SOURCE: Cantrell, Leon. Introduction to The 1890s: Stories, Verse, and Essays, edited by Leon Cantrell, pp. xi-xxv. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977.

[In the following excerpt, Cantrell highlights the uniqueness of 1890s Australian literature and the significant developments in Australian literary history that occurred during this decade.]

The decade of the 1890s has meant many different things as Australians have tried to come to terms with their past. Perhaps there is always an aura of nostalgia and sentiment hanging over a period which seems to mark a watershed between an old way of life and a new. And when that period marks the closing years of a century, especially the first full century of a country's recorded history, something special seems to attach to it. Certainly this has long been the case with the 1890s in Australia. There is a persistent romantic interpretation of the decade which sees it as through the hazy glow of a golden afternoon. To the generation of the First World War and the 1920s the earlier age seemed to contain a potential and a promise which had been lost. Early volumes of reminiscences, taking their cue from the fin de siècle tone of the English decadents, emphasized the nineties' free-and-easy, devil-may-care bohemianism as both attractive and liberating. They spoke of its principal figures as creative giants, the like of whom we would be lucky to see again. George Taylor's wistfully titled Those Were the Days (1918) heralded the beginning of a steady stream of articles and books which saw the literary achievements of the 1890s as central to the Australian experience. A few years later Arthur Jose referred to “the romantic years” of the nineties and told legendary tales of Christopher Brennan's “Casuals” and of Victor Daley's “Dawn and Dusk” group as centres of cultural and creative ferment. Even up-country, Jose wrote, young men's minds were “working as if some super-baker had permeated them with a spiritual yeast.”¹

Oddly enough, however, the period itself seemed to be unaware of its mythical proportions. Certainly there was a feeling of opportunity and achievement in the air, but it was viewed in essentially modest terms, quite lacking the note of euphoria later writers ascribed to it. Desmond Byrne's Australian Writers (1896), for instance, lamented the absence of a literature with “something of a national savour in it”² yet chose to ignore the work of such Bulletin writers as Henry Lawson and “Banjo” Paterson because it was seen as somehow inferior. Though H.G. Turner's and Alexander Sutherland's The Development of Australian Literature (1898) mentions Lawson and Paterson, it similarly concentrates on such earlier figures as Clarke, Gordon, and Kendall. … I have isolated the major concerns of writers to show a variety of approaches to similar themes: writing in Australia, city life, lyricism, politics and nationalism, the city versus the bush, and life up the country. In this way we can see something of the wholeness of the period: how its preoccupations persisted or were modified, how different writers responded to common issues and pressures. It is my contention that the variety of Australian nineties' writing has been underestimated. We have been too prone to accept the generalizations and stereotypes which criticism and literary history have spawned. Like Byrne, eighty years ago, we have been reluctant to look at the evidence. …

But why the 1890s? What features of Australian writing from that decade warrant an anthology … ? Were the nineties so very different from the 1880s or the first decade of this century? Certainly there is a tradition among our literary critics and historians of treating the nineties as a special case, though there is widespread disagreement as to what its special features were. The one indisputable point of agreement is that the nineties saw a proliferation in the writing and publication of verse and prose. A glance through the pages of the Annals of Australian Literature shows that collections of stories, especially, became increasingly common—so much so that the short story or sketch has come to be regarded as the nineties' most characteristic literary product. The reading public's interest in Australian books also grew so that, for the first time, it was not uncommon for a local volume to sell by the thousands. G. A. Wilkes has pointed out that the first collection of Lawson's stories, While the Billy Boils (1896) sold 32,000 copies within twenty years and that his verse collection of the same year, In the Days When the World was Wide, had cleared 20,000 copies by 1914. The nineties' writers were also the mainstay of “the first successful paperbacks in Australian publishing—the Commonwealth series from Angus and Robertson, which had sold over 140,000 copies by 1908, and the N.S.W. Bookstall series, advertised at the same time as ‘selling in thousands’.”³ Ethel Turner's children's novel, Seven Little Australians (1894), though published in London, rapidly became an Australian bestseller and “Steele Rudd”'s On Our Selection (1899) was perhaps the most popular of all books of the time, selling 20,000 copies in four years. Paterson's verse, The Man From Snowy River (1895) outstripped even Lawson in sales. It had been reprinted twelve times in Australia and twice in England by the end of the century and had sold 35,000 copies by 1906.

But what of the quality of this literature, being so swiftly written and so widely read? Earlier critics, such as Nettie Palmer, sifting through the pages of the Bulletin of the nineties in search of material for her Australian Story Book (1928),⁴ complained of an uninspired sameness in many of the short stories. To read through the great mass of nineties' ballads can be equally tedious. But we mistake the achievement of the age if we do not consider its diversity, if we see it solely in terms of its most characteristic forms. For local writing of the 1890s covered a wide range of styles and subjects. Byrne complained that city and political themes were virtually non-existent in Australian literature, but this … [appears] not to have been the case. At its best, local writing of the period can hold its own with much that was being written elsewhere and even in its more characteristically minor phases it has a native vigour which helps us define our concept of the society from which it arose and to which it spoke. Self-consciousness about Australian writing, a fear that it may not be “good enough”, is still with us, and one of its most obvious legacies is a general underestimation of the nineteenth century's achievement. Though the decade of the nineties has suffered less from this neglect than have earlier decades, because of the obvious stature of such writers as Lawson and Joseph Furphy, there persists a reluctance to view its achievement as a whole. Certainly the bush, and life “up-country”, provided the inspiration for many of the best nineties' stories and verses. But, contrary to the common view, outback themes were far from being the only ones explored. And the image of the age as one which simply celebrated the Australian landscape and character will not hold up before the evidence.

One reason for these common misconceptions is the emphasis which has been placed upon the nineties as the great nationalist phase of our history. This view sees the decade's social, political, and cultural achievements as the summation of a uniquely Australian way of life. It emphasizes the local content of nineties' writing. In the ballads and stories of bush life, as on the canvases of Roberts, Streeton, and McCubbin, it locates the “true Australia”: a golden age of achievement and progress, a definition and a consolidation of the Australian experience. Our major literary historian, H. M. Green, thus writes of “a mood of confidence and romantic optimism” as a hallmark of the nineties. He sees the “spirit” of the times as “a fervent democratic nationalism” which finds its “most characteristic expression in Lawson's doctrine of mateship.”⁵ Such an interpretation stresses another side of the nineties' alleged uniqueness. It sees the period as marking virtually a new beginning for local writing. Jose wrote of “rather a naissance than a renaissance”.⁶ Other writers too have seemed at times quite happy to cast aside Australian writing before 1890 as somehow misdirected or artificial. Nettie Palmer felt that too much “attention has been concentrated on novels like Geoffry Hamlyn and For the Term of His Natural Life to the exclusion of more indigenous work”,⁷ which may have been true; but such a position could easily lead to excesses in the opposite direction. Certainly the view that the 1890s marks the first full flowering of a native-born literature, as it marks the growth to a united nationhood by the Australian people, has been hard to dislodge. Writers and artists of the period learned to portray the country as it really is, we have been told. They learned to characterize the quality of the local landscape (which landscape?); to capture, for the first time, the essence of Australian life (whose life?). The legend of the nineties has insisted that their triumph was to throw off the shackles of an imported vision, which had recoiled from the strangeness of the local scene, to show us ourselves and our land, whole and clear.

This interpretation of the period has been a potent force for conservatism in Australian literature and culture generally. During the early decades of this century the popular styles and themes of the nineties came to be regarded by many as the natural and appropriate norms for Australian writers and artists. For a period of some fifty years the local cultural scene was notoriously conservative and resisted departure from these earlier models. Yet such a view of its achievement would have surprised the nineties. Many keen observers of the time stressed the roads Australian writers and artists had yet to travel before they could rest on their laurels. A. G. Stephens, surveying in 1901 the short stories of the 1880s and 1890s, emphasized the potential of the future rather than the successes of the past. “We take the goods the gods provide”, he wrote, “and are properly grateful while striving for better and best.”⁸ The nineties could speak meaningfully of “Australian literature” as a rapidly growing body of work but it tended to be diffident about the nature of acknowledged success. Many writers and artists, such as Lawson in 1899, felt they were not receiving their due in this country and travelled elsewhere in search of recognition and reward. Others, such as R. H. Croll, suggested Australian writers were not adventurous enough in exploiting material to hand:

Whalers, damper, swag and nosebag, Johnny-cakes and billy-tea,
Murrumburrah, Meremendicoowoke, Yoularbudgeree,
Cattle-duffers, bold bushrangers, diggers, drovers, bush racecourses.
And on all the other pages horses, horses, horses, horses.(9)

To find the origins of the legend of the decade as a golden era, as the summation of a peculiarly and admirably Australian way of life, we have to turn to the period between the two world wars. Perhaps Australians then were searching for a notion of nationhood—a sense of identity—they could not find in their immediate lives. The impact of the First World War and the great depression caused many to feel a sense of betrayal of earlier ideals. It was natural to look back then to the work of the decade before federation for definition and purpose. The writings of Lawson, Paterson, and Furphy, disparate though they are, were hailed as enshrining an Australian way of looking at the world. Concepts of mateship, democracy, and nationalism, deriving their basic stimulus from life in the bush, were seen as integral and necessary parts of the Australian ethic. From the vantage point of thirty or forty years it was easy to cite the weekly Bulletin, which had begun publication in 1880, as the principal polemical organ of the nineties' legend. It was widely suggested that the pictures of up-country life, frequently encountered in its pages, contained all that was representatively and generically Australian, that the Bulletin's balladists and short story writers established our literature as Parkes and Deakin established our commonwealth. In 1933 Jose observed that “for most people nowadays the eighteen-nineties are the birth years of Australian literature”.¹⁰ If historians saw the decade as establishing our basic social and political groupings it seemed natural for the argument to spill over to literary history and criticism as well. As late as 1965 the last of the volumes of nineties' nostalgia, Norman Lindsay's Bohemians of the Bulletin, could speak of the period's creation of “a national literature in prose and poetry”.¹¹

By the 1950s, however, other writers had begun to question the legend of the nineties. The idea of the forceful homogeneity of the age came increasingly under attack as its complexities and contradictions were explored. The so-called “Lawson tradition” in fiction no longer seemed an adequate model. The ballad form had clearly outstayed its welcome and purpose. Patrick White castigated the “dreary, dun-coloured realism”¹² of much contemporary Australian prose. Older writers, such as Vance Palmer, suggested that the strength of the nineties lay less in the absolute literary value of its products than in their symbolic function. He saw such characters as Lawson's Joe Wilson, Paterson's Clancy, and Furphy's Tom Collins as representing a “national figure … (and) the habit of regarding it as the literary norm.” Their creators had principally succeeded in establishing a “special quality” in Australian writing which “might be called a democratic quality.”¹³ Russel Ward's important book endorsed this view. The Australian Legend (1958) singled out the “noble frontiersman” as the major figure in our nineties' writing and the central character in our national life and literature. Within the last decade Ian Turner too has spoken of the period as marking “a decisive turn in the way Australians thought about themselves and their future.”¹⁴

Throughout this continuing debate on the nature and importance of the nineties there have been two major assumptions which have not been spelt out and adequately discussed. As they both have a good deal of bearing upon how we view nineties' writers and writing I propose to outline them here. The first is the assumption that there was a radicalization of Australian life during the period: the belief that concepts of nationalism and democracy suddenly took on new and more vital meanings and that they were (perhaps necessarily) reflected in the literature of the time.

Evidence for this political view has been seemingly easy to find. The 1880s in Australia had been a period of economic boom, so that the depression which gripped most of the country by 1892 marked a decisive change in general standards of prosperity. By the middle of that year many banks had failed and several large development companies had closed their books amid rumours of fraud and corruption. Country people were at least as hard hit as those in the cities. Wool especially, the staple commodity, now seemed heavily overproduced. It has been estimated that something like a quarter of the Australian work force was unemployed at the worst stages of the depression.¹⁵ Naturally, people began to look elsewhere, to different philosophies, for a solution to the country's ills. The American Henry George's Progress and Poverty, with its theory of a single, land tax, as well as doctrines of socialism, was widely discussed. George himself visited Australia in 1890 and held many meetings. The young Henry Lawson was one of his avid listeners. But the trade unions, which had become increasingly powerful during the 1880s, were now also hit by financial difficulties as many members were unemployed. Such organizations were thus ill-prepared for the great strikes of the years 1890-94. These disputes, especially on the waterfront and in the shearing sheds, the first major testings of organized labour in Australia, were generally resolved in the employers' favour. In times of economic depression and uncertainty only they could afford to name their own terms. The important result was a wave of working class feeling against the efficacy of militant action. Throughout the country the nineties saw the labour parties emerge as powerful political groups, which seemed to promise success through parliament rather than through strikes. But the initial gains and programmes of labour now seem rather less impressive than they once did. More by design than misjudgment, they left the basic social and economic anomalies of the country virtually unscathed. Real power is not to be found in the ballot box but through the control of property and profits. Far from establishing a democratic decade, labour policies can be seen as consolidating the foundations of the increasingly undemocratic conduct of Australian political life.

If then we must qualify our concept of the political radicalization of Australia in the 1890s we must also look again at the literature, which, we have been told, enshrines the spirit of the decade. There is a common view, for instance, that the Bulletin was a radical newspaper, espousing egalitarian views. Its literary policy has thus been seen as an expression of its political stand: akin to Furphy's (ironical?) description of Such is Life: “temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian”. But if we look closely at the social and political platforms on which the bulletin stood, it is hard to see it as other than a bourgeois-reformist journal which was in no way equipped to instigate a radicalization or democratization of Australian society. Week after week it declared its intention to bring about a number of political and administrative changes but it failed to direct attention to other than superficial anomalies. “The more equitable distribution of wealth is a good thing”, it conceded in 1901, “but unless it is first made certain that the country has a reasonable amount of wealth of its own to distribute more equitably, it is not so good as it looks. ‘Socialism in our Time’ has its advantages, but ‘Solvency in our Time’ needs to come first.”¹⁶

Like the labour parties which shared so many of its views, the Bulletin failed to support social and political restructuring in any other than a narrowly liberal-bourgeois sense principally because it lacked any coherent ideological basis or interests. The doctrines of scientific socialism, widely disseminated in Europe by this time, had no popular platform in this country. The Bulletin's principal political concern was for the preservation and furtherance of middle-class self-help and capital. Its reputation as a radical, democratic weekly can only be understood in the context of our present undemocratic and un-radical society. By 1894 it was clear that so-called radical thought in Australia was expedient rather than ideologically revolutionary. In the Anglo-Saxon manner it sought to prop up or disguise the injustices of the present system rather than to take a leaf or two from the book of European socialism and attempt the overthrow of the established hierarchy. Only William Lane among nineties' activists saw the necessity for a new beginning and he tried it in South America, not Australia. Lane's departure in 1893 marked the effective end of any dream of Utopia in the Australian colonies.¹⁷

The second assumption underlying much of the debate on the 1890s is that Australian writing of the period can be regarded as a reflection of Australian life: that its importance as literature can somehow be measured by the accuracy with which it reflects the nineties' world. Thus Lawson, for so long hailed as the “apostle of mateship”, has been cited as the most representatively Australian writer because his work supposedly reveals the essential truths of our egalitarian, democratic tradition. Such a view is far from accurate. The need to believe in a democratic tradition has been the principal distorting factor in our understanding of writing from the 1890s. It has led to an exaggerated emphasis upon certain features to the virtual exclusion of more important ones. We may well ask: should we even anticipate that literature will enshrine the popular concept of a national ethos, as Russel Ward suggests? Indeed, can we now regard Vance Palmer's “democratic quality” as a unique or even outstanding aspect of our writers of the period? Is it possible that in a search for a national identity we have seized upon particular aspects of an age and have given them a centrality which they never really had? And what of the writers themselves? Were they deliberate social chroniclers? Noble frontiersmen? Or were they, consciously or unconsciously, mythmakers themselves, creating a legend which has passed for substance? It seems an odd coincidence that most of those whose work has been cited as enshrining the tradition were, in fact, city-dwellers; urbanites, whose lives were often a rejection of a rural past. Paterson was a well-to-do Sydney solicitor and journalist: a “city bushman”, as Lawson sneeringly called him. But Lawson himself was a city down-and-out for almost his entire writing career. “Steele Rudd”'s life in Brisbane was made possible by his accounts of the harshness of bush life. Barbara Baynton, later Lady Headley, was an Anglo-Australian socialite and a highly successful businesswoman. Even Furphy found Shepparton, with its proximity to the Melbourne public library, more congenial than the Riverina of which he wrote. The truth is that bush life is most frequently depicted in our literature of the 1890s as harsh and destructive of all but the basic urge to survive. Or, if Arcadian, as belonging to a bygone age, now lost. Egalitarian mateship is less common than loneliness and betrayal. Failure is more real than success.

My view of the 1890s sees a sense of alienation and loss as a principal literary hallmark. … I have sought to show how much of the best writing of the period recoils from those very features which the nationalist interpretation holds to be most characteristic and most affirmatively Australian: mateship, egalitarian democracy, the celebration of bush life. The stories of Lawson, Baynton, Albert Dorrington, and Edward Dyson reprinted here are emphatic in their emphasis upon the horrors of outback life, on the dehumanizing qualities of the frontier existence. The poetic “debate” between Lawson and Paterson in the Bulletin of 1892,¹⁸ where the latter seemed to suggest that Lawson was merely being pessimistic about the bush, can now be seen as a major watershed in our writing. For what was at stake, for Lawson at least, was the whole notion of the relationship of a writer to his society. Should the writer attempt to fabricate and idealize his experience in the interests of a national ideal? Or should he try to depict the world as he saw it, in spite of the hurt to himself and his readers? The path he took was unequivocal:

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

(“Up the Country”)

Even when Paterson himself writes of the present, such as in parts of “Clancy of the Overflow”, it is with a similar sense of disbelief in its humanizing potential.

In those writers more exclusively concerned with the city, or even with more philosophical themes, we can frequently detect a similar thread of disillusionment. Indeed, by the 1890s Australia was already one of the most urbanized nations and the pattern was reinforced by the drift of population to the cities during the lengthy period of recession and unemployment. For writers like Lawson and William Lane the urban landscape was as bleak and inhuman as the poorest place up-country. Christopher Brennan, our finest poet from the period, composed a sequence of poems around a search for ultimate meaning and value. But it remained a search. Even in those pieces where the task seemed most immediately fruitful (such as “We sat entwined an hour or two together”) the tone of loss and resignation predominates at the end:

          lost in the vast, we watched the minutes hasting
into the deep that sunders friend from friend;
spake not nor stirr'd but heard the murmurs wasting
into the silent distance without end.

Indeed, Brennan's affinities with other Australian writers of the nineties have not been sufficiently drawn out. He has been seen as something of an exotic, writing in a European tradition at a level far above the local balladists and versifiers. But his images of loneliness, of deeply-felt alienation and despair, suggest links with Baynton's Bush Studies, with “The Union Buries its Dead”, and with those parts of Such is Life which reveal a forcefully jaundiced view of many of the values we regard as integral to the myth of a democratic tradition. Yet there is one passage in Furphy's novel which seems to offer an almost apocalyptic vision of the Australia of the future:

It is not in our cities or townships, it is not in our agricultural or mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day.¹⁹

But here too the vision lies in the uncertain future: in the world of “potentiality” and “promise”. The force of the present is much more assertive: it is “monotonous” and “interminable”, “grave” and “alien”. Indeed, the major impetus of the novel, its picture of life, is much more in the direction of loneliness, betrayal, physical and mental suffering, and injustice than critics have generally allowed. Perhaps it is “offensively Australian” in a sense which has not been sufficiently emphasized. Its sense of the present as a denial of that which was rightly and properly anticipated in the past suggests similarities with many other works of the period. Two of the nineties' most popular verses, “The Man From Snowy River” and “In the Days When the World Was Wide”, speak of a golden age which has passed and which can only be recreated through the memory of the deeds of yesteryear. They celebrate a way of life and spirit which have vanished. Lawson's sense of betrayal at the hands of middle-class capital, which we see in the bitterly titled “‘Pursuing Literature’ in Australia”, is given the edge of moral outrage in his lament for the passing of the “roaring days”:

But 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 decade's interest in political events as literary themes reveals a similar dichotomy between the awareness of the shortcomings of the achieved present and the inspiration and hope to be derived from a sense of the past and the future. Though the short stories of “Price Warung” deal with the convict days of Australia's past they are finely tuned to the world of the 1890s in their interest in the dehumanizing tendency of organized authority. Some, such as Brunton Stephens and William Gay, may have seen the political events of the period, leading to federation, as the crowning glory of the colonial experience. Others were unconvinced. They suspected that federation, like labour politics (and unionism?), was simply the old game under new rules. The flatulent style of Brunton Stephens's “Fulfilment” and George Essex Evans's “Federal Song” has to be measured against the indignant energy of Victor Daley and the heavily qualified sense of achievement (and even of potential) in Bernard O'Dowd's “Australia” and “Young Democracy”. O'Dowd's first book, published by the Bulletin in 1903, was dedicated “to young democracy”, but its title—Dawnward?—was far from confident or celebratory.

G. A. Wilkes has recently pointed out how, in emphasizing certain aspects of our nineties' writing, earlier critics have given a false sense of discontinuity to our literary history. Marcus Clarke, he suggests, saw the scenery not so very differently from Lawson. The sense of the future potential of Australia, as opposed to the harshness of its present, “also appealed to Harpur and Kendall: it was by no means the invention of the 1890s.”²⁰ Similarly, developments in our writing this century have emphasized continuity with the view of the nineties I have been advancing. The poetry of James McAuley and A. D. Hope shares many affinities with that of Brennan. The landscape of Voss would have been recognized by Lawson. The prevailing tone of the 1890s, an uneasy acceptance of a world which seems to offer more than it can give, is the major tradition of Australian writing. …

Notes

1. Arthur Jose, The Romantic Nineties (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1932), p. 32.

2. Desmond Byrne, Australian Writers (London: Bentley, 1896), p. 24.

3. G.A. Wilkes, Australian Literature: A Conspectus (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969), p. 32.

4. Nettie Palmer, Fourteen Years: Extracts From a Private Journal, 1925-1939 (Melbourne: Meanjin Press, 1948), p. 22.

5. H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1961), pp. 347-48.

6. Romantic Nineties, p. 28.

7. From the introduction to C. Hartley Grattan, Australian Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore, 1929), p. 8.

8. From A.G. Stephens's introduction to The Bulletin Story Book (Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1901), p. v.

9. Bookfellow, 5 May 1899, p. 21.

10. Romantic Nineties, p. 21.

11. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965), p. 7.

12. Patrick White, “The Prodigal Son”, Australian Letters 1 (1958): 37-40.

13. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), p. 170.

14. Ian Turner, The Australian Dream (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968), p. xvi.

15. B.K. de Garis, “1890-1900”, in F.K. Crowley, ed., A New History of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974), p. 225.

16. Bulletin, 18 May 1901, p. 6.

17. This view of the Bulletin is outlined more fully in my essay “A.G. Stephens, The Bulletin, and the 1890s”, in Leon Cantrell, ed., Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen: Essays in Australian Literature (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976), pp. 98-113.

18. See Bruce Nesbitt, “Literary Nationalism and the 1890s”, Australian Literary Studies 5 (1971): 3-17.

19. Such is Life (Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1903), p. 65.

20. G.A. Wilkes, “Going Over the Terrain in a Different Way”, Southerly, 35 (1975): 147.