SOURCE: Serle, Geoffrey. “National Inspiration c. 1885.” In From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972, pp. 60-88. Melbourne: William Heineman, 1973.

[In the following excerpt, Serle stresses the relationship of the Bulletin to the national literary awakening of Australia in the 1890s.]

The 80s were the springtime, adolescent period of Australian history. In these boom years, the utopian assumption of Australia's destiny an another United States, peopled by a chosen white race, superior to the Old World and free from its vices, held sway as never since. The native-born were taking over, and in Victoria the Australian Natives' Association was defining their responsibilities, the first of which was the formal creation of a nation by federation. The centennial celebrations provoked intense controversy over future nationhood and the ultimate relationship with Britain. The trade unions, reinforced by new organizations like the Shearers', braced themselves to launch a political party which would reform Australian man. Naive, confident optimism was reflected by writers and artists striving to express a new civilization. But in the 90s depression and class war shattered such illusions. As Brian Fitzpatrick wrote: ‘What took place was like the ending of a childhood: the curtain's fall on wide-eyed expectation, the entrance instead of uncertainty, doubt and mistrust; “never glad confident morning again”.’¹

Founded in 1880, the Sydney Bulletin quickly became a great national weekly with, by 1890, an astonishing circulation of 80,000. It was rude, slangy, smart, happily vulgar, modern in journalistic style, and above all funny—especially its cartoons. It held an extraordinary combination of extreme attitudes: it was radical, republican, and despised the monarchy and the English ruling classes; it was viciously racist and anti-Semitic but also fought magnificently against the ‘yellow dog’ of sectarianism. Its particular strength was a blend of fervent idealism, down-to-earth commonsense and gaiety. It was a revelation to the young native-born especially; Randolph Bedford said he ‘entered a new world’ when he saw his first copy: ‘It was Australia; whereas all the daily papers of Sydney were English provincials.’² J. F. Archibald, the presiding genius, saw his creation as an instrument to define and express the national being. The Bulletin certainly built up a group myth about Australians and their destiny; in seeking a ‘usable past’ it promoted a version of history which exposed the shame and horror of the English convict-transportation system and glorified the digger and Eureka. Its views were far too extreme to be widely accepted; it represented only one section of nationalism, a movement which took many forms, and it had little influence in the southern colonies.

But very clearly the Bulletin came to be aimed at and to speak for the men of the pastoral interior; it became the ‘bushman's Bible’. It did not begin with this clear intention, although Archibald always had in mind, as his ideal reader, ‘The Lone Hand—the very salt of the Australian people, the educated independent mining prospector’;³ the link was quickly forged in the early to mid-80s. The trend to up-country material may be argued to have begun with the publication of the ballad, ‘Sam Holt’, by ‘Ironbark’ (G. H. Gibson) on 26 March 1881. There followed a trickle, then a flood of paragraphs, yarns, tall stories, anecdotes, ballads and stories; the tap was turned on and stores of creativity were released, although it was to be some years before there were major literary results. The Bulletin not only became a forum for outbackery, but to a remarkable extent was written by its readers—and one of its virtues was that almost anyone could gain a hearing for almost any outlandish idea. In some respects the bushman has been unduly romanticized; nevertheless, outback pastoral society was a queerer phenomenon, perhaps, than even Russel Ward described in The Australian Legend. It included a strong leaven of well-educated and self-educated men who formed innumerable, perpetually changing debating societies round the campfires. By late in the century the bushmen as a class had developed a range of radical nationalist assumptions, were confident in their environment, knew they had something to say, and said it in the Bulletin which also said it for them. The extent to which the Bulletin moulded or reflected their views is an unanswerable problem.⁴

The Bulletin tapped the folk undercurrent which had been running strongly for half a century or more. For a genuine folk culture had begun to emerge in the pastoral interior, which had three main forms—the song, the narrative ballad for recitation and the yarn. Isolated men in small groups, many of whom were itinerant—drovers, shearers, bullockies, casual labourers—in the absence of any other, created their own entertainment. Sometimes one or more of them made their own song or ballad; sometimes they were picked up from newspapers and journals. In either case, they were passed on orally, were sometimes written down, circulated in varying versions and were polished as they went. One particular work-feature which encouraged the bush song was drovers' need to sing, or at least provide a reassuring drone, to their cattle at night. Songs had always been a vital part of the culture of the unlettered; from the eighteenth century the broadside street ballad and song was perhaps the chief form of both news and entertainment among the uneducated sections of the convicts and poor migrants who settled early Australia. It was natural to adapt these songs and make new ones in the old styles, of which the Irish street ballad was the most influential. As Judith Wright puts it,

Songs were seized on, memorized, altered, parodied, sung in camps and riding round the cattle, at shearing sheds and on the track. They came to mirror the kind of life that their singers led; often hard and crude, almost always womanless, and because of this lack of normal balance, generally naive and sentimental under the tough hide induced by hardship and the remorseless conditions of the Australian outback.⁵

It cannot be claimed that many of the folk-ballads have true literary quality; but, as Edgar Waters says, most of them have vigour and the ‘authentic, sweaty smell of a hard life’ about them. The pastoral folk culture had only a limited time to develop in isolation before the impact of industrial society first diluted and then eliminated it. The spread of settlement after the gold rushes and improvement of communications exposed the bush increasingly to the metropolitan press and the popular songs of music-hall and stage. More than anything else, the spread of the railway broke down isolation—shearers in the 90s began to ride bicycles from railheads and the area dependent on horses and bullocks steadily dwindled. Henry Lawson, in nostalgic vein, wrote:

Those golden days are vanished,
And altered is the scene;
The diggings are deserted,
The camping-grounds are green;
The flaunting flag of progress
Is in the West unfurled,
The mighty bush with iron rails
Is tethered to the world.

The automobile rounded off the process. By the early to mid-twentieth century, drovers usually sang the songs of Tin Pan Alley or American country-music to their cattle.⁶

Despite the folk-ballad undercurrent—and it seems odd—few or no literary ballads were published before the 60s. Gordon made his contribution in the late 60s and had a few imitators, but the flood did not begin until the 80s with Gibson, John Farrell, Barcroft Boake and Paterson; the debt then to folk inspiration was very clear. Australian balladry was a sub-species of a very popular international fashion, and Australia was late in taking it up. One of Gordon's three ballads set in Australia, ‘From the Wreck’, was essentially an adaptation of Browning's ‘How we Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. The change in atmosphere, diction and values from Gordon to A. B. Paterson (1864-1941), whose first ballad appeared in the Bulletin in 1886, is very marked. As John Manifold has defined it, the Gordon-style ballad, at least as put out by his imitators, usually had a hero who was a high-born, public-school Englishman, had been in the Army, was an outstanding amateur rider, came to the colonies because of woman-trouble, took an assumed name, punished the grog severely, died in the bush (his noble background then being revealed), and was buried in a bush grave and mourned by bronzed and bearded bushmen.⁷ Paterson created the Man from Snowy River, Clancy and Saltbush Bill.

However modest his literary achievement, Paterson has been Australia's most popular poet; The Man from Snowy River sold 100,000 copies, his Collected Verse was printed for the twenty-sixth time in 1959. With his contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Service of Canada, he is one of the three most popular balladists in English of modern times. He and Lawson, more than anyone else, set the notion of the bush and the bushman as the true and admirable Australia and Australian. He should not be dismissed as a poet; despite all the doggerel, there are subtle, interesting aspects; like other Australian balladists, he had Scottish ancestry and learned something from the border ballads. He transmuted the experience of a huge ‘uncultured’ audience into art. His great strength was his easy rapport with the bush audience of all classes. From a small pastoralist background, he studied law and became a journalist with spells back on the land. He was not really a radical or a political animal, but he detested what was happening to the pastoral industry—the takeovers by banks, companies, urban capital; there is a strong element in his work of nostalgic harking-back to the pure old days. And as H. M. Green says, ‘his conception of the ideal station-owner was of a man who worked with his men on the run, paid high wages, and sympathized with unionism; who was generous to the passing swagman and just to the drover with his hungry mob’.⁸ It's a pity Joe Furphy never met him. It can even be argued that in ‘Waltzing Matilda’ Paterson brought together the traditions of convict ‘treason songs’ and ‘jackeroo songs’ (that is, those composed in the homestead). Like Rabbie Burns, he won the supreme achievement of being put into oral circulation by ‘the folk’ so that his poems were recited in numerous variants. And he repaid his debt to ‘the folk’ by his pioneer collection of Old Bush Songs.⁹

Continued by Will Ogilvie, ‘John O'Brien’ and others, the ballad remained vigorous for nearly half a century, and important as a minor art-form with a large popular audience. R. H. Croll's protest about the end of the century indicates how it dominated the popular idea of what Australian poetry was:

Whalers, damper, swag and nose-bag, Johnny cakes and billy tea,
Murrumburrah, Meremendicoowoke, Youlgarbudgeree,
Cattle-duffers, bold bushrangers, diggers, drovers, bush racecourses,
And on all the other pages, horses, horses, horses, horses.(10)

The Bulletin was interested in short-story writers, not novelists. In his strictly editorial capacity, Archibald insisted on brevity, boiling-down into a ‘par’. Unlike its predecessors, the Australian Journal and Sydney Mail, which both encouraged local writers more than is generally known, the Bulletin did not serialize novels. Archibald sought and found stories in which the emphasis was on life, realism, ‘grit not gush’, topicality, everyday colloquial speech, getting Australia down on paper. Their rough vigour is in striking contrast to earlier colonial or Anglo-Australian writing. Lawson and others such as Edward Dyson, Ernest Favenc, E. J. Brady, Randolph Bedford, Albert Dorrington, Price Warung, Louis Becke and Dowell O'Reilly, though most of them came to live in Sydney, had usually grown up in the bush or spent long periods knocking around; they consciously felt themselves part of a new, different Australia.¹¹

Henry Lawson (1867-1922) was incomparably the best of them. And yet in his day his large public and his tolerant publisher, George Robertson, regarded him as Lawson the Poet, although most of his verse was churned-out, sixpence-a-line doggerel. His stories were badly underrated by his contemporaries and usually judged to be no more than natural artless sketches. His contemporary reputation had almost nothing to do with his quality as a writer: he was the People's Poet, who articulated the egalitarian democratic protest-sentiment of the day when he wrote:

They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own,
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown.

Or:

But the curse of class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled,
An' the sense of Human Kinship revolutionise the world;
There'll be higher education for the toilin', starvin' clown,
An' the rich an' educated shall be educated down.

Many a man seized on his humanitarianism as a sort of ‘reach-me-down Laborite secular religion’. But he was much more than that. His stories are very uneven, but in the best of them he is a highly finished artist and craftsman. He was a writer of high originality—precise, restrained, constantly understating—and almost the only Australian protest-writer whose art successfully carries his message. He was a preacher, of course, of how white men ought to behave to each other, of brotherly love, of mateship; yet fundamentally he was pessimistic, a radical who sensed the futility of radicalism and of Australian utopianism. Green remarks that ‘it would be hard to find any writer of his calibre in whom so deep and romantic a love of his fellows is accompanied by so keen and humorous a perception of their inconsistencies and pettinesses, and, on the whole, by so conscientious a determination to show them just as they are.’¹² He was a master of sentiment, of command over laughter and tears, who escaped sentimentality again and again, except in some of his potboiling stuff, by an ironic twist. He was a master over a narrow sphere of writing and the first major Australian writer, worthy of comparison with Maupassant, Chekhov and Gorki, although in the rank behind them.¹³

In 1892 Lawson suggested to Paterson that they write in verse against each other in the Bulletin, as a means of increasing their incomes, expressing their different views of the Bush. For weeks they ‘slambanged’ away at each other, on the whole good-humouredly, to the great delight of the mass audience, several of whom added entertaining contributions. Many years later, Paterson recalled:

We were both looking for the same reef … ; but I had done my prospecting on horseback with my meals cooked for me, while Lawson had done his prospecting on foot and had had to cook for himself. … I think that Lawson put his case better than I did, but I had the better case, so that honours (or dishonours) were fairly equal.¹⁴

In fact, Lawson was putting a very serious case for realism against romanticism, to which Paterson would not or could not reply. Lawson was arguing 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’.¹⁵ The Bulletin school long remained ambiguous on the matter—the balladists tending to be romantically sentimental, the prose writers on the whole grimly realistic. But much, of course, depended on the Bush which was the subject—the gentle inland pastoral slopes or the harsh interior—and on the optimistic or pessimistic, hedonistic or stoic, values of the observer. Much of the balladry (and some of the later pastoral novels) were about Sydney or the Bush, identified with vice and virtue. Judith Wright has detected in the ballads a cult of the Bush representing the virtues of hard work, abstemiousness, monastic loneliness, chastity, purity, cleanliness, whereas the city or town stood for self-betrayal. The Bush almost came to act as a kind of conscience for Australians, as the city man came to yearn for an ‘idealized vision’, a ‘lost Eden’.¹⁶

The greatest achievement by a Bulletin writer was Furphy's novel, Such Is Life. In a sense it is Australia's Moby Dick, for it was similarly neglected for thirty or forty years and discovered as a classic. ‘Tom Collins’ (Joseph Furphy, 1843-1912) was born at Yarra Glen, the son of poor Irish migrants, and worked as a miner and bullocky for many years, then in his brother's agricultural implement works at Shepparton. He laboured at this gloriously ambitious novel, which was completed by 1896 and published in truncated form in 1903, and almost achieved a masterpiece. ‘It is a novel based on the theory of the novel,’ remarks A. D. Hope; ‘… he is putting forward an entirely new theory of the relation of literature to life and announcing a revolution in the nature of prose fiction.’¹⁷ It is a disquisition on free will, determinism and chance, about how things happen, the consequences of taking one course of action rather than another, about responsibility for actions. It is a determined attempt to state what really happens in life and attacks romancers like Kingsley, R. L. Stevenson and Kipling. It is also a descriptive analysis of Riverina society, of the new, very odd, democratic society which Furphy knew inside out. For example, there is his acute gallery of the five types of squatters. It is about

the art of riding horses and the art of swapping them, the modes of spinning yarns and of telling whoppers, the varied crafts of the bushman and the formidable mnemonic power which they demand, the reticent loyalties to mate and dog, the eccentricities of bush-scholarship, the curiosities of bush-etiquette, and the firm pattern of bush-ethics.

All done by a master of irony, a child of Fielding and Sterne, soaked in Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was an extraordinary achievement for a self-educated man, dependent on the local Mechanics' Institute library and odd hours snatched at the Melbourne Public Library, in total isolation from other members of the craft, except for a lifeline to the Bulletin to which he contributed pars from 1889. It is the most Australian book of all. But the demands Furphy makes are too great, it is too intricate, it is full of the bog-philosophy of the self-educated man, the relentless intellectual purpose grinds many readers down. Amusing though it is, his anti-Englishness is shrill colonialism. Fundamentally, Furphy was a very angry man, who detested both the exploiting fat man and the ‘deserving poor’ for being exploited. He glorified the proletarian virtues:

Without doubt, it is easier to attain gentlemanly deportment than axe-man's muscle; easier to criticize an opera than to identify a beast seen casually twelve months before; easier to dress becomingly than to make a bee-line, straight as the sighting of a theodolite across strange country in foggy weather; easier to recognize the various costly vintages than to live contentedly on the smell of an oil rag.

That needed saying, but he was no philistine. Such Is Life is the most freakish achievement of colonial Australia.¹⁸

The man who published Such Is Life was A. G. Stephens (1865-1933), editor of the Bulletin's ‘Red Page’ from 1896 to 1906—the first important Australian literary critic. He was both stern and constructive in his criticism, and his greatest asset was his breadth of literary interests. He knew his world (especially French) literature, he introduced current trends and used them, he said, ‘as a measuring rod to beat those indulging in antics around the parish pump’. But he was also an ardent patriot and a very knowledgeable barracker for the local team, knowing very well what some writers were contributing to Australians' understanding of themselves. He fused world and Australian literature as no-one else did for nearly half a century.¹⁹

No historian or critic has yet taken adequate notice of A. A. Phillips's bold claim about the Bulletin group:

it was a strikingly original school of writing; indeed it might have been a revolutionary school, had it occurred to English writers to have learned from it—or even to have read it. For the first time for centuries, Anglo-Saxon writing had broken out of the cage of the middle-class attitude. Dickens, Hardy and Bret Harte had, it is true, written sympathetically and knowledgeably of the unpossessing; but they had written for a middle-class audience. They were the guides who conducted their middle-class audience on a Cook's Tour of the lower orders. But to Lawson and Furphy, it was the middle-classes who were the foreigners—and they the often jingoistic nationalists of the poor. They wrote of the people, for the people, and from the people. In that task almost their only predecessors later than Bunyan were Burns and Mark Twain—and neither had the full courage of his convictions.²⁰

Certainly, no foreign parallels spring to mind; this does appear to be a unique case of writers of high quality from humble origins stating radical democratic attitudes to a fairly wide working-class audience. These were the early years of mass literacy anywhere, and in this regard Australia was among the world leaders. The case would be much stronger if there had been other writers of the quality of Lawson and Furphy, if the Bulletin writers as a whole had not come from such a wide variety of social backgrounds, and if one or two more had put forward as explicit a radical message. And if (with slight doubts about definition) we allow Lawson and Furphy to have been working-class intellectuals and writers, they had no immediate successors. Nevertheless, the case broadly stands: we have not yet recognised what a phenomenon this was, for ‘poetry’ to have been given to the people and for the people to have liked it.

But there wasn't enough real poetry or literature; and what ‘the people’ liked were the ballads. A strong popular school of writing continued well into the twentieth century but, reflecting the collapse of utopian idealism in the 90s, the writers had little of a serious nature to say. A tradition of democratic writing had been set, but it was not to renew itself, at one or two removes, for several decades. And the new writers of the early twentieth century were mediocre. One exception was (Stella) Miles Franklin (1879-1954), who at the age of sixteen wrote the promising squib, My Brilliant Career (1901). The major new figure was Steele Rudd (A. H. Davis, 1868-1935) who set out ‘to tell faithfully all I knew of the life our family and neighbouring families had lived, and were then living on the land’.²¹On Our Selection was a serious and immensely popular work, but Rudd's talent for farce led him in later work to play to the gallery; Dad and Dave and the others became caricatures, were eventually further debased in radio, film and popular oral story, and became the butts of the superior city man. Throughout, the Bulletin school had made little impact on the inheritors of the values of English literature; for together with its vigour and life, it had a certain anti-intellectual aspect—a lack of respect for the craft of writing and of appreciation for high cultural values.²² Unfortunately it tended to widen the gulf between the proponents of European culture and Australian writers, for the highly educated élite sheered away in distaste as Australian writing seemingly became identified with democracy, radicalism and, in the period of the Boer War, treason almost. Nevertheless, to adapt one of Arthur Phillips's images, whereas before the 90s there was no continuous stream of Australian literature, only isolated works like waterholes in a sandy creek-bed, after the Bulletin writers of the 90s there was at least a continuous trickle.²³

If Australia needed a Whitman it almost gained him in the red-bearded seer and polymath and disciple of Whitman, Bernard O'Dowd (1866-1953). He was very much a product of late nineteenth century Melbourne, with all the moral earnestness of that city's intellectual tradition; but he was also an intellectualizer of the Bulletin ideology who reinforced the broad Lawson-Furphy outlook. Of Irish descent, he renounced Catholicism in his youth, worked his way on scholarships through the University of Melbourne, and spent most of his life as Supreme Court librarian and parliamentary draughtsman. He was a militant secularist when young and wrote the extraordinary Lyceum Tutor (a ritual handbook for secular Sunday schools); in the 90s and later he was engrossed in left-wing politics, was a founder and editor of Tocsin, and prominent in the Victorian Socialist Party. As Judith Wright puts his viewpoint:

Australia, as the youngest of the continents and hence least trammelled by tradition, was to devote herself to the task of creating the new society on purely rational lines. Human thought had now been freed from all traditional claims; the Darwinian theory had done away with the notion of divine sanctions and the old political tyrannies had been broken. At last it was open to man to create the just society.

Australia was ‘the whole world's legatee’: ‘She is the scroll on which we are to write / Mythologies our own and epics new’. O'Dowd came to poetry late, in his thirties; in turning himself into a poet, he may have had some notion that he could fulfil Australia's need for a modern mythmaker. The long, portentous and didactic poem, The Bush (1912), was his most famous, and contained nearly all his prophecies, hopes and idealism for men to live freely and in brotherhood. The Bush symbolized his idealism: ‘Faithful to dreams your spirit is creating, / Till Great Australia, born of you appears’.

Modern critics treat O'Dowd harshly. While some agree that his passion carries him far and that a true poet lurks behind his stilted language, it is commonly said that he did not learn to distinguish poetry from oratory, that his verses limp along arthritically, and that his learning is far too obtrusive. But to quote Green in his favour, he was ‘a new voice … a strong and individual voice, often dry and monotonous, but swelling at times in passages of real beauty and power’. Brian Elliott reasonably claims him as the forerunner in using the landscape metaphysically and mystically, not just descriptively and in imagery. And he and Brennan were the first poets of serious ideas.

But O'Dowd was probably much more important as a cultural influence than as a poet. He was by no means a simple, cocksure nationalist but—in this sense a post-gos man—full of doubt about the future. Perhaps his most influential statement was Poetry Militant, a lecture given in 1909. Poetry for poetry's sake should be postponed to the millenium; contemporary poets were merely making crazy quilts out of pretty words. The poet's tasks were, while remaining a poet, to work usefully for the progress of the species, to make the findings of science and philosophy digestible, to help men win the battle of life, to chart the day and make it habitable, to unveil frauds, to imbue the masses with high ideals, to awaken them to a sense of the wrongs they endured or inflicted, to answer for them the real questions of the age, to promote wise rebellion and stimulate reconstruction. The true subjects of poetry were politics, religion, sex, science and social reform. ‘And at no [place] was the need for the Permeator poet, the projector of ideals, the Poet Militant greater than in … this virgin and unhandicapped land of social experiments, embryonic democracy, and the Coming Race, Australia!’ Katharine Susannah Prichard left the lecture ‘too exalted and exhilarated to speak’,²⁴ and other young Melbourne writers were also deeply impressed by the high demands of their calling.²⁵

Notes

1. Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People 1788-1945, Melbourne, 1946, p. 217

2. Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty-Three, Sydney, n.d., pp. 89-90

3. The Lone Hand, July 1907

4. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne, 1954, ch. 5; Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne, 1958, pp. 205-9; S. E. Lee, ‘The Bulletin—J. F. Archibald and A. G. Stephens’, The Literature of Australia, ed. Dutton; Sylvia Lawson, ‘J. F. Archibald’, Aust. Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3

5. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 50-51; ch. 3 in general

6. Edgar Waters, ‘Ballads and Popular Verse’, The Literature of Australia, ed. Dutton, quotation from p. 265; John S. Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads?, Sydney, 1964; Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing ed., Australian Bush Ballads, Sydney, 1955, and Old Bush Songs, Sydney, 1957; Elliott, Landscape of Australian Poetry, ch. 9; Covell, Australia's Music, ch. 3

7. Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads?, pp. 107-8

8. Green, History of Australian Literature, i, p. 367

9. Clement Semmler, The Banjo of the Bush, London, 1967; Judith Driscoll, ‘A Thaw on Snowy River’, Aust. Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, October 1971; H. P. Heseltine, ‘Banjo Paterson: A Poet nearly Anonymous’, Meanjin Quarterly, 1964, no. 4

10. R. H. Croll, I Recall. Collections and Recollections, Melbourne, 1939, p. 58

11. Ken Levis, ‘The Role of the “Bulletin” in Indigenous Short-Story-Writing during the Eighties and Nineties’, Southerly, 1950, no. 4

12. Green, History of Australian Literature, i, p. 538

13. A. A. Phillips, Henry Lawson, New York, 1970; Denton Prout, Henry Lawson. The Grey Dreamer, Adelaide, 1963; Stephen Murray-Smith, Henry Lawson, Melbourne, 1962; various editions by Colin Roderick

14. Quoted by Prout, Henry Lawson, p. 81

15. Bruce Nesbitt, ‘Literary Nationalism and the 1890s’, Aust. Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1971

16. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 51-6

17. A. D. Hope, Meanjin Papers, 1945, no. 3, pp. 226-7

18. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, ch. 2 (quote from p. 21); Miles Franklin, Joseph Furphy. The Legend of a Man and his Book, Sydney, 1944

19. Vance Palmer (ed.), A. G. Stephens. His Life and Work, Melbourne, 1941

20. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, p. 38

21. Rudd, quoted by John Barnes, The Literature of Australia, ed. Dutton, p. 166

22. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 77-9

23. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, p. 38

24. Prichard, Meanjin, 1953, no. 4, p. 419

25. Victor Kennedy and Nettie Palmer, Bernard O'Dowd, Melbourne, 1954; Hugh Anderson, The Poet Militant: Bernard O'Dowd, Melbourne, 1969; Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, pp. 71-7 (quote from p. 71); Vincent Buckley, Essays in Poetry, Melbourne, 1957, pp. 11-12; Green, History of Australian Literature, i, pp. 501-10 (quote from p. 510); Elliott, Landscape of Australian Poetry, pp. 184-98

Bibliography

The leading critical works on which much of this book has been based are as follows:

Literature

H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, 2 vols., Sydney, 1961

E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935, 2 vols., Melbourne, 1940. Extended to 1950 and ed. by Frederick T. Macartney, Sydney, 1956

Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), The Literature of Australia, Melbourne, 1964

Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Melbourne, 1965

A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, Melbourne, 1958

Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, Melbourne, 1967

John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia. A Collection of Literary Documents 1856 to 1964, Melbourne, 1969

T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Sydney, 1971

G. A. Wilkes and J. C. Reid, The Literatures of the British Commonwealth. Australia and New Zealand, Pennsylvania, 1970

The files of Meanjin Quarterly, Southerly, Australian Literary Studies, Quadrant, Overland and other periodicals contain many important articles to which it has been impracticable to refer in the following notes.

The Pelican Literature of Australia (ed. Dutton) contains invaluable lists of the leading works by and commentaries on writers to 1964.

General

A. L. McLeod (ed.), The Pattern of Australian Culture, Melbourne and Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, has some useful chapters. The only general historian of Australia who has paid any sustained attention to the development of culture is C. Hartley Grattan in his The Southwest Pacific to 1900 and The Southwest Pacific since 1900, Ann Arbor, 1963. (Grattan is the only important modern foreign observer of Australia.)

For short biographies of nearly everyone mentioned in this book before the 1930s, see Australian Dictionary of Biography (ed. D. Pike) and P. Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography. For writers, see also the works referred to above by Green, Morris Miller and Macartney, and L. J. Blake, Australian Writers, Adelaide, 1968. …