[In the following essay, Davison provides the cultural context for the Australian legend of the bush, a myth consolidated by the mostly urban-dwelling writers of Sydney's Bulletin during the 1890s.]

‘It was I’, recalled Henry Lawson in his years of fame, ‘who insisted on the capital B for “Bush”’.¹ Lawson, as it happened, was not the first writer to adopt the convention and his pursuit of the bush idea was only one strand in a broader movement during the 1890s to make the rural interior a focus of Australian ideals. Though the bush, with and without a capital B, had figured in earlier writing, it remained for an expatriate Englishman, Francis Adams, in his book The Australians (1893), to identify the ‘bushman’ as a distinct national type. It is interesting, in view of the significance that the ‘bush’ was later to acquire, that Adams and Lawson should also have promoted the matching terms, ‘city’ and ‘cityman’. ‘Bush’ and ‘city’ were plainly important literary touchstones to the writers of the 1890s and their symbolic counterpoint provides a vital clue to the sources of the ‘Australian Legend’.

Historians of Australian cultural origins have generally sought the explanation of the ‘bush’ myth in the social context of the bush itself. Russel Ward, its most influential interpreter, has traced the ‘Australian Legend’ to a popular tradition of ballad and yarn that developed first among the convict settlers and itinerant workers of the pastoral frontier. Invoking the ‘frontier hypothesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner, Ward argued that while America, a small man's frontier, had produced a national ethos of individualism and privatism, Australia, as a big man's frontier, created a tradition of egalitarianism and collectivism, of ‘mateship’. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, through the powerful influence of the Sydney Bulletin and the ‘new unionism’ these traditions were imported from the pastoral frontier to the coastal cities where they formed the basis of a national, rather than merely sectional, culture.² As the ‘bush’ became the ‘Bush’, folk tradition was transmuted into literature.

It is a tribute to Ward's persuasiveness that, through a new generation of historical writing, The Australian Legend remains the standard account of Australia's cultural origins. Even as he was writing in the late 1950s, the foundations of his interpretation—the rural-export model of the Australian economy, his simple two-class model of pastoral society, the Turnerian concept of the frontier—were under attack. American historians were tracing their legend back from the far West to the popular song and story-writers of the great cities. In the early 1960s, Norman Harper, reviewing the history of the American and Australian frontiers, urged Australian historians to shift their vantage point ‘from back of Bourke to the coast’ and Michael Roe reminded them that ‘whereas the appeal of the bush has been the great myth of Australian history the appeal of the city has been the great fact’.³ Yet ‘fact’ and ‘myth’ have remained strangely unrelated, not least because the few casual attempts at an urban interpretation of the ‘Australian Legend’ have lacked a definite intellectual and social context.

A fundamental weakness of folk history—a genre of which Ward's book is a superior example—derives from its assumption that popular values may be abstracted from creative literature without direct reference to the ideas and special situation of those who created it. We are required to look beyond the mediating author to divine the conscience collective. The hazards of this method are obvious even with an unselfconscious, traditional culture, but they are greatly multiplied when we apply it to a post-industrial, culturally derivative society like nineteenth-century Australia. In such a culture, I suggest, we do better to begin, as we would any other exercise in the history of ideas, with the collective experience and ideas of the poets and storywriters themselves.

This experience, it must be emphasized, was of an emerging urban intelligentsia rather than a dying rural folk culture. All but a few of the Bulletin's staple contributors and most of its occasional ‘correspondents’ lived in the coastal cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne. But only a handful had apparently grown up as city dwellers. The most outstanding group—Henry Lawson, Bernard O'Dowd, Edward Dyson, A. G. Stephens, the Lindsays—came as fortune-seekers from the declining goldfields, their intellectual interests already often kindled by small-town self-improvement societies. ‘Banjo’ Paterson was the one important figure with even fair ‘bush’ credentials. Moreover, while it may be true, as Geoffrey Serle has claimed, that ‘there is hardly one major creative artist, after Marcus Clarke and Buvelot, who is not a native Australian’,⁴ a striking number of the Bulletin's second rank—James Edmond, G. H. Gibson, Ernest Favenc, ‘Price Warung’ (William Astley), Victor Daley, D. H. Souter, Will Ogilvie, Will Lawson, F. J. Broomfield and Albert Dorrington—had arrived in Australia from Britain as adolescents or young adults. Rather than bush—or Australian city—origins, the recurrent feature in the biographies of the Bulletin writers was their arrival in Sydney or Melbourne as lone, impressionable, ambitious young men.

In some, literary ambition had been fired by the frustrations of more conventional pursuits. Drop-outs from law or commerce, like Roderic Quinn; failed matriculation candidates like Lawson; disillusioned schoolteachers like Mary Cameron: all clamoured for a place in the one calling, open to talent and consistent with literary aspirations, which a colonial city provided. ‘Journalism’, G. B. Barton noted in 1890, ‘is at present the only field in which literary talent can find profitable occupation’.⁵ The 1880s were a prosperous time for the press. Expanding colonial trade and a growing urban reading public produced a rapid growth of newspapers and trade journals and, in turn, an encouraging stimulus to literary effort. The number of ‘authors, editors, writers, and reporters’ counted by the census-taker in Melbourne more than quadrupled from 89 in 1881 to 359 in 1891. But even in these best of times a journalist's apprenticeship was hard and the long hours, low pay, and drudgery of police rounds weeded out all but the most determined. His work, by its very nature, put the young reporter constantly on call and this ‘enforced irregular life’ and ‘weakening of domestic influences’ were reckoned to confirm the ‘bohemian tastes’ and lifestyle of the average journalist.⁶

Many would-be writers had already cut adrift from ‘domestic influences’ when they came to the city and, like other young urban immigrants, lived alone in lodgings. In 1890 Sydney, with its large floating population of dock labourers, seamen, and seasonal workers, had over 300 listed boardings-houses, most of them crowded into a narrow ‘transitional zone’ between the terminal areas around the waterfront and railway station and the central business district. The city's boarding-house district extended from the high-class boarding-houses on Dawes Point south into a notorious skid-row of seamen's lodgings in lower George and Clarence Streets near the older Chinese quarter and the Quay; there were further clusters of cheap rooming houses adjacent to the main ‘red light’ district around the Town Hall and amid the pubs, music halls, and paddy's market near Belmore Park and the Haymarket; then, a little further out, a crescent of respectable white collar and artisans boarding-houses stretched from Redfern Station through Surry Hills towards King's Cross.⁷ Sydney's boarding-houses were more than twice as numerous as Melbourne's and, since they lay athwart the main transport arteries, they were also more conspicuous. By the late 1880s, rising unemployment and the city's chronic housing shortage had swollen their population to crisis point. High population densities and residential mobility, a preponderance of unattached men and the volatile mixing of the poor, the vicious, and the exotic gave the region a distinctive ethos.⁸ These were the tidelands of the city: a staging point for immigrants; a haven for the drifter, the outcast, the man or woman with a past; a twilight zone of rootlessness and anomie.

This was the sleazy urban frontier which provided the social context for the Bulletin writers' confrontation with the city and from which, as we shall see, they fashioned reactively their conception of the ‘bush’. …

Throughout their early stories and verses there are vivid glimpses of boarding-house life. We meet the landlady, blowzy and familiar, and drawn—as we might expect with young men away from home—affectionately and rather larger than life. James Edmond describes one such ‘wild’ bohemian establishment:

There were ten of us there … including Bem, the humorous Polish tailor, who was vaguely understood to have thrown bombs at all the royal families of Europe, and then gone into exile. We paid seventeen shillings a week each, not including washing; and we lived riotously on boiled mutton. There were more empty beer bottles in the bedrooms, and more laughter, and more grease slopped on the floor, and the candle-ends got in the soup oftener in that boarding house than in any other I ever heard of. Also the neighbours got less sleep than anybody ever did in the vicinity of any other boarding-house. The dining room had not been papered since the beginning of history, and the landlady had only one eye; also her daughter had recently eloped with a nonunion printer. She, the landlady, was aged about 40, and wore a green dress, and in the evening she used to sing songs to us with her hair down.⁹

But beyond the rough good fellowship of the boarding-house, the city melted into the fleeting images of the twilight zone: Chinese opium dens and sixpenny restaurants, drunken youths swaying under gas lamps, painted women waiting on street corners and the ceaseless tidal flow of faces in the street. Henry Lawson, who traversed the region daily on his way from Phillip Street to Redfern Station, gave us the essential vision:

They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet,
My window sill is level with the faces of the street—
Drifting past, drifting past
To the beat of weary feet
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.(10)

None of Lawson's early poems establishes so precisely his marginal urban situation or attests so poignantly to his legacy of loneliness. The dilemma—‘Sydney or the Bush?’—had been inherent, from the very beginning, in the emotional conflict between Lawson's parents, the brooding bushman Peter Larsen and his ambitious, city-struck wife, Louisa. Louisa had married Larsen, she later confessed, to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of her parents' home but, as a selector's wife, she soon repented her blunder. (Misalliance was to become the emotional core of her feminism and a central theme in her later fiction.) Torn between this ill-matched pair, young Lawson grew up dreamy, solitary and deprived. When he was five, he visited Sydney for the first time, an experience he still recalled, with the pain of outraged innocence, thirty years later. He wandered into a brothel, ate cakes with the ladies of the town, and was scolded by his mother. With some playmates he stole some wood shavings from a neighbouring coach factory but was detected by the boss who chased the young delinquents down Castlereagh Street, shouting, ‘Cut off their heads.’ Young Harry hardly stopped running until he got back to Gulgong, marked for life with a distrust of city ways and city people.¹¹

When he was sixteen the Lawsons' dismal marriage broke up and Louisa brought her four children to Sydney. They squatted with relatives at Marrickville for a few weeks then, in 1884, rented four rooms in Phillip Street, amid a cluster of lodging houses near the Quay. On their first night the children, unaccustomed to the noises of the city, lay awake listening to the clatter of feet on pavements, the mewing of tom-cats and the rattle of trams around Hunter Street corner. For Louisa the city was at first a lonely and difficult place and a few years later, in a thinly disguised autobiographical story, she described the difficulties of a separated country wife making her way by doing odd jobs and taking in boarders. The problem of simply surviving as one of that ‘greatly ill-used, landlord-cursed class, the boarding-house keeper’ was compounded by the ‘undeserved loss of caste’ in being a married woman apart from her husband. She was, in her own eyes, ‘a social outcast’. ‘I was unknown and uncared for’, she wrote, ‘lost in a great city’.¹²

The helplessness of the rural emigré, their exclusion from respectable society, and Louisa's highly developed religious sensibility all combined to bring the Lawsons into the orbit of Sydney's radical intelligentsia. Within three or four years Louisa, with Henry at her apron-strings, had extended her manic energies to the full spectrum of ‘progressive’ causes, ranging from secularism and spiritualism to republicanism and feminism. A letter to George Black in 1888 reports on a typical week's activities:

Mr Bell has gone to the northern districts and in consequence we expected no [Republican] meeting in the Domain Sunday but Mr K[eep] reports a good one. The speakers were Mr Manley and others. … Good crowd, fine day etc. Mr K. attended Mr Collins lecture title Resurrection Myths last evening fair house. Mr K. says it was a splendid discourse. I went down to Lyceum where Mr Hubbard the medium was giving clairvoyance tests with fair success. … I went down to the Town Hall on Sat Eve to hear what the Australian Natives Association had to say for themselves they were well received … I also attended the Anti-Chinese meeting in the same buildings.¹³

The close interconnections between radical organizations suggested by Louisa's routine are further substantiated by their geographical concentration in the inner city. The overlapping circles of secularists, republicans, land-reformers, feminists and socialists, which together comprised Sydney's infant ‘counter-culture’, focussed their activities on a small triangle of the ‘transitional zone’ between the Town Hall, Hyde Park, and Redfern Station.

Its nucleus was the Hall of Freedom in George Street where, under Thomas Walker and W. W. Collins, Sydney's freethinkers continued to preach the doctrines of Thomas Paine, just as their great contemporaries Charles Bradlaugh and F. W. Foote did in London. Many of the Association's stalwarts were themselves apparently refugees from London's declining trades: hardworking hatters, drapers, upholsterers, and compositors whose secularism, crude and iconoclastic, had reflected the disappointments of their lot. But economic aspirations denied by Clerkenwell and Finsbury found more encouragement in Sydney and by the late 1880s many older secularists had left the mean environs of George Street for Woollahra and Paddington. With their dispersion something of the old militancy was lost, and in 1889, at the opening of a new Freethought Hall, these ‘sons of Albion’ were ardent in praise of their ‘Southern Home’. Indeed, it was not resentment of England or a peculiar sense of being Australian so much as fidelity to the Paineite tradition that made some of Sydney's leading freethinkers, like Thomas Walker and William Keep, theoretical republicans. For them, kings and princes, like bishops and priests, were part of an outworn fabric of medieval superstition and oppression. It was only among a smaller cadre of native-born secularists—including, notably, the Lawsons, mother and son—that republicanism became the basis of a more distinctive nationalism. Other Bulletin writers who may be numbered, formally or informally, as republicans in the late 1880s include George Black, E. J. Brady, J. le Gay Brereton, John Farrell, Roderic Quinn and, away from Sydney, Bernard O'Dowd and A. G. Stephens.

From the attack on priest-and-princecraft, it was only a step further to an attack on inheritance. Since the days of the Land and Labour League in the 1860s, the causes of republicanism and land nationalization had been closely associated in London radical circles and during the 1870s Charles Bradlaugh had made land reform a main plank of his electoral platform. In Sydney, secularists and republicans appeared, with the Bulletin's W. H. Traill, among the leaders of the New South Wales Land Nationalization League. The radicals of the inner city had good reason to crave ‘the abolition of that poverty which manifests itself in all large cities of the world’ and the Bulletin urged them on with slashing exposes of rack-renting in lower George Street. The scapegoats for the city's housing problem were the hated Chinese. The pressures created by redevelopment around Circular Quay had forced them to abandon their old haunts in lower George Street and move south to the new market area near Belmore Park, an area which, with its boarding-houses and bookshops, the radical intellectuals regarded as their own. Their champion, George Black M.L.A., led the anti-Chinese campaigns of the late 1880s and early 1890s while the Bulletin's illustrators led by Phil May depicted the squalid interiors of Chinese gambling houses, brothels, and opium dens.

The outlook of Sydney's radical intellectuals was, therefore, a product of two mutually reinforcing influences: the transplanted artisan culture of late nineteenth century London and the pressures of day-to-day life in Sydney's transitional zone. One cannot but remark how closely their ideological preoccupations—secularism, republicanism, land reform, and anti-Chinese feeling—match the ‘anti-clericalism’, ‘nationalism’, bush sentiment and ‘race prejudice’ which Ward has identified as the defining features of the ‘Australian’ ethos. Indeed in this chapter I argue that the projection of these values, born of urban experience, onto the ‘bush’ must be understood in terms of a concurrent movement to establish the ‘city’ as a symbol of their negation.

The city depicted in the writings of the Bulletin school is one that a dispassionate historian would find hard to recognize in contemporary photographs of Sydney's dishevelled townscape. But their lurid imagery, we must remember, was more symbolic than photographic, and owed less to observation of the Sydney scene than to the rich stock of urban imagery which the Bulletin's ‘hard-reading crowd’, along with other colonial city-dwellers, imported from London. The primacy of London and their stereoscopic vision of the nearer urban scene is nicely suggested in a line of Lawson's, written ‘to speed enthusiasm in favour of the London poor’.¹⁴ ‘I looked o'er London's miles of slums’, he wrote, ‘I saw the horrors here / And swore to die a soldier in the Army of the Rear’.¹⁵ (His first and only journey to London still lay fifteen years in the future.)

For J. F. Archibald, founding editor of the Bulletin, the experience of London merely crystallized and reinforced an already dismal view of the colonial city. He had first come to Melbourne in the 1870s as an apprentice journalist from the Western district and for eighteen months scraped along as a part-time stone-hand, living alone and depressed in a South Melbourne boarding-house. A few years later, after becoming well established in journalism, Archibald arrived in Sydney. He was ‘ill and tired’ at first but gradually established himself and in 1880, with his partner John Haynes, founded the Bulletin. But the metropolis continued to exert its fatal attraction and in 1884 he arrived in London. Sick and burdened with financial worries, he lived for almost two years on the margins of Fleet Street, shut out from regular employment but supplying the Bulletin with leaders and ‘pars’ that reflected his acquaintance with contemporary radical journalism and the mounting sense of crisis in ‘Outcast London’.¹⁶ The experience reinforced his distaste for the ‘selfish’, ‘hysterical’, and ‘callous’ ways of the city but, paradoxically, increased his reverence for London standards. Under his influence the Bulletin in the later 1880s continued to project its view of local affairs onto a rolling backdrop of metropolitan events: the West End riots, the rise of the Social Democratic Federation, the fortunes of Charles Bradlaugh, and the Dock Strike.

Among the paper's contributors over the following decade, it is possible to distinguish three main styles of urban writing, each firmly rooted in the London context. As bookish schoolboys in the 1860s and 1870s the Bulletin's writers naturally fell under the pervasive influence of Charles Dickens's rich, but essentially segmental and antipathetic, view of London. Henry Lawson, for example, claimed that ‘every line that Dickens wrote / I've read and read again’ while his friend Jack Brereton recalled how ‘Lawson and I used to wander into all sorts of queer corners and neglected backwaters of Sydney, and he pointed out to me the localities which he fancifully associated with the one novelist with whose work he was fairly familiar, Charles Dickens’. Unhappily it was the weaker side of Dickens—the pathos of young Oliver and Little Nell—rather than his powerful vision of urban landscape which Lawson emulated in his 'Arvie Aspinall and Elderman's Lane stories.¹⁷ But then the value of the London influence lay not in the quality of these imitations so much as the later, less obviously derivative, work for which they provided a scaffolding.

Archibald's stay in London had also coincided with the success of the journalist and light versifier, George Robert Sims. As a protege of Douglas Jerrold and G. A. Sala and a patron of the National Sunday League and the Hall of Science, Sims united the sympathetic, but otherwise separate, worlds of literary bohemia and militant secularism. Today he is remembered mainly for the impact of his book, How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1883), on the housing debate of the 1880s, but he was equally celebrated in his day as the author of Dagonet Ballads, a book of light verse dramatizing the condition of the London poor. (It included ‘It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse’ and ‘The Lights of London Town’.) The Bulletin regarded Sims as ‘undoubtedly the most read light litterateur in the world’ and reprinted his verse on several occasions.¹⁸ With his use of colloquial speech and the ballad convention, and his theme of rural innocence and ‘urban degeneration’, Sims may have exerted a powerful influence on the style and anti-urban bias of Australian popular verse.

The third, and most seminal, influence on the Bulletin writers was the tradition of rhetorical, quasi-religious verse which descended from the late eighteenth century through Blake and Shelley, persisted in Chartism, and returned to fashion in the radical movements of the 1870s and 1880s. For Dickens, the city was mainly a theatre of human character; with Sims, it was a cause of human degeneration; but among the radical poets it became a gigantic symbol of corruption and exploitation invested with the apocalyptic shades of Sodom and Gomorrah. The most formative English exponent of the style was the ‘poet laureate of freethought’, James Thomson, whose ‘City of Dreadful Night’ first published in 1874 enjoyed a vogue during the 1880s. In Australia he was followed by the ‘Arnoldian Socialist’ Francis Adams whose collected verse, published in Sydney in 1887, was, according to E. J. Brady, ‘a notable incident in the pre-socialist period’. Adams's gloomy view of London, ‘the City of Wealth and Woe’, reflected his deep hostility to the land and class of his birth but became, through its resonance with the marginal urban situation of the Bulletin poets, a pivotal image in the verse of J. A. Andrews, George Black, E. J. Brady, Edward Dyson, Henry Lawson, and Bernard O'Dowd, who all served for a time as poetic footsloggers in Adams's ‘Army of the Night’.¹⁹

These three styles of urban image-making corresponded roughly with different kinds of social and political consciousness and the gradual predominance of the third over the first and second is one index of the deepening sense of urban alienation among Bulletin writers around 1890. Only careful attention to the chronology of their writings discloses the connection between their increasingly dismal view of the city and the rise of the bush ideal. Until about 1890, for example, Henry Lawson's writing had consisted mainly of republican ‘songs for the people’, verses on urban themes (‘Watch on the Kerb’) and semiautobiographical sketches on gold-fields and selection life. But in that year we find his interests moving further inland. In a series of newspaper articles he discussed the idea of decentralization and land reform, arguing that ‘if some of the surplus suburbs of Sydney were shifted up country a few hundred miles, New South Wales would greatly benefit by the change’. Almost simultaneously his verse leaps ‘Over the Ranges and into the West’:

We'll ride and we'll ride from the city afar
To the plains where the cattle and sheep stations are.(20)

In the late 1880s ‘Banjo’ Paterson may have stood closer to the rest of the Bulletin crowd than he did in later life. It is true that he joined few of their campaigns and lived in semi-rural seclusion across the Harbour at Gladesville, but his solicitor's office was within a block of the city's most sordid flophouses and in one of his first published pieces, a tract on land reform Australia for the Australians (1888), he invited his readers to

take a night walk round the poorer quarters of any of our large colonial cities [where] they will see such things as they will never forget. They will see vice and sin in full development. They will see poor people herding in wretched little shanties, the tiny rooms fairly reeking like ovens with the heat of our tropical summer. I, the writer of this book, at one time proposed, in search of novelty, to go and live for a space in one of the lower class lodging houses in Sydney, to see what life was like under that aspect. I had ‘roughed it’ in the bush a good deal. … But after one night's experience of that lodging I dared not try a second … I fled.²¹

In his flight from the horrors of the city, Paterson retreated inland; his solution to urban ills was to open up ‘the rolling fertile plains’ to closer settlement. The city and the country were established as separate moral universes: the poet worked in a ‘dingy little office’ in a ‘dusty dirty city’ but his better self, on permanent vacation, rode with the ‘western drovers’, sharing the ‘pleasures that the townsfolk never know’.²²

With E. J. Brady, the flight from the city took a new direction. Brady had grown up in Carcoar, a mining town on the eastern slopes, but spent some of his school years in the United States where, he later claimed, he was converted to republicanism. Back in Sydney, Brady and Roderic Quinn, a schoolmate at the Marist Brothers High School, actually designed an emblem for their future ‘Republic of Australia’. After matriculation and a brief trial as an engineer's apprentice, Brady followed his father into Dalgety and Co., becoming a timekeeper in their bondstore on Circular Quay. The Harbour, in his eyes, was to become a ‘golden portal’ between the mean environs of the Quay and ‘the wide mysterious domains of Glory and Romance, spreading out and away across the world’.²³ He wrote a first slumming article on the Chinese gambling dens of lower George Street and learned a lot about ‘ships and sailormen and stevedores’ which he stowed away as material for the sea-shanties and ballads which expressed his nautical variation on the ‘bush’ themes of mateship and manly toil. His intellectual horizons were broadening too. From Chateaubriand and the Lives of the Saints he moved on to Kant, Mill, Darwin, and Marx—teachers who took him far from the faith of his childhood and created a rift with his parents who became ‘so opposed to my secular opinions that I could not discuss my religion or politics within the home circle without disagreeable conflict’. These tensions emerge clearly in Brady's unpublished verse of the late 1880s: two of his poems—‘Ruth’ and ‘Ishmael’—express feelings of ‘mental isolation’ and territorial estrangement, while others—‘Eden: The Dream of the Disinherited’ and ‘The Land of the West’—project his vague utopian longings beyond Sydney Harbour into a mythical land far from ‘the shore / Of Time, whose restless changing sea / The fleeting prow / Of mortal How / Sails to some far-off To Be’.²⁴

The dream-like ‘Land of the West’ which emerged in the late 1880s as an anti-type of the city began to acquire a more definite character during the urban conflicts of the early 1890s. With the Maritime Strike of 1890, the Sydney waterfront, already ridden with unemployment, overcrowding, and racial tension, became a frontier of class conflict. There was rioting on Circular Quay and unionists held almost daily meetings in the Haymarket. Battle lines were strictly drawn and the radical intellectuals, occupying the narrow divide between the eastern (middle-class) and western (working-class) sectors of the city, were bound to take sides. E. J. Brady refused his employer's instructions to enrol as a special constable and was dismissed without credentials. He was now a ‘marked man’, shut out from regular employment and disowned by friends and relations. ‘I very shortly learned what it feels like to go without regular meals, and what it feels like when the soles of your boots preserve but a nodding acquaintance with your uppers and your only coat is out at elbows and turning a faded green.’²⁵ He tried to organize a clerks' union but his brother clerks, loyal to the white collar, held aloof. In 1891 he was appointed secretary of the Australian Socialist League whose members, for a brief moment of radical solidarity, spanned the range of anarchists, social democrats, Georgists, and labourites and extended from the intellectuals of the transitional zone to the working-class respectables of the western suburbs. Roderic Quinn wrote euphorically of a new unity of ‘Labour and Thought’ and many of the Bulletin crowd—including Lawson, George Black, Mary Cameron, Con. Lindsay, and ‘Price Warung’—were active in socialist circles at the time. The engagement of their sympathies laid an ideological basis for the ‘egalitarian’ and ‘collectivist’ elements of the bush ethos and began the transformation of socialism into ‘being mates’.

The headquarters of socialist activity was the boarding-house and bookshop run by W. H. McNamara next door to the League's rooms in Castlereagh Street. Henry Lawson was a frequent lodger and it was here that he met his wife-to-be, McNamara's step-daughter, Bertha Bredt.²⁶ Later, in 1893, William Lane, on his long odyssey from non-conformist Bristol to ‘New Australia’, kept a similar establishment further west on the borders of Chippendale. It cannot have been Lane's first visit to Sydney for his novel, The Workingman's Paradise (1892), contains an acutely observed sketch of the ‘moral geography’ of George Street:

There were no street-walkers in Paddy's Market, Ned could see. He had caught his foot clumsily on the dress of one above the town-hall, a dashing demi-mondaine with rouged cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes and a huge velvet-covered hat of the Gainsborough shape. … Then he had noticed that the sad sisterhood were out in force where the bright gas-jets of the better class shops illuminated the pavement, swaggering it mostly where the kerbs were lined with young fellows. … Nearing the poorer end of George Street they seemed to disappear, both sisterhood and kerb loungers, until near the Haymarket itself they found the larrikin element gathered strongly under the flaring lights of hotel bars and music hall entrances. But in Paddy's Market itself there were not even larrikins. Ned did not even notice anybody drunk.²⁷

As a mind-scarred refugee from the English class system, Lane was prone to interpret Australian conditions in terms of London stereotypes but his working-class characters, like Mrs Phillips with her doomed aspirations for a Sunday ‘room’, nicely catch the predicament of inner Sydney families squeezed by rising rents and irregular employment while the salon conversation of his radical intellectuals exposes, even as Lane himself attempts to repair, their fragile alliance with the working classes. For as long as it persisted, the intellectual-working class partnership strengthened the influence of the socialist muse upon the Bulletin poets and intensified their apocalyptic vision of the city:

In the bye ways foul and filthy—in the dark abodes of crime—
Revengeful fate is counting out the gathered sands of time,
In the hovels of the helots—in the narrow city slums
An army lay in waiting for the beating of the drums.(28)

E. J. Brady's ‘dirty, smoky city’, peopled by drunks, harlots, and legions of the oppressed was, as we have seen, conventional among English radicals, but it also mirrored life as he saw it from his room in an umbrella shop in Regent Street, Redfern. (‘I have rented me a room / In the close oppressive gloom / Of a narrow street where I / Watch the people passing by …’)²⁹

Writers, as a group, had experienced a sharp reversal of fortune. As a boom occupation, journalism was hard-hit by the depression. Full-time respectable reporters set up an Institute of Journalists to defend themselves, but the part-timers and freelancers of the colonial Grubstreet had little collective strength left to exert. For a few months in 1891 Brady had been editor, at £3 a week, of the Australian Workman, but he fell out with the freetraders who controlled the paper and was elbowed aside by George Black. ‘With nothing else for it’, he went over to John Norton's Truth where, for the next few years, he eked out a ‘sordid’ livelihood at 10s. 6d. a column. It was galling to be a mere ‘wage-writer’:

You may hold your own opinions and you hold them dearly too,
But the journal that you live on has a ‘policy’ and you?
Why, you barter those opinions for the things you wear and eat,
And sell your very virtue, like the woman of the street.(30)

In Melbourne, Edward Dyson's one-man imitation of the Bulletin, the Bull Ant, struggled bravely against the flood of cheap English magazines but foundered in 1892. Lawson wrote a lament for ‘southern journalism’ in ‘The Cambaroora Star’ (1891). During the depression the Bulletin became one of the chief sources of outdoor relief for unemployed journalists and it is no accident that older family men—‘Price Warung’, Edward Dyson, and Ernest Favenc—were its most prolific contributors during these years. The depression also took a heavy toll on writers' wives and saw the break-down of several marriages, including those of Brady, O'Dowd, Black and Becke.

For Melburnians especially the 1890s were a period of terrible disillusionment. Even with their ideological defences up, the city's radical intellectuals could not help sharing the optimism of the land boom era and the fall of ‘Marvellous Smellboom’, as the Bulletin cruelly dubbed the scandal-ridden metropolis, destroyed the illusion of urban progress and brought them a step closer to the dark city of the revolutionary poets. During the good years Edward Dyson had migrated to ‘a very exclusive suburb, out at the far end of a methodical and cautious railway’ but by the mid 1890s he had been forced back ‘In Town’.³¹ Bernard O'Dowd, who fled with his in-laws when their Carlton bootshop failed, looked down from its windswept northern perimeter on a city cursed—as he was himself—with disease and poverty.

The City crowds our motley broods
And plants its citadel
Upon the delta where the floods
Of evil plunge to hell.
Through fogs retributive, that steam
From ooze of stagnant wrongs
The towers satanically gleam
Defiance at our throngs.
It nucleates the land's Deceit;
Its slums our Lost decoy;
It is the bawdy-house where meet
Lewd wealth and venal Joy.(32)

O'Dowd's was possibly the most protracted and overwrought response to the depression crisis and it was more than a decade before his celebrative poem ‘The Bush’ (1912) provided a symbolic counterweight to the despair of ‘The City’.

Under the impact of the depression, Sydney's boarding-house zone had deteriorated almost to the level of ‘Outcast London’. As well as the familiar ‘boozers’, ‘loafers’, and ‘spielers’, hundreds of respectable working men were wandering aimlessly through Hyde Park, eating frugally in the ‘Full and Plenty Dining Rooms’ and sleeping under newspapers near the old Fruit Market. Henry Lawson, who spent much of 1892 in doss-houses round Dawes Point, left a grim picture of boarding-house existence during the depression in his story ‘Board and Residence’ (1894). He describes his hypocritical Welsh landlady, her uninviting board of warm grey tea and thin white bread, and the dumb resentment of her guests. ‘This’, he reflects, ‘is the sort of life that gives a man a God-Almighty longing to break away and take to the Bush.’³³

At last, at the end of 1892, Lawson broke away from Sydney and made his famous journey out to Hungerford on the Queensland border—the brief, unhappy episode that was to be, as A. G. Stephens noted, ‘his sole experience of the outback’.³⁴ He had gone prepared to be disillusioned for already, after a less arduous trip ‘up-country’ the Bulletin had published the verses which sparked off his famous duel-in-doggerel with ‘Banjo’ Paterson:

I am back from up the country—very sorry that I went—
Seeking for the Southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent;
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track,
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I'm glad that I am back.
Further out may be the pleasant scenes of which our poets boast
But I think the country's rather more inviting round the coast.
Anyway, I'll stay at present at a boarding house in town
Drinking beer and lemon squashes, taking baths and cooling down.(35)

Hungerford confirmed his worst apprehensions about the county ‘further out’ and, in a letter to his ‘Aunt Emma’, Lawson resolved ‘never to face the bush again’. Even so, he was the exception among the Bulletin writers in testing experience against the bush ideal and, though others came to his defence in the controversy with Paterson, few in practice adopted as sardonic a view of outback life.³⁶ After Hungerford, even Lawson remained in two minds on the question, for the savage realism of his best stories depended for its effect on the continued cultivation of a bush ideal, a process which Lawson the poet himself assisted by his adoption, in the mid 1890s, of the ‘capital B for Bush’.

The 1890s have been rightly interpreted, by Russel Ward, Vance Palmer, and others, as a watershed in the creation of an ‘Australian Legend’. But that ‘apotheosis’, as Ward calls it, was not the transmission to the city of values nurtured on the bush frontier, so much as the projection onto the outback of values revered by an alienated urban intelligentsia. How far itinerant bush workers absorbed these values, or shared them already, remains very much an open question. The most, perhaps, one could say is that urban experiences, intensified by the economic crash, might almost suffice in themselves to explain the value-structure, if not the mythological setting, of the bush legend. With anti-urban sentiment flowing strongly in the wider community, the depression years fixed the rural ideal, and by the end of the decade the original negative image of the city had slid silently away, leaving the bush to acquire a new reality of its own.

As the depression lifted, the Bulletin writers made their belated escape from the inner city. Most moved back into regular journalism and under A. G. Stephens, fresh back from London, were drilled into a self-conscious literary school. Stephens was convinced that ‘it was in the cities, not the bush, that the national fibre [was] being … slackened and destroyed’ and the collected editions of Bulletin material he published around the turn of the century omit most of the writers' earlier city-influenced verse and prose.³⁷ By now most had dropped their old radical associations. The scandal of George Black's ‘domestic infelicity’, blazoned forth in John Norton's Truth in 1891, sowed the first seeds of suspicion between the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘horny-handed sons of toil’.³⁸ Con. Lindsay was expelled by the socialists and Brady by the Redfern Electoral League, while Lawson passed from socialism to anarchism and on to alcohol. Most of the Bulletin's young radicals had forsaken their old haunts in the twilight zone for the pleasanter pastures of Darlinghurst and Paddington. ‘Banjo’ Paterson married and moved to a big house in Roslyn Gardens; Rod. Quinn, Victor Daley, F. J. Broomfield, ‘Price Warung’ all lived in the vicinity of Glenmore Road, Paddington; while several of Stephens's newer discoveries, Alex Montgomery and D. H. Souter, moved further out along the Bondi Road.³⁹ Their association was more convivial and artistic than ideological, their one common cause the defence of ‘art for art's sake’. They gathered, now, only in the boozy fellowship of the Dawn and Dusk Club, affecting the strenuous bohemianism that was their last defence against the encroachment of suburbia.

Notes

1. Lawson to G. Robertson, 21 January 1917 as quoted in Colin Roderick (ed.), Henry Lawson, Collected Verse, vol. 1, 1885-1950, Sydney, 1967, p. 423.

2. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne, 1958, passim.

3. N. D. Harper, ‘The Rural and Urban Frontiers’, Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 40, May 1963, p. 421; M. Roe, ‘The Australian Legend’, Meanjin, vol. 21, 1962, p. 364.

4. G. Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, Melbourne, 1973, p. 58.

5. ‘The Status of Literature in New South Wales II, How the Publishers Look at It’, Centennial Magazine, vol. 2, no. 2, September 1889, p. 92.

6. Fred. H. Bathurst, ‘Reporters and their Work’, ibid., vol. 2, no. 7, February, 1890, pp. 498-502.

7. Select Committee on Common Lodging Houses, N.S.W. Votes and Proceedings, vol. 6, 1876, pp. 2-9; Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Gambling and Immorality and charges of bribery against members of the police force, ibid., vol. 7, 1891-92, pp. 20, 26, and Appendix Table 3, pp. 487 ff; John Wolforth, ‘Residential Concentration of Non-British Minorities in 19th Century Sydney’, Australian Geographical Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, October 1974, pp. 207-18.

8. On the general characteristics of the ‘zone-in-transition’ see E. W. Burgess, ‘The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project’, R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie (eds), The City, Chicago, 1925, pp. 54-56.

9. ‘Titus Salt’, ‘The Row in Our Boarding House’, Bulletin, 19 December 1891.

10. ‘Faces in the Street’, Bulletin 28 July 1888 (my emphasis).

11. On Lawson's childhood see D. Prout, Henry Lawson, The Grey Dreamer, Adelaide, 1963 and ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, in Colin Roderick (ed.), Autobiographical and Other Writings, 1887-1922, Sydney, 1972, esp. p. 175.

12. ‘A Christmas Story’, Dawn, December 1889.

13. 22 April 1888, George Black Papers, Mitchell Library.

14. Dawn, 5 November 1889.

15. ‘Army of the Rear’, Bulletin 12 May 1888.

16. Sylvia Lawson, ‘J. F. Archibald,’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, pp. 43-8.

17. ‘With Dickens’ (1900), Collected Verse, vol. 1, p. 389; J. le Gay Brereton, Knocking Round, Sydney, 1930, p. 5.

18. G. R. Sims, My Life. Sixty Years Recollections of Bohemian London, London, 1917, pp. 111, 135-7, 332; Dagonet Ballads, London, 1881, Bulletin 12 February 1887, 6 July 1889.

19. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, 2nd ed., London, 1894.

20. Henry Lawson, ‘Straight Talk’, Albany Observer, 1890 in his Autobiographical and Other Writings, 1887-1922, p. 11.

21. Ibid., p. 9. Compare C. Semmler, The Banjo of the Bush, 2nd ed., Sydney, 1974, ch. 4-6.

22. ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, 1889.

23. E. J. Brady ‘Personalia’, Brady Papers, M. L. ‘Lights of Labour’, Brady Papers, A.N.L., Sydney Harbour, Sydney 1903, p. 32.

24. E. J. Brady, ‘The Intelligentsia’ in ‘History of the Labour Party’, A.N.L., Poems of E. J. Brady, c. 1887-1912, La Trobe Library Manuscripts.

25. ‘Personalia’.

26. C. Roderick, ‘Henry Lawson: The Middle Years, 1893-6’, Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings, vol. 53, part 2, June 1967, pp. 103-4, 114-9.

27. Ibid., p. 39.

28. ‘The Beating of the Drums’, Australian Workman, 4 April 1891.

29. ‘The Man Outside’, Bulletin, 24 September 1892, Henry Lawson, by his Mates, Sydney, 1931, p. 134.

30. E. J. Brady, ‘Lights of Labour’, ‘The Wage-Writer’, Bulletin, 26 November 1892.

31. Bull Ant, 21 August 1890, Rhymes from the Mines, Sydney, 1896.

32. Bulletin, 1 June 1901, reprinted in Dawnward?, Sydney, 1903.

33. C. Mann (ed.), the Stories of Henry Lawson, First series, Sydney, 1964, p. 191.

34. A. G. Stephens, ‘Henry Lawson’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 1922, reprinted in C. Roderick (ed.), Henry Lawson Criticism 1894-1971, Sydney, 1972, p. 217.

35. ‘Borderland’ (later re-titled ‘Up the Country’), Bulletin, 9 July 1892.

36. B. Nesbitt, ‘Literary Nationalism and the 1890s’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1971, pp. 3-17.

37. V. Palmer, A. G. Stephens: His Life and Works, Melbourne, 1941, pp. 235-6.

38. W. D. Flinn to G. Black, 14 January 1892, Black Papers.

39. G. A. Taylor, Those were the Days, Sydney, 1918, Henry Lawson, by his Mates, p. 63.