[In the following essay, originally published in 1950, Levis discusses the opportunity provided by the Bulletin to Australian short fiction writers concerned with depicting Australia and its people.]

The greatest force in the development of indigenous short-story writing was the Sydney Bulletin, which provided a stimulus, developed an attitude of mind, stood firmly by its writers and supplied for them critical standards and an enthusiastic audience. Other papers and periodicals did some of these things, in some measure—especially the Age, the Australasian, the Australian Journal, the Freeman's Journal, the Boomerang, the Town and Country Journal, the Sydney Mail—but none approaches the importance of the Bulletin.

In appraising the function of the Bulletin in literary development, critics have been prone to hasty generalizations, not altogether borne out by closer inspection. Thus, it has been commonly considered that the Bulletin appeared with a policy for the encouragement of Australian writing. This is not so, as examination of the development of its short narrative during the eighties will prove. In 1880, the first year of publication, only two stories appear, one brief sketch, and an unfortunate serial, “Adrienne”, sub-titled “A Love-Story of the Lancashire Cotton Distress”. This appeared on 6 March, continued until 8 May, reappeared from 29 May to 10 July, again from 31 July until 23 October, reappearing and disappearing until it ceased on 5 March 1881, still “to be continued”. The short sketch alone has Australian reference. It strikes the typical humorous exaggeration of bush yarns. The Bathurst Mosquitoes (“colonial canaries”)

sit upon trees and bark at people as they pass. Not very loudly, you know—not like big dogs, certainly, but very much like English terriers.

Only two stories, both set in France, are published in 1881. Four stories appear through 1882. Of these an anonymous humorous tale, “The Tombstone in the Garden”¹ is the Bulletin's first story with an Australian setting. 1883 produced five stories and a sketch. Only ten pieces, including two very short sketches, appear throughout 1884. J. Farrell's “One Christmas Day”² is the first serious attempt to present a story of Australian people and life in the Bulletin. 1885 has a dozen pieces, including short sketches, seven written by “Austral”, unimportant pieces of light entertainment with little Australian reference. 1886 has eight pieces of short narrative, 1887 has seven—if we include two articles, Thermo's “Shamming”³ dealing with gaol abuses, and Francis Adams's “A Gaol Flogging”,⁴ a piece of reporting, well written and unified by the writer's attitude of protest. 1888 produces twelve short narratives of various kinds, and 1889, thirty-four, twelve of these being in the Christmas number.

In ten years, then, no more than one hundred pieces of short narrative appear, including half-column sketches. Development accelerates in 1888 and 1889 and reaches greatest vigour and range throughout the nineties and into the early years of the twentieth century. Then the impetus slackens, the conventions of “the Bulletin story” have been established; writers work within them and are not so greatly concerned with working towards them. The distinction is important.

To understand the full flowering of short-story writing of the late eighties and the nineties, the factors making such fertility possible need to be realized. The Bulletin set out to cater for Australian readers, especially “bush” readers whose interest lay in the life they and their fellows lived in all parts of Australia, to assert Australian nationalism, and to attack Imperialism. The first number, 31 January 1880, stated:

The aim of the proprietors is to establish a journal which cannot be beaten—excellent in the illustrations which embellish its pages and unsurpassed in vigor, freshness, and geniality of its literary contributions. To this end the services of the best men of the realms of pen and pencil in the colony have been secured. … We give to the public what is dictated by the result of twenty years' experience on the colonial Press. … The public eye rejects as uninteresting more than half of what is printed in the publications of the day. It is only the other half which will be found in The Bulletin.

This aim was justified under Archibald, Edmond, McLeod and A. G. Stephens. The main features of the early issues are the vigorous political comment and cartooning, the lively journalism which shows at times astounding ingenuity, the interest in the theatre and in sporting activities. The journalism is of higher standard, has more “bite” than that of the seventies in Sydney and Melbourne. The “Bulletin men” had something important to say, and with the success of the paper, could say it to an increasing and appreciative audience. Affirmation and satiric criticism were preferred to entertainment, pose and patronage. It was not long before the editors were caught up in a struggle for freedom of the press. Archibald and Haynes were gaoled in 1882 for libel. Feeling ran high while they cheerfully wrote article under the heading “In the Jug”. Verse became a feature of the paper from the early days—it was well suited to satiric comment.

The half-tone engraving plant, said to be the first in Australia, gave the Bulletin advantage over its rivals relying on hand-engraving, and it allowed the rapid development of cartooning. The importance of the black-and-white artists in building up Bulletin spirit cannot be overstressed. “Hop” began his long association with the paper on 19 May 1883.⁵ His work immediately invigorated the paper and was probably the greatest factor in establishing a convention. He was joined by Phil May on 16 January 1886. During the eighties and nineties, and in the early twentieth century, a number of outstanding artists found their expression in its pages—Percy F. Spence, Frank P. Mahony, B. F. Minns, Bert H. Levy, H. Souter, Ambrose Dyson, A. H. Fullwood, G. Lambert, Lionel Lindsay, Jack Eldridge, Fred Leist, Hugh McCrae, Norman Lindsay, David Low—a group unequalled in black and white work on any paper in Australia, and on few abroad. They produced the cartoons, illustrations serious and comic, caricatures that delighted the Bulletin's readers and galled its opponents.

The rapid success of the paper was astounding. In five months, it boasted, the circulation had risen from 5000 to 10,000; in a year to 16,000, by 20 December, 1883 to 40,000. The Christmas number of 1886 sold 82,500 copies.

As the Bulletin policy developed, the transition from political and social quips, wise-cracks, smart paragraphs, to other fields was inevitable. Interest in literature, in the possibilities of Australian literature, develops. Criticism of Australian writing, of collections of poems; jibes at poor work, at the work of the “litterateurs”, of the Anglo-Australians become more frequent. Hop's satiric coloured supplement to the 1883 Christmas number, “Reginald's Wooing—An Anglo-Australian Romance”, is a typical affirmation of Bulletin belief. Extracts from earlier Australian writers were reprinted from time to time,⁶ articles on writers and thinkers⁷ were published, book reviews and significant oversea work was reprinted⁸ and translations of French short-stories⁹ were made. With A. G. Stephens, the Red Page became an important feature, a forum for literary discussion.

The policy soon developed of having as many readers as possible contributors. Readers were informed:

The Editor will carefully read and acknowledge in the “Correspondence” column all [sic] contributions submitted—whether in the form of Political, Social, or other Articles, Verse, Short Tales or Sketches (those dealing with Australian subjects, and not exceeding two columns in length, or say 3000 words, are especially acceptable), Paragraphs, Letters, or Newspaper-Clippings. All communications will be regarded as strictly confidential.

It was not until the second half of the decade that the “keep it short” rule developed.¹⁰ Many early stories are long, rambling, loosely-written. The need for short, directly written narratives, accounts, reports, “pars” became more and more obvious. The keep-it-short technique was at times overdone, stories were cut into short sections, divided by asterisks. Edward Dyson's “A Profitable Pub”, 24 December 1887, was split into short sections; Henry Lawson's “His Father's Mate” was divided into seven “chapters”. Writers were encouraged to write about the life they knew best, as directly as possible. Topicality was a virtue. Edward Dyson's “Mr and Mrs Sin Fat”¹¹ appeared in a special “anti-Chinaman” issue; his “The Evolution of Parkes”¹² is a playful political satire on the great Hi Ham. Use of everyday speech, rich with the picturesqueness of local idiom, was recommended. This was in direct contrast to the stilted speech associated with Anglo-Australian writing. An attitude of mind characterized by wry humour, satiric comment, good-natured interest in fellow Australians, rejection of cant and humbug, was encouraged. Under A. G. Stephens great pains were taken to develop writers, to advise and encourage them. Scarcely a writer in verse or prose in the nineties did not come under his influence.

During the eighties the short narrative of the Bulletin shows an increased awareness of the interesting life Australians in widely-differing situations are living. By the end of the decade and through the nineties we note the constant assertion of the writer's identification with that life.

P. R. Stephensen¹³ claims that the Bulletin has had a bad effect on Australian literature and culture. “It has made the larrikin idea paramount, as in an earlier phase convictism was paramount.” This comment is unfair. It arises from a feeling of the inferiority of our life and culture; or, in other words, the stories of the Bulletin do not deal with the things Mr Stephensen thinks they should in his ideal community. The Bulletin had much more than the larrikin to offer, earlier literature themes other than convictism. Mr Stephensen complains that the Bulletin prevented Lawson from writing “great Australian novels, indigenous novels; … Archibald wanted short stories and sketches and poems for his paper, so Lawson became a writer of fragments … and the great works, the sustained works, the ample and leisured works Lawson might have written, and which Australia required of him, remained unwritten”.¹⁴ Such assertions, unsupported and impossible to prove, are of little value; indeed, they show Stephensen's failure to grasp the full significance of the Bulletin influence. The paper was much more than a formula which “ruined” Lawson and trained writers “in flippancy, vulgarity, smartness, terseness, and irreverence”,¹⁵ and to “lay on local colour, not with a brush, but with a trowel”. The Bulletin allowed and helped writers to depict and interpret life as lived by great numbers of Australians. As for local colour, there is scarcely a writer of the nineties who did not at some time make his jibe at the popular tendency in inferior work to exploit it. Lawson in “The Union Buries Its Dead” speaks for the whole group:

I have left out the wattle—because it wasn't there. I have also neglected to mention the heartbroken old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent—he was probably “out back.” For similar reasons I have omitted reference to the suspicious moisture in the eyes of a bearded bush ruffian named Bill. Bill failed to turn up, and the only moisture was that which was induced by the heat. I have left out the “sad Australian sunset,” because the sun was not going down at the time. The burial took place exactly at midday.

Scarcely a writer of significance was not associated with the Bulletin. Victor Daley's short stories are amongst the earliest and his association as prose and verse writer was one of the longest. J. Farrell contributed the first serious Australian story, 27 December 1884, taking the occasion to tilt at conventional writing. In 1887 “Delcomyn” (Ernest Favenc) begins to contribute. Francis Adams and Edward Dyson appear in the same year. In 1888 James Edmond contributes “A Cannibal Story”¹⁶ and Lawson his first short story, “His Father's Mate”.¹⁷ In 1889 “The Banjo” (A. B. Paterson), Randolph Bedford, make their appearance as prose writers. Henry Siebel, Mannington Caffyn and Price Warung (William Astley) join the Bulletin writers in 1890; Alexander Montgomery in the following year. Louis Becke, Lilian J. Turner, Louise Mack and Dowell O'Reilly have stories published in 1893; Ethel S. Turner in 1894, and in 1895 Albert Dorrington, Rose de Boheme, J. Evison, Harry Fletcher, Tom Collins and Steele Rudd make their entries. 1896 adds as prose writers the names of Edward S. Sorenson, Constance Clyde, Barbara Baynton, Roderic Quinn, J. A. Philp and Von Kotze. Ambrose Pratt and Hugh McCrae appear in 1897, Ernest O'Ferrall in 1901, Mrs Langloh Parker in 1902 and in 1903 G. B. Lancaster, James F. Dwyer and C. A. Jeffries.

This list is sufficient to indicate the function of the Bulletin in Australian letters during its first two decades. At no time in Australian publishing were so many writers able to publish work of quality, assured of audience and payment. At no time were writers freer to write as they wished for a weekly paper—even the keep-it-short rule was not pressed for work of some literary value, but served in the main as a guide for beginners. Bulletin writers enjoyed a freedom under enlightened editorship¹⁸ which most contributors to the commercial press have envied. Charles Junor, whose introduction to his stories is much better than the stories themselves,¹⁹ complains:

It must be remembered … that these tales were originally written to suit the individual tastes of the various editors by whom they were first published, and not merely in accordance with the personal predilections of the author himself.

Junor had not the originality, for instance, of the American writer Jerome Weidman, who, faced with this situation, wrote:

I do other people's work badly. … I write the stories I want to write in the way I think they should be written.²⁰

Bulletin writers of the nineties and early twentieth century, if they had something to say, escaped this short-sighted editorial policy.

Bulletin stories need to be studied in conjunction with the contemporary short narrative, if the full significance of the Bulletin contribution is to be recognized. The Christmas book collections of the seventies continued through the eighties, but have little more to offer. Mrs M. J. Evans is associated with two of these in South Australia: South Australian Christmas Annual²¹ and Christmas Bells.²² She claims the former book to be the first South Australian Christmas book, though Percy Sinnett's Wattle Blossom: an Australian Annual for Holiday Readers²³ appears in the same year. The collections contain worthless, sentimental, fashionable narratives. Australian Stories in Press and Verse²⁴ is a good sample of publications for leisure reading, contributed to by leading journalists, crammed full of matter, double-columned with stolid engravings. Garnet Walch's Illustrated Australian Annual for Christmas, 1882, and New Year, 1883²⁵ is of the same species. Bush Yarns, by Authors on the Wallaby²⁶ is another typical collection. We meet again the narratives in the first person, in no way subjective, but written to give the sense of the author's having experienced something unusual. The constant need to explain terms, or to deal jocularly with them is felt:

A sun-downer, as perhaps you are aware, is a polite name for a sturdy beggar who wanders about from station to station ostensibly looking for work, and who is impressed with the unshakable conviction that society is bound to feed him while engaged in his arduous search.²⁷

The Bulletin writers were freed from such explanation; they wrote for the people who used these terms. We meet the common themes—loneliness, bushfires, death by thirst, sudden good-luck, gentlemen of independent means who are left English fortunes, exercises in the Pathetic, e.g., “A Melbourne Holiday”, by Donald Cameron:

There lay the mother of the two children. Last night, as the moon-beams began to steal, blue and cold, through the crevices, she had died with her children's hands in hers. They knew she was dead; she had told them what death was; she had commended them with her last breath to the one Father who was left to them, poor, desolate creatures.

‘Willie,’ she said before the death struggle came on, ‘you are ten years of age, earn a living for your sister, anyhow, anywhere, but honestly. Do not let them send you to the Industrial Schools. Save your soul and that of your sister, so that we may meet in Heaven.’²⁸

The most common structure is still the tale within a tale. W. T. Pyke's Bush Tales by Old Travellers and Pioneers²⁹ culls eight poorly-told pieces from

… many old books and journals long since out of print, … given in the words of their original writers, with but few modifications here and there, to adapt them to their present position and their new readers.

Of collections by individual writers during the eighties, Reginald Crawford's Echoes for Bushland³⁰ presents “tales and sketches”, scarcely short stories, rather ponderous in style, but telling with some effect Australian tales for their own sake. Frances Faucett's A Bushman's Story³¹ is an unusual story of the supernatural with an Eastern-architectured city set in the bush. The prose serves fairly well. Campbell McKellar's A Premier's Secret and other Tales³² and Frank J. Donohue's A Sheaf of Stories for the Centenary Year³³ are laboured tales, heavy with the ponderous literary jargon and posturing of the period, with frequent “learned” references. The stories are plot stories told in an unsuitable prose style. Donohue provides a framework for his tales—a group of men going “home” to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition decide to write a story each. David G. Falk's “Gabriel Lobo, or, The Legend of Trodd's Flat”³⁴ is an undistinguished narrative of the gold diggings. Mrs A. Blitz's Digger Dick's Darling and Other Tales³⁵ and ‘Overlander's’ Australian Sketches³⁶ stress the “Australianity” of their stories. Many stories by ‘Overlander’ are “facts that occurred to the writer himself … or were related to him by friends”. The stories in both collections are wordy, loosely written in a clumsy prose style. Caroline Clarke's Tales, Sketches and Poems³⁷ is distinguished in nothing but its melancholia, sentimentality and prose weaknesses that prevent any short-story development.

The stories of the volumes discussed above are, with few exceptions, written about life of which the writers know little. Not one memorable character appears, the prose is undistinguished, structure almost universally clumsy. The aims of these people in their writing are not important, and any healthy development is impossible. Technically, development towards short-story craftsmanship is equally impossible. This was seen by literary students of the time, certainly by the Bulletin editors, writers and critics. Professor Tucker in The Australian Critic³⁸ attacked four recently published collections which I have refrained from mentioning above. These were Oakbough and Wattle Blossom: Stories and Sketches by Australians in England, edited by Arthur Patchett Martin,³⁹In Australian Wilds and Other Colonial Sketches by B. L. Farjeon, etc., edited by P. Mennell,⁴⁰Over the Sea and Under the Gum Tree, both edited by Mrs A. Patchett Martin.⁴¹ Professor Tucker objected to the “Australianity” of the work, to the parading of the fact that the writers were “Australians in England” and to their fulsome praise of one another. American short stories are held up as models. “Mr Marriott Watson has some good stuff in him. He has read Bret Harte carefully. …” The argument is summed up thus:

Australianity must not be thrust forward so obtrusively. It need not chase the reader about, and trip him up. There are other and not less interesting types than diggers and squatters. Gum trees and wattles are not the only vegetation. From, too, is quite as important as matter, but neither will suffice without the other. And, above all, imagination and naturalism must take the place of convention.

This article of Tucker's is a historically important statement of the aims of the Australian short-story writer. He rejects the inadequate conventions of Anglo-Australians, or of Australio-Anglians, just as Henry Lawson did in the ironic comment quoted above from “The Union Buries Its Dead” and just as Bulletin nationalism did. The two Bulletin collections show how short-story writing in Australia was shaping itself: A Golden Shanty: Australian Stories and Sketches; Prose and Verses by Bulletin Writers⁴² and The Bulletin Story Book: A Selection of Stories and Literary Sketches from the Bulletin, 1881-1901.⁴³

The ten years of A. G. Stephens's association with the Bulletin were important ones, for Stephens gave not only an impetus but direction to indigenous writing. No one was better equipped than he for this function. His standards were high, his literary perspective clear. He was intimately acquainted with the literatures of England and France, especially with the contemporary literature. He knew Australian bush, small town and city life thoroughly. His earlier journalistic and printing experience gave him valuable practical assistance, and his passion to develop literature in this country supplied the driving force for tireless labours. His critical work still retains its penetration and freshness. The literary work on the Boomerang formed an excellent apprenticeship for the Red Page. The Bookfellow, begun as an extension of his Red Page work in 1899, reappearing weekly for a short time in 1907 after his departure from the Bulletin, and finally being resumed as a monthly in December 1911, continuing until 1925, allowed him to carry on his work as our leading critic. Writing of Stephens in 1940,⁴⁴ Vance Palmer says of his comments:

… they are the sparks his mind threw out in the heat and energy of the moment; but how they light up the work that produced them, how potent they are in kindling fire still!⁴⁵

This is no undeserved praise. The pretentious, the sentimental, the conventionally romantic in writing, the unneeded rhetoric, were relentlessly attacked in his efforts to help Australian literature develop and become conscious of oversea standards and achievements.

The Bulletin Story Book of 1901 is Stephens's selection of sixty-four stories by sixty-two writers. “It has not been attempted to choose the best examples of literary style,” he says in the Preface, but to make “an interesting book”. A second book, equal in quality, could easily be compiled, he truthfully pointed out. The Bulletin Story Book is a fair cross-section of Bulletin stories. The quality varies. The main virtues of the selection are the general shortness of the stories, objectivity rather than subjectivity, unaffected use of colloquial language, strength of dialogue, preference for stories told in the third person, identification of the writer with the life he deals with, very little of the posing affected by earlier story writers, avoidance of interpolated comment, greater realism, a political and social interest and awareness, relish of bush yarns and folk-lore, a wry humour, a genuine Australianity—genuine in the sense in which A. G. Stephens spoke of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, of the same year, as “the very first Australian novel to be published”.

The stories are not generally plot stories, though some make use of plot. They present, rather than manipulate life.

There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice. I am one of a class, the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life. …⁴⁶

This applies to most of the Bulletin writers as forcibly as it does to Miles Franklin. There is no patronage in the writing. Lawson's socialism, his philosophy of mateship demanded, in writing, friendly equality of writer and reader. The writer accepts his reader on equal terms, takes for granted interest in and knowledge of Australian bush and city life. The stories were thus of greater interest to an Australian audience than to an oversea public. A. G. Stephens was in no danger of over-estimating the performance of his writers.

So the stories and sketches which follow are usually the dreams of men of action, or the literary realisation of things seen by wanderers. Usually they are objective, episodic, detached—branches torn from the Tree of Life, trimmed and dressed with whatever skill the writers possess (which often is not inconsiderable). In most of them still throbs the keen vitality of the parent stem: many are absolute transcripts of the Fact, copied as faithfully as the resources of language will permit.

He goes on to point out that

… the branch should be shown growing upon the Tree, not severed from it: the Part should imply the Whole, and in a sense contain it, defying mathematics. Every story of a man or woman should be a microcosm of humanity; every vision of Nature should hold an imagination of the Universe.⁴⁷

These remarks are true. Many short stories fall short of such standards, however cunningly wrought. Their writers lack vision, significance is not realised. But the stories of the Bulletin collection deal with life, whatever their limitations, the “keen vitality of the parent stem” throbs through them. The work is healthy; if Australian life is not treated adequately, if Australian literature does not become memorable, “it will be the fault of the writers,” says Stephens. The twenty years following Stephens's Bulletin association brought forward only a few writers who learned the lesson he taught and grappled with the life they knew on their own terms.

Notes

1. 11 November.

2. 27 December.

3. 26 February.

4. 26 November.

5. [Livingston Hopkins, who joined the Bulletin from America.]

6. e.g. the “Sketches from Dead Hands”, 1882.

7. e.g. Deniehy, Marcus Clarke, Kendall; Zola, Bret Harte, Mallarmé.

8. e.g. Extracts from Kipling, Swinburne, Rossetti, and of course—Samuel Butler's “Discobulus”.

9. e.g. by Maupassant, Françoise [sic] Coppée, Mirbeau.

10. “Short Australian or other stories, up to say, 3000 words. About half that length, or even less, will be preferred.” (10 May 1890—typical note.)

11. 4 April 1888.

12. By Silas Shell, 21 January 1888.

13. The Foundations of Culture in Australia. An Essay towards National Self Respect. Sydney, W. J. Miles, 1936. [See The Writer in Australia, John Barnes (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969), p. 236.]

14. Page 66, The Foundations of Culture in Australia.

15. Ibid., p. 70.

16. 21 January 1888.

17. 22 December 1888.

18. Despite Henry Lawson's complaints of tardy publication—21 January 1889.

19. Dead Men's Tales, Melbourne, George Robertson, 1898 [p. ix].

20. Saturday Review of Literature, 15 April 1939.

21. Adelaide, Scrymgeour & Sons, 1881; “containing tales by Maude Jeanne Franc, G. E. Loyau and others”.

22. Edited by Maude Jeanne Franc; Adelaide, Geo. Collis, January 1882.

23. Adelaide, H. J. Woodhouse.

24. Melbourne, Cameron, Laing, 1882.

25. Hobart, J. Walch & Sons; Adelaide, H. Hampson.

26. Melbourne, Cameron, Laing, 1884.

27. “The Devil and the Swagman”, by Frank Morley.

28. In Bush Yarns, by Authors on the Wallaby.

29. Melbourne, F. W. Cole, 1888.

30. Sydney, City of Sydney Publishing Co., 1881.

31. Private circulation, 1882.

32. Melbourne, McCarron, Bird & Co., 1887.

33. Sydney, W. M. MacLardy, 1888.

34. Australian Supplement, 25 December 1886.

35. London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1886.

36. Melbourne, Kemp and Boyce, 1888.

37. Melbourne, McCarron, Bird & Co.; private circulation, 1886.

38. 1 December 1890.

39. London, Scott, 1888.

40. London, Hutchinson, 1889.

41. London, Trischler & Co., 1890.

42. Sydney, Bulletin Co., 1890.

43. Ed. by A. G. Stephens; Sydney, Bulletin Co., 1901.

44. A. G. Stephens, His Life and Work, Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens, 1941.

45. Page 34.

46. Introduction to My Brilliant Career (Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1901) [p. 2].

47. The Bulletin Story Book; Introduction, page v.