SOURCE: Nesbitt, Bruce. “Literary Nationalism and the 1890s.” Australian Literary Studies 5, no. 1 (May 1971): 3-17.

[In the following essay, Nesbitt recounts the debate between realism and romanticism conducted by Henry Lawson and “Banjo” Paterson in the pages of the Bulletin during the 1890s, suggesting its impact in accelerating Australian literary nationalism.]

As every culture advances toward maturity, R. W. B. Lewis has suggested, it seems ‘to produce its own determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it’.¹ In the nineteenth century, Australians certainly participated enthusiastically in numerous controversies about the great issues of each decade: civil and religious liberties, economic theory, and the political future of the colonies. Many of these issues were resolved by the end of the century, yet none of them had emerged as Australia's ‘own determining debate’. Australia's culture was still unformed, if Lewis is also correct in suggesting that the debate ‘may be said to be the culture, at least on its loftiest levels; for a culture achieves identity not so much through the ascendancy of one particular set of convictions as through the emergence of its peculiar and distinctive dialogue.’²

In 1892, however, readers of the Sydney Bulletin saw the beginnings of an argument which developed into the single most significant event in the history of Australian literary nationalism. This controversy, with Henry Lawson at its centre, was in fact a coherent debate about the nature of Australia and the role of literature in shaping a colonial society. It was not the only debate in the Bulletin's columns, nor was it regarded at the time as an influential contribution to Australia's intellectual history, but the literary issues it raised later provided a focus for other non-literary debates, and helped draw them together into a distinguishing cultural dialogue.

Perhaps because it was not conducted at any particularly lofty level, the importance of the debate has been underestimated in Australian literary and social history. It began as a duel in doggerel between Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, and their biographers, among others, have been content to accept Paterson's recollections written nearly forty-seven years after the ‘undignified affair’. But it did not stop there, and its literary results have become in the twentieth century a primary source of the Australian ‘identity’ itself.

I

The debate began when Lawson's ‘Borderland’—later retitled ‘Up the Country’—was published in the Bulletin on 9 July 1892. This light piece of doggerel was a frontal attack on the assumptions and conventions of Australian literature's mood of romance, the mood prompting innumerable poets to idealize Australia's arid outback ‘bush’. The ‘sunny plains’ of the bush were actually ‘burning wastes of barren soil and sand’; its ‘ranges’, ‘barren ridges’; and its ‘shining rivers’, ‘strings of muddy waterholes’. The bush, moreover, rather than breeding a new race of free men embodying the virtues of the ‘true’ Australia, had instead produced a barbarized race of ‘gaunt and haggard women’ who ‘live alone and work like men’. Lawson's lighthearted conclusion—that he will stay in town drinking beer and lemon-squashes—scarcely concealed his serious intent:

I believe the Southern poet's dream will not be realised
Till the plains are irrigated and the land is humanised.

The Australian environment, that is, had to be seen as it is: fit for idealized description only if it is changed. If man is to conquer the land before he is conquered by it, he must seize it completely, ‘humanise’ it by accepting, understanding, and describing its grim reality.

Paterson, by 1892 one of the Bulletin's better-known authors of romantic ‘bush poetry’, replied to Lawson two weeks later. The title of ‘In Defence of the Bush’ (23 July 1892) indicates how thoroughly he misunderstood Lawson's ‘Borderland’, or at least how determined he was to evade the literary issue. For this first poem ‘In Defence of the Bush’—his only two contributions to the debate both had the same title—was an inexplicably personal diatribe against Lawson himself. To Lawson's charge that the bush would never be understood by romanticizing it, Paterson replied that Lawson was grossly misleading. Instead of describing the bush as a ‘land of no delight’, Lawson should have told of the singing ‘in the shearers' huts at night’, the carol of the magpies, and the ‘chiming of the bell-birds’. ‘But, perchance, the wild birds' music by your senses was despised.’ If (as he suggested in 1939) Paterson knew Lawson well enough to have agreed to contrive the debate, then he also knew about Lawson's chronic deafness.³

As for Lawson's attacks on the conventions of idealization, Paterson suggested that he was merely ignorant. The bush changed with the seasons, as any ‘loyal’ bushman knew. And those barbarized inhabitants of the bush: ‘Were their faces sour and saddened like your “faces in the street”’? Lawson, of course, had consistently attacked the dehumanizing influences of urban life in his verse and stories, just as he had suggested in ‘His Father's Mate’ (22 December 1888) how man could triumph over that barren landscape of the outback which was his moral allegory. Paterson concluded that Lawson

          had better stick to Sydney and make merry with ‘the push’,
For the bush will never suit you, and you'll never suit the bush.

Lawson could scarcely have missed the irony of being associated with the larrikin gangs he detested as symptoms of the depersonalized city, as well as being told that he would ‘never suit the bush’ on the very day that the Bulletin published ‘The Drover's Wife’.

‘In Answer to “Banjo”, and otherwise’ (6 August 1892, later revised as ‘The City Bushman’) was Lawson's systematic attempt to reply to all of Paterson's accusations, except for satirical comments on ‘the push’ (which he reserved for an anonymous ‘Sydney larrikin ballad’, ‘Billy's “Square Affair”’, published on 5 November 1892) together with a rather oblique thrust at Paterson personally in ‘The Grog-an'-Grumble Steeplechase’ (10 September 1892). But his central concern was to return the debate to its literary basis. The bushman was not ‘a poet's dummy’: ‘Droving songs are very pretty, but they merit little thanks / From the people of a country which is ridden by the Banks’. The ‘Eldorado of the poets of the West’ may come, Lawson suggests, but not until Australian authors portray exactly the conditions that must be reformed.

Lawson might have been less oblique if he had seen Paterson's second ‘Defence of the Bush’ (1 October 1892): a sustained attack on Lawson's abilities, integrity, and nationalism. Choosing to ignore Lawson's reason for beginning their debate, he accused Lawson of morbidity, ‘of writing about “corpses” and “the tomb”’. Repeating his simple-minded charge that Lawson was in some way attacking the bush itself, Paterson implied that Lawson was opposed to a poet (such as himself) who ‘thinks there's something healthy in the bushlife after all’. The bushman can stand the rough life ‘if he's built of sterling stuff’; Lawson would presumably have Australians ‘herd into the cities’, ‘learn to hate the bush’, and perhaps ‘sneak across to England’.

Lawson was obviously puzzled by Paterson's response, and the Bulletin printed his ‘Poets of the Tomb’ (8 October 1892) a week later. Refuting the charge that his verse was morbid, he continued to expand his defence into a more general theme: literature's value as an instrument for the reformation of the present state of Australian society. The real ‘poets of the tomb’ were those ‘bush poets’ (as the Bulletin called them) who perpetuated the conventions of romantic melancholy, those writers of ‘vanished hopes’ who refused to acknowledge life around them.

Lawson had begun the debate, then, with three charges: that idealization of the bush falsified the ‘true’ Australia, that the conventional diction of idealization was a barrier to accepting the outback as it was, and that the outback's real inhabitants could not be understood as long as the bushman of literary romance continued to be celebrated. Paterson's first answer was wholly disingenuous, for he turned the question away from literature: Lawson was not only denouncing Australia's outback and her people, but was also suggesting that urban life in Australia was more desirable than bush life. His second answer was more insidious, for he linked Lawson's (and by implication, any) attack on idealization with unhealthy morbidity and a variety of anti-Australianism. While Lawson had issued his challenge to romance in the name of literary nationalism, Paterson saw the challenge as an attack on literary nationalism. Whatever Paterson's motives in consistently turning a literary debate into a malicious and personal diatribe, his charges would haunt Lawson for at least a decade.

II

The debate, far from being over, had just begun. With the two cases put by Lawson and Paterson, the Bulletin opened its columns to other contributors; interestingly enough, the earliest reactions attacked Paterson's position nearly unanimously. ‘H.H.C.C.’ 's ‘The Overflow of Clancy (On reading the Banjo's “Clancy of the Overflow”)’ satirized the ‘bush-struck towny’ who perpetuates the conventions of ‘wattle and the bushman's lonely grave’ in his ‘romances’, and contrasted life under ‘the comic-op'ra stars’ with the life the poet had experienced as a bushman (20 August 1892). And Francis Kenna, writing as ‘K’, noted in ‘Banjo, of the Overflow’ (27 August 1892) how he was

                    tired of reading prattle of the sweetly-lowing cattle
Stringing out across the open with the bushman riding free.

Even the title of ‘M.T.’ 's ‘An Unorthodox Wail’ (3 September 1892) suggests the strength of the convention of celebrating bush life romantically. The author attacked both the stock phrases of colonial romanticism—specifically citing ‘solitudes awesome’, ‘infinite space’, and ‘the wail of the plover’, among others—as well as ‘bush poetry’ itself:

The sight of ‘a drover’ is deadly,
          The ‘crack of his whip’ drives me mad,
The low of wild cattle's depressing,
          And ‘the bleat of the sheep’ quite as bad.

W. E. Carew, however, wanted to make a simpler point. His ‘Tommy's Hut’ (4 February 1893), sentimental verse about the good old days at a ruined bush shanty, ended as

                    the dark enleadened scrawling shadows strive to tell
Of the men the bush has deadened with its mystic, subtle spell.

Lawson's original case for an Australian realism was obviously becoming obscured, as Edward Dyson further demonstrated. Dyson had already asked Paterson (without naming him) ‘why those fellers who go buildin' chipper ditties, / 'Bout the rosy times out drovin', an' the dust an' death of cities’ don't leave the cities and live in the bush (30 July 1892). A few weeks later, in ‘Re Those Bards’ (10 September 1892) he apparently thought that the debate could be resolved by his observation that the Australian outback ‘plains’ were both ‘splendid’ and ‘dreadful’:

                                                                                it depends on when they're seen.
And so the bards who bless the bush, or damn it in a song—
They both are right, but each of them decidedly is wrong.

John LeGay Brereton was at least aware that Lawson was talking about literature. His verse ‘From Shadowland’, a reference to Lawson's ‘Borderland’, ended with a toast to Lawson, but challenged him for not knowing Australia's ‘Sons of sin from sons of Song’ (3 September 1892). Realism, that is, was not a proper mode for verse.

Nevertheless for ‘Toby Twist’, as well as for numerous later contributors to the Bulletin, the debate raised a more disquieting problem. He acknowledged the central issue at stake, but as he put it in ‘On the Road’ (13 May 1893):

This realism blasts another romance of my youth:
          I recollect in boyhood's days I deemed the frowsy ‘bluey’
A theme for admiration. Ere I cut a wisdom-tooth
          I reverenced the ‘billy’ and the weird, romantic ‘coo-ee’.
I don't know that I'm better, if I'm wiser, for the truth.

Lawson, in the meantime, began sending the Bulletin what he found to be the truth about Australia. It was ‘towards the end of '92’ that Lawson ‘got £5 and a railway-ticket from the Bulletin and went to Bourke’ (21 January 1899). Whether or not Paterson's charges were responsible for Lawson's roaming, it did more than confirm his childhood memories of bush life. Like Stephen Crane's wanderings in the American west, Lawson's trip supplied material for some of his most mature work. And through this work, Lawson introduced a new mode of realism into Australian literature. The first literary result of his six-month trip to New South Wales' desolate interior was his well-known sketch ‘In a Dry Season’. Less well-known is that it was written as an explicit answer to Paterson. In the original version published in the Bulletin on 5 November 1892, Lawson ended the sketch with a note that it ‘is written more in sorrow than anything else, and if it lacks interest it isn't my fault’. Each paragraph, in fact, was a reply to one of Paterson's specific accusations, from the suggestion that his work was morbid (‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush’) to the charge that he did not know the country (‘Somebody said to me, “Yer wanter go outback, young man, if yer wanter see the country. …” I don't wanter; I've been there.’)

The companion to this story, ‘In a Wet Season’, published in the Bulletin one year later (2 December 1893), was similarly intended as an answer to Paterson. ‘In a Dry Season’ ends as a train pulls into drought-stricken Bourke; the second piece begins with a train leaving Bourke in the rain. Again Lawson described the erst-while heroes of Paterson's balladry as he saw them: at their best, ‘cheerfully and patiently dismal’, and at their worst, ‘apologies for men’. And instead of Paterson's ‘vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’, Lawson found something far closer to Marcus Clarke's ‘weird melancholy’.

In the short prose sketches which followed his trip outback, Lawson finally raised the debate from rhetoric to fact. Instead of talking about the debate in rhetorical doggerel, his prose sustained his arguments by their accomplishment. The sardonic humour and fragmented detail of ‘Crawlalong’ (4 February 1893) and ‘Hungerford’ (16 December 1893) marked the beginning of Australian literary nationalism's new ironic mood. Yet perhaps not unexpectedly, Lawson was still preoccupied with Paterson's invective. In ‘Hungerford’ he named a beaten-down old drover ‘Clancy’; as the sketch was first published in the Bulletin, Lawson wrote after Clancy's damnation of the Australian colonies, ‘Wonder whether he was “Banjo's” Clancy, formerly of the Overflow?’ And ‘Banjo’ Paterson even appeared in such trivial verse as his ‘St. Peter’ (8 April 1893). But after 1893 Lawson's fiction spoke for itself, and he resorted to rhetoric only in his verse and criticism.

The crucial point of the debate was finally reached on 18 November 1893, when Lawson published an article on ‘Some Popular Australian Mistakes’. More than any other single critical document of the Australian 'nineties, this short disconnected column buried in the Bulletin is the focal point of a decade. ‘Some Popular Australian Mistakes’ was Australia's first manifesto of literary realism.

The article consists of twenty-three points of fact and a conclusion. Most of Lawson's remarks concerned terminology in Australian writing, ranging from a simple statement on the correct use of slang (‘swag’, ‘sundowners’, and ‘super.’) to observations on romantic diction (‘there are no “mountains” out West; only ridges on the floors of hell’). Conventions of characterization were attacked as strongly as those of diction, for man, Lawson recognized early, was the true subject of literary nationalism: ‘the poetical bushman does not exist; the majority of the men out-back now are from the cities. The real native out-back bushman is narrow-minded, densely ignorant, invulnerably thick-headed. How could he be otherwise?’ His conclusion was so baldly and clearly stated that even Paterson could not misunderstand it:

We wish to Heaven that Australian writers would leave off trying to make a paradise out of the Out Back Hell; if only out of consideration for the poor, hopeless, half-starved wretches who carry swags through it and look in vain for work—and ask in vain for tucker very often. What's the good of making a heaven of a hell when by describing it as it really is, we might do some good for the lost souls there?

The Bulletin's only reaction to this seminal document was to advise a ‘Station Hand’ from Narramine that he took Lawson's ‘affected cynicism’ too seriously (2 December 1893).

III

Lawson had in fact left Australia immediately after he wrote ‘Some Popular Australian Mistakes’. Again, like his trip to Bourke the year before, his departure at this time may have been more than coincidental, for his bitter verse ‘Australian Bards and Bush Reviewers’ (18 August 1894) was composed in New Zealand in January 1894. After eight months in New Zealand Lawson returned to Sydney, but he had not forgiven Paterson, much less his other critics. His irritation at their unwillingness to understand his realism carried over into the preface to his first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, published by his mother shortly before Christmas 1894; the preface itself was virtually a restatement in prose of ‘Australian Bards and Bush Reviewers’.

At the Bulletin, meanwhile, although the editors rejected a contribution comparing Paterson and Lawson (‘this paper prefers both’: 13 April 1895), sides continued to be taken in its columns. Henry Fletcher's ‘In the Bush’ (31 August 1895) related a conversation with a bushman who was knowingly ‘chained, riveted, married’ to the country's dehumanizing harshness. Despite its polemical tone, Fletcher adopted Lawson's descriptive accuracy in an attempt to make ‘In the Bush’ a realistic sketch. Henry Ellis (‘A. Chee’) was more direct in his ‘The Delights of the Bush’ (14 December 1895), in which he told a story—partially repeating one of his contributions published on 14 January 1893—specifically to denounce by illustration ‘a certain fatuous class of writers’ among whom ‘there has always existed a custom of sending forth gushes of gladsome song, and warbling, in more or less tuneful warbs, about the pleasures of country life’.

‘R.A.F.’, on the other hand, was still troubled by those ‘Australian poets despairing’ who never utter ‘a note that is glad’ (7 December 1895). By failing to idealize the heroic virtues of the new Australian world, these realistic authors were undoubtedly undermining Australia. E. J. Dempsey's verse ‘A Vision of the Gruesome’ (25 July 1896), however, restored the question to its literary basis. The poet has a conversation with the ‘“bushy” type’ of the conventionalized Bulletin short story and verse, who laments that he has

                                                                      no existence save in dark imaginations
Of the poets and the proseists [sic] in their stories and their rhymes.

Complaining that ‘in order to get pathos they must kill me in the end’, the unfortunate ghost concludes ‘that the thing's become a bore’, and disappears as another writer calls him up.

‘J.P.’, perhaps, was bored by the controversy itself, for his verse ‘The Unknown Land’ (14 September 1895) claimed that even realistic stories had become conventionalized, with their descriptions of a land of men

          Who eternally sit
          Round a fire and spit
And their narrative force never fails.

The story-tellers of this ‘terrible bush’ have ‘carefully noted down’ that ‘the land into two is divided, / And everything's “bush” but “the town”’. In their bush:

          the scene always matches the story,
For Art unto Nature has neared;
‘Lurid lights to the south’ for the gory,
And ‘gums grey and gaunt’ for the weird.
          And the children of toil
          Fairly reek of the soil,
And their faces by summer are seared.

Another versifier, ‘Jim's Uncle’, was clearly weary of both the controversy and the whole question of literary nationalism as it was reflected in the Bulletin. Satirizing the paper's 1895 Christmas number, he saw New South Wales as a ‘land of bards, forever pitching / Simple songs of “Jim” unshaven, / Seldom washed, and freely itching’ (4 January 1896):

Land of mock-eccentric stories
          Told of hopeless fortune-questing
(Tales wherein the hero's gore is
          Shed to make him interesting),
Owing all their mystic worth
To the country of their birth.

‘Jim's Uncle’ notwithstanding, A. G. Stephens began his review of Lawson's first volume of verse, In the Days When the World Was Wide, by claiming that in the work of Lawson and Paterson, ‘Australia has found audible voice and characteristic expression’ (15 February 1896). Echoing Marcus Clarke's preface to Gordon's verse, Stephens joined a long list of critics who continued to discover ‘something like the beginnings of a national school of poetry’ (15 February 1896). John LeGay Brereton found something else in Lawson's verse: ‘drivel’. Brereton's ‘A Reflection on Lawson's Poems’, printed in the Bulletin on 18 January 1896, was the first published reaction to Lawson's collection. In it Brereton property pointed out that Lawson's verse, unlike his prose, idealized Australia's past as romantically as Paterson's verse idealized its present. Rather than objecting that Lawson was denying his own realistic manifesto, however, Brereton attacked him for failing to write as optimistically about contemporary Australia.

Four weeks later A. G. Stephens also took up the problem of Lawson's pessimism. ‘It is when he is most Australian that he is most happy. This amounts to saying—what is perfectly true—that his earlier poems are among his best. It is curious to note the contrast between Lawson's optimism of seven years ago and his pessimism of to-day.’ Pessimism, that is, was un-Australian, while ‘impersonal’ Hope produced ‘better’ verse than ‘personal’ Discontent. But then, of course, Lawson's ‘mental scope is narrow; he is comparatively uncultured’ (15 February 1896). ‘What could a University have done for Lawson? … A University could have shown Lawson where the pearls lie’ (13 June 1896).

Having disposed of Lawson's version of literary nationalism at its theoretical level—verse is best as well as most Australian when it is ‘happy’—Stephens turned to Lawson's prose. Unlike his verse, it was among ‘the best produced in Australia’: specifically, ‘brimming with humour and pathos’ (15 February 1896). As for Lawson's manifesto of realism, Stephens could only refer six months later to his ‘quaint simple style’ (29 August 1896). According to Stephens, the real ‘charm of Lawson's prose is essentially that of his poetry. Art he has none; his artifices are of the feeblest.’ Lawson's volume of prose was ‘like a bad cook's ragoût’. A half-dozen of his sketches were indeed ‘something like literature. The rest are frequently good journal-work, good material for literature—nothing more.’

Lawson's defenders, unfortunately, confused the rhetorical content of his verse with the accomplishment of his prose no less thoroughly than did A. G. Stephens. Henry Cargill's ‘Reflection on Brereton's “Reflection on Lawson's Poems”’, for instance, stoutly insisted that since man could never reach his past ambitions in the present, poets ‘can only “sing the past”’ (15 February 1896). And Joseph Furphy's first poem in the Bulletin suggested that in any case, civilization had destroyed the true outback: ‘there is no Up the Country for us now’ (3 October 1896).

Furphy's doggerel underlines the extent to which Lawson's original literary argument had gradually developed into an ethical issue. For Furphy was actually challenging Lawson's major premise, not defending it. Lawson's was an argument against the unthinking use of inappropriate literary conventions; Furphy's verse represents a resigned acceptance of them. Furphy's prose fiction, ironically, was as different in mood from his verse as Lawson's prose was from his own doggerel. The difference, in fact, was almost as great as that between what Lawson called the ‘Real’ and the ‘Ideal’, a difference which extended to Lawson's defence of his own published collections. In ‘The Uncultured Rhymer to His Cultured Critics’ (25 December 1897, written in February 1897), Lawson violently attacked his principal critics in verse. That same month, February 1897, he issued his second prose manifesto of realism.

IV

Not reprinted until 1964⁴, this untitled column on the Bulletin's ‘Red Page’ of 27 February 1897 is a direct expansion of ‘Some Popular Australian Mistakes’, a summary of the central issues in the confused debate, and a second major statement of his literary aims. Australian writers had simply failed to grasp that ‘heart of Australia’, as A. G. Stephens once called it (5 January 1895):

One might imagine a tropical jungle, a ‘glittering’ ice-field, a ‘rolling’ prairie, a ‘Northern’ forest, an ‘African’ desert; but not a mighty stretch of country which is neither desert, nor fertile land, nor anything else you can think of—except thousands of miles of patchy scrub. … If the back country were a desert we might love it, as the Arabs are alleged to love their desert, for the sake of the oases; if it were a region of noble ranges, mighty forests, shining rivers, broad lakes, and grassy plains, we would love it for these things; as it is, we don't know how to take it, and prefer not to take it at all.

Referring to Paterson's attacks of four and one-half years earlier, Lawson went on to note that he had ‘been accused of painting the bush in the darkest colors from some equally-dark personal motives’:

I might be biassed [sic]—having been there; but it is time the general public knew the back country as it is, if only for the sake of the bush outcasts who have to tramp for ever through broiling mulga scrub and baking lignum, or across blazing plains by endless tracks of red dust and grey, through a land of living death.

Finally his main point emerged, that the ‘bush bard … is temporarily blinded to the Real by the intensity of his vision of the Ideal’, and that Australian literature must recognize the ‘Real’ if the country is ever to be understood.

The result of this article—the first in which Lawson unhesitatingly referred to realism—was overwhelming. A. G. Stephens devoted three-quarters of the ‘Red Page’ a month later to his own reflections on the ‘perpetual warfare’ between ‘isolated Man and Nature in the bush’, and on the countryside's barbarizing effects on men: ‘the Bush has strangled their souls’. By failing to connect the content of literature with its mode of presentation, his criticism suggests that he was unaware that the question was a literary one at all. ‘J. Jingle’'s reply to Lawson's article similarly missed the point (3 April 1897). Seeing Lawson's work as a ‘tirade against the backblocks’, he claimed that Lawson's realism might be positively harmful:

That the bush is often ugly enough to breed pessimism is the worst of reasons for deriding unpessimistic bush-poetry, and so robbing the real, genuine bush-dwellers (not the rim-dwellers like Lawson, who make one hard trip and vow it will last them a life-time) of the pleasure of welcoming in the words of others an interpretation of the (possibly rare) beauties which they see and feel yet cannot themselves interpret.

Richard Holt was less willing to see colonial romanticism as the only path for Australian writers. Instead he suggested in the same issue of the Bulletin that there were two kinds of bushmen: the ‘real bushmen’, the average bush natives, quiet workers who love their land and whose highest ambition is to win the Mulga Hack-Race; and the ‘mongrel bushmen’, men who hate the bush, and who ‘write doggerel about “shining rivers” and “rippling streams”’; ‘to get an insight into Australian bush life one must read “The Banjo” and similar Bulletin writers, as well as Lawson. “The Banjo” and others give us the real bushman and his sentiments as truly as Lawson shows the pseudo or mongrel bushman.’ Holt's logic might well have prompted Lawson to wonder ‘what's the use’ (25 January 1896), particularly when a versifier like Daniel Healy also suggested that his ‘maudlin dirges’ would soon create ‘a nation morbid mad’ (28 August 1897).

The debate's new direction understandably worried James Brunton Stephens, long considered by the Bulletin's editors to be—with Kendall and Gordon—one of Australia's finest poets. In 1897, at the age of 62, Brunton Stephens wrote a long review of an edition of Barcroft Boake's verse collected by A. G. Stephens; the review, which A. G. Stephens published on the ‘Red Page’ of the Bulletin on 2 October 1897, was less a favourable appreciation of Boake than another attempt to return the terms of the debate to their original literary beginnings. Poetry itself was at stake, Brunton Stephens suggested, when those versifiers who declaimed the wrongs of man in doggerel and in the name of the ‘brutal truth’ failed to ‘strengthen and intensify the presentment of truth in the very act of debrutalising it. … Nine-tenths of this Marseillaise business is mere Marseillaziness’. And so he attacked what he reluctantly called the ‘anti-lay’, the products of poets dissatisfied with ‘the existing state and system of Society’. He added, significantly, that the poets of the ‘Anti-school’ are those men ‘for the most part, who go in for the “brutal truth”’. The message, in other words, had gradually come to supplant the mode as a means of communication. Realistic literature as such was ignored as a method of showing man's condition, in favour of simple normative statements about it. For the first time in the Bulletin's pages the literary debate begun by Lawson was entered into on its literary terms.

Peter Airey sensibly commented four weeks later that realism and romanticism, much less a poet's ‘pessimistic or optimistic bias’ had little to do with the merit of literature; he differed from Brunton Stephens, however, by suggesting that the ‘anti’ tendency of social protest was ‘rather a healthy one’. At the same time Francis Kenna disagreed violently with Brunton Stephens' whole review, stating flatly that ‘the dispute between Brunton Stephens and the young school of Australian poets is the dispute between the Romantic and the Realistic schools of Art’ (30 October 1897). Kenna's article, surprisingly, marked the first time that one of the participants in the debate had suggested it to be anything other than a purely Australian argument.

Kenna seriously misquoted and misconstrued Brunton Stephens' argument, as the latter angrily pointed out two weeks later (13 November 1897). In his rebuttal, Brunton Stephens made it clear that Henry Lawson was one of many Australian poets who are ‘linked together by the common desire to give expression to the life of this strong young country’. But Brunton Stephens also maintained that he opposed those literary nationalists who were linked together ‘by a bond of dismal wretchedness and apparently a common poverty of resources’. His view of literary nationalism, like that of most of his contemporaries, demanded that Australian literature must emphatically be ‘positive’ as well as ‘independent’. The difference between poets such as Lawson, Paterson, Boake, and Farrell, and those poets whose work was not ‘positive’ and ‘independent’, was ‘the difference that exists between begetting and expectorating.’

Lawson himself came increasingly to see the debate in personal terms, as indeed much of it was. Dogged by alcoholism, he sailed to New Zealand for the third time in March 1897. In September he wrote his heavily autobiographical ‘Writer's Dream’, giving his reasons for leaving Australia: his ‘heart grew tired of the truths he told’, so he sailed ‘in search of a people who lived a life as life in the world should be’ (21 May 1898). Here in New Zealand the ‘writer’ resolves to put aside ‘the heart of the cynic’, that epithet first used against Lawson by the Bulletin in 1893, and repeated four times in ‘The Writer's Dream’. Even in New Zealand, however, Lawson found that ‘local “Fashion”’ and a petty ‘local spirit’ charge him with having an ‘axe to grind’, and he realizes that the promptings of his ‘cynical dream’ are really those of ‘Truth’. Lawson ends his dream remembering A. G. Stephens' reference to his lack of culture, and resolves to ‘write untroubled by cultured fools, or the dense that fume and fret’.

Lawson's self-pity in ‘The Writer's Dream’ is not simply an index to the maudlin wanderings of a sensitive alcoholic, but also to some extent a reflection of the violence of the Australian debate between romanticism and realism. As the principal exponent of realism, Lawson had to bear the major attacks on realism, attacks characterized by misunderstanding, personal rancour, and perverted literary nationalism. Towards the end of the 'nineties he could only endure increasing criticism ranging from the simple-mindedness of ‘Hawker’ (‘Don't tell me the Bush is the abode of misery and desolation. I know better’: 22 October 1898) to the venom of ‘J. Jingle’. Instead of censuring verse like Lawson's ‘The Dry Country’ (20 August 1898) as another exercise in resurrecting the dying bushman, ‘Jingle’ asked the Bulletin ‘how much more of this drivelling pessimism are we going to get?’ He then referred to Lawson's verses as, successively, ‘partly incomprehensible’, ‘partly untrue’, ‘gruesome incongruity’, ‘nonsense’, and ‘jangling misery’ (15 October 1898). Whatever the truth of these strictures, the assumption behind them was that Lawson's realism was too realistic.

By 1899 Lawson faced opprobrium unprecedented in his career, despite the fact that with Paterson he was one of Australia's two best-selling authors. His Bulletin essay ‘Crime in the Bush’ (11 February 1899) expanded the moral basis of his earlier manifestos, but it was virtually ignored. Similarly the significance of his call for realism in Australian art, ‘If I Could Paint’ (8 April 1899), made no immediate impression. But when Lawson wrote of his personal experiences while ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’ (21 January 1899), Australian reaction was vicious and immediate. His Bulletin article was actually a detailed refutation of the misunderstandings which had grown up around the debate, particularly those reflected in A. G. Stephens' criticism. If Lawson thought that his autobiography might lead to a clearer understanding of the problems of writing in Australia, he was wrong. For he made the mistake of advising the aspiring young Australian author to ‘go steerage, stow away, swim, and seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuctoo—rather than stay in Australia till his genius turned to gall, or beer’.

E. J. Brady led the attack on 11 February by accusing Lawson of being ‘unhealthy’. To ‘H. F.’ (Henry Fletcher?), Lawson was more or less a Judas Iscariot, while ‘7 x 7’ suggested that he was cowardly in betraying the determination of ‘The Writer's Dream’. Bernard Espinasse merely noted that Lawson was most likely unenterprising in not having made better financial returns from his writing, but Alexander Montgomery damned Lawson directly for ‘howling’, and revealing ‘that dry-rot of the inner manhood—self-pity’. Steele Rudd mocked what he considered to be ‘poor Lawson, and that Hard-up Confession of his’ (27 May 1899), and ‘M. O'K.’ revived Paterson's charge of 1892 that Lawson suffered from ‘want of patriotism’ (11 March 1899). A. G. Stephens noted sarcastically on his ‘Red Page’ that Lawson's ‘famous soul-unburdening on this page has unlocked critics' hearts and publishers' purses. Which shows that fame is synonymous with advertisement; since his recent work is no better than that of five years ago: it is only better known’ (22 July 1899). Only Harry Stockdale and Richard Holt defended Lawson's ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’ (11 February 1899; 11 March 1899).

Shortly before Lawson left Australia for England in 1900 (when his wife was eight months pregnant he had actively and successfully solicited money for their passage from Lord Beauchamp, Governor of New South Wales), A. G. Stephens devoted his ‘Red Page’ to a long hortatory editorial ‘For Australians’ (9 December 1899). Its ostensible purpose was to call for national ‘greatness’ on the part of the colonies about to federate as the Commonwealth of Australia, and to encourage all Australians to point out to their children ‘in how many ways Australia is eminently worthy to be loved—both the actual land and the national ideal.’

Stephens' last phrase, apparently a conciliatory gesture to both romantics and realists, was actually aimed directly at Lawson's manifestos for realism. For as Stephens went on to say, ‘it is in the cities, not in the bush, that the national fibre is being in a hundred ways slackened and destroyed’. This gratuitous reference to Lawson's ‘Crime in the Bush’ might be seen as another product of Stephens' eccentric views on Australia's ‘national vitality’, were it not for the comment which followed:

No one acquainted with the every-day heroism displayed by our agricultural and mining pioneers can have the least doubt of the stability of the nation if the Men On The Land are helped and encouraged as they deserve to be helped and encouraged—as it is imperatively necessary for the future of Australia that they should be helped and encouraged.

Lawson, clearly, was not one of those Australian writers whose realism allowed them simply to ‘encourage’ the ‘national fibre’ by resorting to Stephens' own facile praise of ‘the bush’. A. G. Stephens, obviously, was no William Dean Howells, nor was the Bulletin an Atlantic or Harper's of the 'nineties in Australia. Instead of demonstrating any awareness of the problems raised by realism—much less verism or naturalism—he was content to dogmatize on Australia's ‘national ideal’. The literary identification of the country's ‘actual land’ he left, almost unwillingly, to Henry Lawson. Both facts, despite what has been written about literature and the Bulletin in the 'nineties, accurately reflected the ambiguities of literary nationalism at the time.

The debate which Lawson began in 1892 posed the same problem faced by literary nationalists in Australia since 1803: what was the function of literature in identifying and relating a new environment to its inhabitants? The idealization of Australia's landscape, Lawson knew, had fulfilled its role in creating Australia's ideal man. By the 1890s the values of the man of the bush, the bushman, had supplanted those of the convict as a literary preoccupation. But how could he examine the bush and its inhabitants—as most of his contemporaries charged—without destroying both?

This Australian literary ‘debate’, then, was an authentic one, with an unsettled resolution and more than one worthy opponent. Its ambiguity lay in the fact that most participants supported the only possible judgment. Literature clearly had a role in identifying Australia's past and present, as well as in shaping its future. Lawson's task, as it emerged, was as much one of keeping the debate within its proper terms as it was one of supporting his own case. To attack idealization, satirize its conventions, and describe its subjects, as he soon learned, meant defending his own literary integrity, abilities, and nationalism.

The weak point in Lawson's case, ironically, was the rhetoric of his execrable verse. For so long as it could be attacked, the accomplishment of his short prose sketches would be ignored. And until the merit of his prose was recognized, his whole case—the essence of the debate itself—was vulnerable to attacks on his rhetorical doggerel.

Irony, however, was a familiar mood for Lawson. Unlike literary nationalism's mood of romance, which prompted Australia's authors to recreate their environment by idealizing it, Lawson's mood prompted him to particularize Australia through its own images. Literary nationalism's mood of irony, in fact, is the second of two alternating currents detected by Northrop Frye in Canadian writing: ‘one romantic, traditional, and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant and humorous’.⁵ The closed mood of romance dissociated Australians from their environment. Through his new mode of realism and mood of irony Lawson had reassociated them. He needed a sense of irony if he was to be condemned as pessimistic and ‘anti’-Australian for attempting to redefine Australia, Australians, and their literature.

Notes

1. The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), pp. 1-2.

2. ibid., p. 2.

3. See the second instalment of ‘Banjo Paterson Tells His Own Story’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1939.

4. As ‘The Bush and the Ideal’ in ‘Sydney and the Bush (Extracts from Lawson's fugitive prose, 1892-1894)’, Southerly, XXIV, 4 (1964), 207-208, where it is incorrectly dated 27 November 1892.

5. ‘Conclusion’ to C. F. Klinck et al., eds., Literary History of Canada (Toronto, 1965), p. 825.