[In the following essay, Wright explains the origins of the symbolic dichotomy between the bush and the city in late nineteenth-century Australian poetry.]

[Henry] Kendall died in 1882, and with him died the nineteenth-century attempt to interpret this new country in ‘serious’ verse. [Charles] Harpur's adjuration to himself—‘Be then the Bard of thy country’—had been heard, beyond his own generation, by no one but Kendall; and Kendall's decision to take over the search for the Harp Australian had … ended at the worst in poems which were time-serving and ‘the words of blind occasion’, and at the best in poems which, in spite of their apparently objective reference to ‘Australia’, were given their chief force by a tormented subjectivity whose chief reference was not to the outer reality, not even to an Australia taking shape in the minds of her new people, but to Kendall's own frustrations and search for resolutions of his problems.

After Kendall's death, the split in the Australian consciousness took its most obvious shape, on the one side in the ‘bush balladists’ who for the first time began to express what was happening to European character in the new conditions of Australia, on the other side in Christopher Brennan's withdrawal from all such manifestations of ‘nationalism’ and his attempt to rejoin the main stream of European thought.

What exactly, it is now possible to ask, did Kendall's frustrations consist in? Why was it not possible to be an Australian poet during this generation, or indeed for generations after? I think the question requires not only an examination of what was happening in Australia, but of what was happening in Europe too; and more particularly in England.

England, it has been said, is twenty years or more behind the Continent in its thought; it was natural that Australia should be even farther behind England. Yet there are certain large trends of feeling—and of negation of feeling—in which we can see much the same thing happening during the century, wherever the same general conditions applied. Kendall was not a thinker; he was a man of feeling. He did not know much of what was happening during his lifetime; it is doubtful if he took an interest in the current events in his own country, let alone in others. But he felt, and he reacted to what he felt. He withdrew from the world the tentacles of his spontaneous feeling, because he recognized that what he found there was hostile to him and to his poetry, even when it pretended sympathy. ‘Just to be beyond the burning / Outer world, its sneers and spurning’ became his characteristic cry.

Like Harpur's, in fact, his aspirations to be a poet had received a bitter setback. (Understand that I am talking here of poetry—not of Cantatas for the Melbourne Exhibition or of bush sketches—a very different matter.) So the images of Australia that he had ‘purposed once to take his pen and write’ about, had undergone a subtle change; they had become the symbols of his inner torment, the torment of a poet (however minor) turned back upon himself. If, to the undiscerning, they still looked like images of Australia, and if he was spoken of as a poet of Australian themes and landscapes, that only emphasized the gap of incomprehension between himself and that audience, and the fact that his audience knew very little of what poetry actually was.

Yet poetry is, so we say, the most reliable gauge to the inner life of a people. What had happened—or not happened—to the inner life of the Australian people during the nineteenth century? Harpur had in his despair given up hope of a true inner response being generated among his own contemporaries; ‘in the dearth / On every side, of sympathy’ he had greeted Kendall as his only appreciative audience.

He did not, however, greet him as an understanding audience. For clearly Kendall's notion of what the possession of the Harp Australian entailed on its holder was a good deal shallower than Harpur's. Kendall's Muse of the Wild, though she bears a resemblance to Harpur's Muse of the Evergreen Forest, had nothing to do with tending Harpur's Tree of Liberty (as Harpur may even then have noticed). Kendall demanded much less of his audience than Harpur had, as he demanded much less of himself; yet he did not, for the most part, obtain even that little, and much of his time was occupied with filling the shallow but exigent demands his audience in turn made on him. The results of these demands are beyond question Kendall's very poorest productions, and those which more than anything else prevent us from considering most of his work seriously as poetry. Harpur's audience was his despair; Kendall's was his poetic ruin.

I now want to suggest that, though we are apt to think of Australian life and thought as spiritually impoverished because of its isolation from the main stream of European thought, it was in fact the main stream of European thought and feeling that largely impoverished the life of Australia. It is a commonplace that when the circulation of the blood is poor, the first parts of the body to suffer are the outlying parts, the fingers and toes. This is what happened to Australia, the most distant outpost of Western civilization; the blockage of thought and feeling, the increasing sense of separation from the rest of the universe, and of the ‘death of God’ that Nietzsche announced with lament and triumph, was felt less consciously here, but its effects were even more devastating. This new colony of an old civilization, so far distant and faced with such forbidding tasks, needed, in order to develop real vitality, a strong and confident sense of the importance of its task, the strength and viability of its race and civilization.

It needed, in fact, a force and unity that could only be given from its European background. The fact that this had been a convict colony need not, I think, have mattered as it has done in the Australian psychology, if there had been any assurance of a possible redemption, of a re-entry into the current of a meaningful and purposeful civilization.

But in Europe the original impulse was fast ebbing from traditional Christian culture. In the year that Kendall died, Nietzsche was struggling from his years of despair into the desperate attempt at some kind of affirmation that led him to write Thus Spake Zarathustra; man, he thought, had come to an end, because man had been based on God, who was now ‘dead’, and only Superman could now take up the burden of a world so profoundly shaken and undermined.

In England, that year, Rossetti died; Rossetti who had represented, however shallowly decorative his rebellion, some kind of stand against the spread of grey industrial ugliness and materialism. Hardy, resigned to the passing of a simply faithful country way of life, was writing his desolate novels; Wilde was cultivating a desperate dandyism and wit against the coming of the deluge. The Established Church was, as T. H. Huxley wrote, ‘eking out lack of reason with superfluity of railing’ against the eagerly rational exponents of the evolutionary theory, and that very railing served to concentrate attention on its obvious weakness both in argument and in spiritual resources. If in all this scene there was any basis for Nietzsche's announced arrival of the Transvaluation of Values, it was not apparent. Europe was drifting.

If this were so, it was even more obvious in Australia, where not even the shell and structure of European traditional values were available as a refuge for the naked. It was no wonder that Kendall, to find any kind of peace and unity, had had to look backwards to his first master Harpur and to Wordsworth for guidance. There was none elsewhere, until Nietzsche had erected that precarious philosophy by which Man was to raise himself to a new level by dragging at his own shoelaces.

Meanwhile, there was nothing for the heart to feed on in Australia; neither the collapsing values of Europe, nor the yet-undiscovered values of a new country. Australia was, for spiritual purposes, not yet discovered; Europe was, for spiritual purposes, lost.

As always, where a vacuum opens in the heart, action and violence rushed in to fill the space. In England, the new voice that was raised belonged to a young man called Rudyard Kipling, but in Australia, Kipling had been anticipated by more than a decade. Adam Lindsay Gordon had already set free a new current of feeling, and a new surge of writing followed it.

Before Britain discovered her Empire as a subject, Australia discovered ‘the men of the Bush’. The attitudes and qualities that the balladists, and in their wake the ‘nationalist poets’, now began to find in or attribute to the Australian character, still to a large extent (perhaps too large an extent) influence our notion of ourselves and our behaviour.

Independence, of course, had always been a part of the personality attributed to Australians; from the first description of the ‘Currency Lads and Lasses’, through Harpur's self-characterization as ‘a man of the woods and forests’, and Kendall's description of Jim the Splitter and his ilk who ‘look at God's day in the face’.

But Harpur, at least, thought of himself as more than merely independent; he was, or ideally hoped to be, a man ‘spherical, and therefore Godlike’. The notion of the Australian that began to prevail from Gordon's time onward had lost this sphericity; it was a flat and narrow personality that looked out from Gordon's ‘Sick Stockrider’, from Paterson's ‘Man from Snowy River’, from the bush ballads and from much of Lawson's work. There was about this new type of Australian scarcely any aspiration, scarcely any emotion or passion wider than can be comprised under the sentiments of egalitarianism, self-esteem and ‘mateship’, scarcely any ideas beyond the political, scarcely any culture more than could be legitimately acquired from an uninstructed reading of Thackeray and Dickens and perhaps (if we are to believe Furphy) Shakespeare and Goethe and the early socialist writers, under the tail of a bullock-waggon or in a drover's camp. The Australian ideal was a man of action—a horseman more daring than any known before, a spare laconic personality with little time for ideas and a restricted grasp on reality, the other side of whose aggressive masculinity turned out, surprisingly often, to be a soft-centred sentimentality that could amount to mawkishness.

All this had its truth—and its falsity. To discover the basis of fact on which the picture was painted, it is necessary to look at the way in which the country itself imposed its conditions on the men who first went out into it.

There were certain factors in the growth of Australia that were unlike those that operated in the growth of other white colonies and dominions, such as New Zealand and Canada. The most important of them were conditions imposed by the continent itself—by its climate, its soils and its size. The climate was, except in certain favoured parts of the coastal plain, unsuited to farming and unwelcoming to small settlers; the threatening possibility of droughts, floods and bushfires (the Terrible Three which haunt all Australian thought and writing) prohibited any constant growth and prosperity of settlement; and very few farms or even large stations, in the early days of settlement, remained in the same hands for more than a generation or two without some form of disaster overtaking the owners.

Slumps and low prices for farming products, and the uncertainty of overseas markets at great distances, made their contribution to this. Even in the richer areas of the coastal plains, the soils were variable; and the poor or sometimes ruinous methods used to farm them (since few emigrants were trained in farming, or even if they were, could make allowance for the difference between Australian and English seasons and soils) contributed to the lack of stability both of the soils and the men who farmed them.

Along the plains and valleys of New South Wales, particularly the once-rich Hunter Valley, for instance, the constant cropping of wheat year after year began a process of impoverishment and erosion which has continued to the present day; the soils cleared of heavy forest were at first rich in humus, but once this had been exhausted, with no return made, farms which once made small fortunes for their proprietors reverted to grazing land, and poor land, often enough, at that. It was not until the 1930's that any important moves were made to prevent erosion, which in Australia's lighter soils was a problem as early as the first clearing of the Hawkesbury Valley's forests; and in the interval much had been lost and many small settlers ruined.

The factors of uncertain climates, bad farming and easily-exhausted soils, with the early alienation of much land to a few men, have meant that there has not been in Australia the kind of stable farming population and prosperous increase in settlement that Canada, America, New Zealand and other newly-established white settlements have been able to rely on. As exploration opened up the inland, large stations and runs were gradually established by overlanding cattle and sheep; in the process there were many casualties in ownership, but the sheer size of Australia has always meant that, even if one district was suffering from slump, drought or flood, others were doing better. So there was always work offering, in the shearing season, on sheep stations, and during the rest of the year in droving camps and as stockmen and boundary riders in the cattle country, or (before the days of fencing) as shepherds on sheep runs.

The small settlers, displaced or ruined by bad seasons, tended to go inland on contracting work or as nomadic workers, so that instead of a stable settled population, Australia tended to have a nomadic and comparatively rootless population of workers, men for the most part, and for the most part (since the inland with its great distances and waterless stretches is dangerous for the solitary traveller) moving in groups, or at least in pairs, from job to job. The sheer size of Australia often meant that from year to year they scarcely saw their homes and families (when they had any), or reached the settled areas, so that instead of being merely one of the conditions of earning a living, nomadism became a way of life to many.

Not all the wanderers were simple uneducated men; some were of the class known (since they were numerous enough to form a class) as ‘broken-down swells’, men who had failed in larger enterprises than the rest, or men dispatched to the ends of the earth by their families as black sheep, or simply as ‘colonial-experiencers’, and living on here half-forgotten, like Harry Morant, in the hope of returning to England some day as men of fortune. But the conditions of their lives meant that books and reading were things of the past; libraries, however small, cannot be carried in swags.

So the common currency of the bush workers was verbal; and this is how the bush song and the ballad came to flourish in Australia so much more strongly than in other new countries. Songs were seized on, memorized, altered, parodied, sung in camps and riding round the cattle, at shearing sheds and on the track. They came to mirror the kind of life that their singers led; often hard and crude, almost always womanless, and because of this lack of normal balance, generally naive and sentimental under the tough hide induced by hardship and the remorseless conditions of the Australian outback.

It was this life, and these songs, which set the tone of much in later Australian life. The attitude to women—both wary and sentimental—still persists; so does the unspoken assumption that the male-to-male relationship alone can be trustworthy and uncomplicated; so do the horse-worship, the naivety, the tough insularity—even the White-Australia policy, instilled as a kind of gospel by the bush workers' dislike and distrust of the Chinese immigrant in gold-field days and their pitying superiority towards the Kanakas on the sugar plantations. All these, or their traces, can be found in today's Australian psyche, as in the nineteenth-century bush balladists and their songs.

Moreover, it is here that another peculiarly Australian dichotomy is first found—the emotional content in the conflict expressed in the phrase ‘Sydney or the Bush’. This country-versus-city opposition has always been a deeply-involved problem in Australia—more so, it would seem, than elsewhere. The choice has always been more an emotional than a rational matter; it has gone deep into our character. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about it is that it seemed almost a matter of morals, a choice between Virtue (the Bush) and Vice (the City).

Australians have always been deeply and narrowly puritan in temperament (with occasional necessary outbreaks or ‘sprees’, safety-valves of which on the whole the perpetrators have been secretly ashamed). This puritanism, probably, has attached the notion of virtue to hard work, abstemiousness, monastic loneliness; all these conditions were associated with the strict solitudes of the bush in which the worker earned his cheque; putting up mile after mile of fencing; boundary riding, droving, mustering, shearing. The inevitable reaction came with the cheque itself (usually paid six-monthly or yearly) and with the shoddy enticements of the bush shanties or the towns and cities.

The cheque once drunk and womanized away, the rueful bush worker set his face away from the devilish temptations of civilization, which had once again robbed him of his hard-won money and his hopes of a better life; and as he went he repented and promised himself reformation—a reformation with which the hard bush life was associated.

So the Bush came to stand for chastity, purity, cleanliness and virtue, the town for a kind of self-betrayal.

I take the Old Man Plain, criss-cross it all again,
Until my eyes the track no longer see;
My beer and brandy brain seeks balmy sleep in vain,
I feel as if I had the Darling Pea.
Repentance brings reproof, so I sadly ‘pad the hoof’,
All day I see the mirage of the trees,
But it all will have an end when I reach the river bend
And listen to the singing of the breeze.
Then hang the jolly prog, the hocussed shanty-grog,
The beer that's loaded with tobacco;
Grafting humour I am in, and I'll stick the peg right in,
And settle down once more to yakka.

(‘The Jolly Jolly Grog and Tobacco’)¹

Or, from ‘The Stockman's Cheque’:

Thank the Lord I'm back at last, back though wrecked and whisky-logged,
Yet the gates have not come open that I shut,
And I've seen no broken fences, and I've found no weak sheep bogged,
          And my little cat is purring in the hut. …

So the Bush comes to have various, and slightly conflicting, emotional connotations. It stands for virtue, certainly; but a virtue distinctly hard and uncompromising, a puritanism of narrowness, harshness, and poverty, from which in the end, however repentantly the bush worker may stagger back from his sprees, he must escape again. This aspect is expressed in what may be called the Perisher ballads, those that lay emphasis on the hardness and danger of the bush life, and the toll it takes of human self-assertion and even human life:

There is no life on the Deadman's Plain,
Where the Drought King rules supreme,
Guarding as spoils the bones that lie
In the bed of a phantom stream …
… Then a hat we discovered beside the trail,
A pint and a billycan,
A bloodstained shirt that was torn to shreds
And the corpse of a naked man,
With its face as black as the hell-black crows,
The left cheek gnawed away,
The right arm pointing across to where
The phantom waters lay. …

or ‘Out from Noonkanbah’, with its grimly memorable verse:

The coolibahs quiver,
The snakewood moans,
And bowerbirds play
With Lin Bower's bones. …

And the longing for escape is expressed in many of the ballads, such as Morant's ‘For Southern Markets’,

O pale-faced sons of Sydney town, who don't find Sydney gay,
You should have been where we have been these many months away!

So, if sometimes it seems that the Bush acted as a kind of conscience for Australians (the development of this feeling, I think, is clearest in the twentieth-century poet Furnley Maurice), it was a conscience that, for most, was too puritanical and demanding to be obeyed for long. Men accumulated virtue and money, as it were, in the Bush; but they spent the accumulation of both, with the urgency of guilt, in the City. The contrast between hard virtue and lurid, if shoddy, vice gradually passes over, in the later pastiche balladists, into a sentimental yearning on the part of the city man for an impossibly idealized vision of the Bush, not as a grim symbolic chastity, but as a lost Eden.

For the moral element in our feeling for the Bush has certainly not prevented Australians from crowding into the cities, whose growth has been immoderate. It has, however, contributed to a great deal of almost Rousseauist sentiment in our literature and our character. Virtue, to us, is apt to be a matter of negative rejection of temptation, rather than of positive right-living and affirmative attitudes. It is just this element that has caused the notorious ‘wowserism’ in our national life, against which Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae found themselves fighting at the beginning of the twentieth century; and since this wowserism was in association with the particular brand of nationalist sentiment that elevated the Australian Bushman (tall, rangy, daring, freedom-loving and essentially a countryman) as a type of our national life, the fight against it necessarily also became a fight against the ‘nationalist’ brand of literature exemplified in Lawson and the Bulletin bards, and against the kind of patriotism that infuriated Brennan at the time of the Boer War.

Moreover, this flaunted preference for the enforced virtues of solitude and simplicity in hard but pure surroundings led for a time to a kind of hermit-cult, an anti-social glorifying of the lonely life in contact with the realities of the elements, and a rejection not only of the ‘artificialities’ of the city, but even of society itself. To this nomad-hermit philosophy of the ‘bush-hatters’ and permanent swagmen forever on the track belongs, perhaps, the ‘gum-tree poet’ who left his summary biography on a tree:

Me and my dog
          have tramped together
          in cold weather
          and hot.
Me and my dog
          don't care whether
          we get any work
          or not.

For the true bush-hatter rejected not only the vices of civilization, but even so much contact with society as was implied in the notion of hard work. Sometimes this rejection of work was associated (whether in rationalization or otherwise) with a refusal to help enrich the ‘squatter’; sometimes, like the philosophy of the bums in the United States during the depression, it was sheer hopelessness and detachment from life that lay behind it; sometimes it was a kind of protest against everything implied by the materialist society; an extension of the attitude that the young Barcroft Boake expressed when he wrote to his father ‘Civilization is a dead failure’. For the bush ethos attracted the men hurt by life or unwilling to meet its demands; and during the nineteenth century, with depressions, bank failures and overoptimism about the capacities of the land and climate, there were many such, even without the addition of the ‘remittance men’ from overseas.

This rejection of human society and its squalors forms a kind of undercurrent in the bushman legend. The ‘mateship’ that Lawson wrote of, though it may have seemed like the opposite side of this tendency, sometimes in fact reinforced it; as in the old Convict Oath quoted by Price Warung, ‘mateship’ could be and often was a protection against the hostile forces of society, as of the dangers and loneliness of the bush itself.

This gives an almost monastic, even a semi-religious, quality to some of the attitudes to the Bush that persist even today. There are numberless poems, from O'Dowd's ‘The Bush’ to Hope's ‘Australia’, in which denunciation of the people—those ‘monotonous tribes’—alters to a semi-mystical anticipation of the emergence from this ‘Arabian desert of the human mind’ of some spirit which escapes ‘the learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes / That is called civilization over there’. (Notice again the rejection of ‘civilization’ that seems to form part of the Australian legend.) And the apotheosis of this religious attitude comes in Voss, where the Australian Desert is the testing-ground through which the expedition follows Voss in his search for reconciliation with self and society—for the apotheosis of love.

So there is a sense, then, in which the idea of Australia is a central, almost mystic, symbol in our literature. It is a vision of a certain kind of innocence, not childlike but regenerative; a purification which is the result of hardship and endurance, of sacrifice of personal ease, sacrifice perhaps of life itself. (Indeed, death is part of the legend; Australia has always been ‘the land where the dead men lie’.)

Visitors who comment on the shoddiness of some aspect of Australian life, particularly city life, are often told that ‘this is not the real Australia’. The real Australia is always farther out, farther north or farther west. Perhaps it is known only by the hero of the queer poetic bush recitation, ‘Humping the Drum’—a cross between the ‘tall yarn’ and the song of Tom O'Bedlam:

I humped my drum from Kingdom Come
To the back of the Milky Way;
I boiled my quart on the Cape of York
And I starved last Christmas Day.
I cast a line on the Condamine
And one on the Nebine Creek;
I've driven through bog, so help me bob,
Up Mungindi's main street;
I crossed the Murray and drank in Cloncurry
Where they charged a bob a nip.
I worked in the Gulf where the cattle they duff,
And the squatters let them rip.
I worked from morn in the fields of corn
Till the sun was out of sight,
I've cause to know the Great Byno
And the Great Australian Bight.
I danced with Kit when the lamps were lit,
And Doll as the dance broke up;
I flung my hat on the myall track
When Bowman won the Cup. …
I pushed my bike from the shearer's strike,
Not wanting a funeral shroud;
I made the weights for the Flying Stakes
And I dodged the lynching crowd. …

Notes

1. The songs and ballads quoted in this chapter are taken from Stewart and Keesing's: Australian Bush Ballads (Angus & Robertson, 1955) and Old Bush Songs (Angus & Robertson, 1957).