulse comes from subjective and sub-conscious need; and I am now claiming that it represents some mystic emanation from the Australian land. You may reasonably object that I cannot have it both ways.

I believe that I can. I believe that sometimes the inner compulsions of a writer's individual need meet and mate with some element in the life and environment which he or she is interpreting; and I believe that when that happens, a propulsive imaginative power is generated. If you doubt that, if you feel that it is merely a Literary Gent's easy generalisation, I ask you to test it against the work of Emily Bronte, of Dostoievsky, of Herman Melville. For all her subjective compulsions, Barbara Baynton's power is an essentially Australian power; it is none the less so because she is also unique among Australian writers.