SOURCE: Carter, David, and Gillian Whitlock. “Institutions of Australian Literature.” In Australian Studies: A Survey, edited by James Walter, pp. 109-35. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.

[In the following excerpt, Carter and Whitlock analyze the content, style, and public role of the Bulletin in the last decades of the nineteenth century.]

… Just as literature has played a major role in discussions of national identity, so too have questions of national identity played a key role in determining how people have read and discussed Australian literature. Literary texts have been read with such questions in mind as: How ‘Australian’ is this book? What does it tell us about the ‘national character’? What does it tell us about the nation's growth towards cultural ‘maturity’? Looking at literature this way, through the ‘spectacles’ of national identity, has given rise to a number of totalizing approaches to Australian literature and literary history. By totalizing we mean any approach which discusses the whole development of Australian literature in terms of a single theme (for example, the search for national identity or confrontation with the landscape); or any approach which takes the literature of a given period as representative of the whole period (in its various social, cultural and political aspects). Individual writers or texts are often seen to represent the spirit of their age, or are seen as stages in a cultural growth towards maturity. Such views tend to discuss the history of Australian literature, and culture generally, as if a literature were a single organism, growing, adapting, maturing (like a tree or a person). One such work, widely used in schools and universities, is Geoffrey Serle's From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973), later re-issued as The Creative Spirit in Australia (1987). This book contains many useful details about aspects of Australian culture in different periods, but its generalizations about the development of Australian culture often amount to tracing the rise and fall of some overall cultural growth to maturity. (For a critique of such approaches see Docker 1984:34-8.)

Other approaches within literary criticism have focused on individual texts and authors. The Oxford History of Australian Literature (Kramer 1981), in its chapters on Fiction and Poetry, provides a whole ‘history’ in these terms. Our approach, instead of studying Australian literature as if it were an organism or a simple aggregate of texts, is to see literature as an institution (or set of institutions). This approach means that instead of concentrating just on individual texts and individual authors, taken to represent the national culture, we will examine in some detail how writing comes before readers, how it comes before them as ‘Australian literature’, and how it is read in a given social context. Such an examination involves us on both a conceptual and a concrete level. We will want to know about possible literary and ideological influences such as contemporary notions of ‘literature’ and ‘nationhood’; but also about contemporary technologies for publication and distribution, specific social groupings of writers and intellectuals, and the nature of the reading public for different kinds of writing. Australian culture is to be understood, not as a mysterious ‘creative spirit’ (Serle 1973), but as a network of social institutions and practices.

In this [essay] we focus on the magazine or newspaper as exemplary of the institutional aspects of literary production. Through a case study of the Bulletin, plus comparisons with twentieth-century periodicals, the discussion centres on the role of such publications in the ‘print economy’ and the range of their functions for writers and readers. It is not the case that an author's work just ‘appears’ and is naturally or inevitably recognized as significant. Nor is there a single, nationally-constituted readership. We need to see authors and readers as only two elements in a much larger network which includes critics and reviewers; journalists, editors and publishers; academics and teachers; literary magazines and newspaper review pages; advertising and marketing practices; printing technologies; and curricula in universities and schools. Literary periodicals play a crucial part in this scenario—in publishing writing and criticism, defining areas of cultural debate, carrying advertisements, giving certain authors prominence, and giving literature a particular profile in the print economy.

Like American, Canadian and New Zealand literatures Australian literature is of fairly recent origin. In all these countries literature has had a special place in debates about culture and nationality, and literary periodicals have been crucial in the development of a local literature and specific cultural milieux. As the Bulletin literary editor A. G. Stephens remarked, literature in the colonies was ‘suckled at the breast of journalism’ (Whitlock 1985:36). Nadel (1957) has shown that in the colonial period the presence of literature was identified with the general level of morality and civilization in a given society. According to this thinking, which might be identified with the colonial élite, literature in Australia was seen as the best way of civilizing a crude, uncultured and materialistic ‘new’ society. (The notion of a ‘new’ society is discussed in chapter 4 of White's Inventing Australia (1981). At the same time, the development of a ‘distinctive’ literature was seen as evidence of a society's progress towards nationality. Literature was seen to be the product, not just of gifted individuals, but of the ‘national mind’ or ‘national genius’. We can see the two views, literature as a civilizing influence and as a national expression, in the following quotation from 1837:

We consider … the diffusion and cultivation of literature to be one of the chief instruments of elevating and enlightening the minds of a people, and especially of a people formed under the peculiar circumstances of this colony … [A] taste must first be established for the literary offspring of others, before genius can be aroused to the desire of creating for itself. Until this, however, takes place, no national literature can be properly said to exist, for it is the expression of a nation's mind that constitutes literature.

[Webby 1981:13]

The latter idea was still popular in 1878:

[S]urely as we are developing a national life and national types of characters, resembling, no doubt, but yet distinct from, that of the mother country, so surely shall we develop … a genuine literature of our own. For all literature is merely the artistic expression of national life and character.

[Webby 1981:28]

Both quotations come from literary periodicals: from William a'Beckett in the Sydney Literary News and James Smith in the Melbourne Review respectively. Both ideas about literature still appear in the 1980s! Their recurrence might be explained by the colonial relationship to perceived metropolitan centres, a theme described in earlier chapters of this book. Each idea represents a way of negotiating the colonial dilemma, either by reinforcing the value of the known or encouraging the new. The Bulletin expressed both attitudes, seeing a local and a universal role for culture, but it vigorously rejected any hint of colonial inferiority. Newspapers and periodicals generally were crucial in mediating between local and ‘imported’ (and continue to be so).

The emergence of a ‘new’ literature demonstrates with particular clarity how many different kinds of intellectuals and different sites of intellectual activity are involved in what may seem at the outset to be a fairly simple or natural process in which an author's work is placed before a reader. When we think of ‘literature’ or ‘Australian literature’ it is probably certain individual texts and writers that first come to mind. But this picture is much too uncomplicated. The process whereby we recognize certain texts as ‘literature’ and ‘Australian’ is a complex one which involves social institutions, social groups and social practices.

We need to pay more attention to the social background of literature and how that social and institutional context affects the very nature of the literature itself—and what counts as literature—in a particular culture at a given moment. This means that literature is not to be understood as a fixed set of texts so much as a way or a number of different ways of thinking about texts. The boundary lines dividing the literary from the non-literary are not fixed, and have shifted quite clearly over time. It is important, then, to ask: (a) what concepts of the literary are operating for particular groups at particular times?; and (b) what are the social institutions and practices which produce and maintain such concepts of literature (Eagleton 1983:1-53)?

We chose the Bulletin of the 1880s and 1890s as our initial case study for a number of reasons. The Bulletin of those years already has a well-established (though contested) reputation in literary and historical studies, insofar as it has been seen as the birthplace of the so-called ‘Bulletin school of writers’ and as the nursery of pre-federation nationalist politics. The magazine has been seen in social histories and in literary criticism as a watershed in the development of a truly indigenous national literature and a truly indigenous democratic political attitude. These have both been regarded as expressions of the national identity, and thus the Bulletin has been a conspicuous focus of totalizing approaches such as those referred to earlier, approaches in which the magazine is seen to reflect or express the spirit of the age, the nation, or the people (see Inglis Moore 1971; Palmer 1954). Further, as Sylvia Lawson (1983) argues, literary criticism has tended to isolate the ‘literary’ texts and authors from the magazine as a whole, thereby simplifying the way the Bulletin operated for both its readers and its writers. This in turn means a simplification of the magazine's social role and its place in cultural history.

The argument of this [essay] is partly directed against these earlier versions of the Bulletin. Our discussion has been influenced throughout by Sylvia Lawson's work The Archibald Paradox (1983), which traces the life and journalistic career of the Bulletin's most important editor, J. F. Archibald, and places the magazine in a richly elaborated context of newspaper and publishing history, social networks, and literary and political debates.

The Bulletin is widely available in libraries, at least on microfilm, and it is a very revealing exercise to look through the whole of one issue. This can begin to show how the literary contributions were situated in the paper and thus how the magazine operated for its readers and its writers. The examples used here are drawn from the Bulletin of 15 April 1893, though the points made apply generally. Details of the Bulletin's publishing history can be filled in by consulting such texts as Lawson (1983) and Wilde et al. (1985).

As well as raising specific points about the Bulletin, we pose questions useful for understanding any literary periodical (and the role of literary journalism in any specific local culture). In line with the approach to literary studies outlined above, attention is directed to how the magazine acts as a mediator in bringing writing to readers and readers to writing. What kind of ‘text’ is a literary magazine? How does it influence the way writers write and readers read? How do magazines relate to other forms of publication in a given print economy? Who was writing, and for whom? Who was reading and how were they reading?

THE PRINT CIRCUS

What kind of text was the Bulletin? It is necessary to make clear that the Bulletin was a weekly news magazine rather than a literary periodical. This does not disqualify it for our purposes, but points up the variety of modes that literary publication outside book form can take.

We can first note the Bulletin's characteristic tones and styles, its range of contents, and its diverse format. The editorials, generally addressing political issues, employ striking (and often irreverent) language: ‘Even the minor rascality of the province might well shudder at the deep damnation of such a national crime, and join in the good work of politically stoning to death those by whom it is contemplated’ (emphasis added). The editorial page and the columns which follow always cover an extraordinary range of topics, both local and overseas, and of tones, from moral outrage—‘Flogging is a penalty enthusiastically approved by the capitalistic class and extended only to men in the garb of workmen’—to smart jokiness: ‘A Japanese merchant in Sydney states that he is being ruined by cheap and nasty Birmingham imitations of his wares’. The writers delight in exposing hypocrisy and privilege among the rich and powerful, identifying the reader's interest against vested interests.

A particular readership is addressed in various ways. The magazine advertises itself as ‘The National Australian Newspaper’, and as its motto has ‘Australia for the Australians’ (later ‘Australia for the White Man’). It is announced to readers that:

The Editor will carefully read and acknowledge in the ‘Correspondence’ column all contributions submitted—whether in the form of Political, Social or Other Articles, Verse, Short Tales or Sketches (those dealing with Australian subjects, and not exceeding two columns in length, or say 3000 words, are specially acceptable), Paragraphs, Letters, or Newspaper-clippings.

This broad invitation is crucial in understanding how the Bulletin functioned for its writers and readers. The contributors were indeed acknowledged in the ‘Correspondence’ column, which sets up a highly entertaining public dialogue between editors, writers and readers: ‘“Edward G. Madely”: We dare not turn your thoughts loose on an unprepared world … “The Wirroo”: Poetry on a yamstick. Better hire yourself out as a corroboree with a dingo accompaniment’!

Even the Bulletin's advertisements are significant in range and contents. Those for such unlikely products as the Eureka Electric Belt for Nervous Men, for example, reflect contemporary concerns about masculinity (see Lake 1986). Generally the advertisements are from city-based small businesses—it was policy not to accept them from big firms—and they can be read as indicative of how the magazine conceived and managed its potential audience.

There are columns in each edition of the Bulletin on politics, business, culture and show business; a women's column (‘My Dear Moorabinda’); numerous cartoons; and other assorted items (for example, an essay called ‘Lovers Women Like: an Analysis of Woman's Weaknesses, By a Woman’). Then come the short stories or prose sketches, jammed in between gossip items, readers' contributions and more advertisements. We might leave this impression of the Bulletin pot-pourri (and give some of the flavour of ‘the Bulletin legend’) by quoting Henry Lawson. In a piece unpublished in his lifetime, written about 1900 and possibly addressed to an English audience (Kiernan 1976:345), Lawson wrote:

The Bulletin fills the place of an Australian Magazine and Review … ; there is a page devoted to art and literature … cleverly written and edited by a literary editor … whom the old contributors love like an elder brother because he is trying to introduce what he calls ‘culture’ … and ‘Art for Art's Sake’. There are the leader and the ‘Plain English’ pages. There are three full page cartoons … and two or three sketches on every page. There's the ‘Wild Cat Column’ for the comfort of Banks and mining and other companies and ‘shindykits’. There are the ‘Society’ pages, ‘A Woman's Letter’ (written by the cleverest pen-woman in Australia), ‘Personal Items’ and ‘Political Points’—all calculated to make the Bulletin well beloved by shaky politicians and Australia's scrubby aristocracy, and to make the irreverent Australian chuckle. There is the ‘Sunday Shows’ page and ‘Poverty Point’ for actors, and, of course, ‘Sporting Notions’, for Australia is the land of sport. And perhaps the most humorous, as well as pathetic, and, to some, the most tragic column of all is the ‘Answers to Correspondents’. I know many Bulletin readers—not writers—who prefer that column.

[Cronin 1984:879]

Sylvia Lawson (1983:150) describes the magazine in this era as ‘a great print circus’. But we are not simply emphasizing diversity for its own sake; we need to think of the Bulletin's range of tones, styles and materials, not just as individual or idiosyncratic qualities, but as a set of cultural meanings and effects (meanings and effects which are an important part of the social context for reading the literary contributions). What does the range of tones and material tell us? How might it affect our understanding of the literature printed in the magazine? Of the ways it was written and read?

To answer these questions we need to discuss the role of the magazine's distinctive format in setting it apart as different and new in the print economy of its period; its success in appealing to a mass audience, which was both geographically and socially widespread; and its role as a forum for a specific social group or cultural formation of writers and intellectuals.

‘Nothing was too trivial’ for the magazine, suggests Sylvia Lawson (1983:165) but the trivial details, the one-line jokes or the reader-contributed anecdotes and newspaper clippings, just as much as the editorials and short stories, worked in certain ways, produced certain effects and ways of reading. Here we can begin to see how the magazine distanced and distinguished itself from its contemporaries (and competitors), and thus how it appealed to a mass audience. Its styles and tones, its mix of materials, and indeed its very look, set it apart from the ‘decorums’ of the established press of its day (Lawson 1983:72-90). Unlike the established press, the Bulletin did not speak ‘as’ or from the position of the Establishment, the governors and ruling interests. It stressed entertainment, and it sought to appeal to a mass audience. It addressed an implied audience capable of appreciating a wide range of subject-matter—from the extended political analyses to the gossip, to the racist one-liners—and capable of entertaining a wide range of attitudes, from political outrage to cheeky irreverence.

Further, though the magazine never hesitated in expressing its editorial opinions, it did not speak for or to any single sectional interest whether ruling class or working class, bush or city, business or ‘the family circle’ (a popular target of other papers). Despite some similarity in policies, it was therefore very different from the Worker or the Boomerang, which defined their audiences more narrowly as ‘labour’ or ‘worker’. The Bulletin defined its audience explicitly as ‘national’ and ‘Australian’. It was not the only paper or periodical to do so, nor was its version of ‘Australian’ the only one, but certainly it was extraordinarily successful in reaching a diverse reading public, and crucial in this success was the audience implied in the magazine's pages.

The Bulletin did not emerge out of (or into) nothing. Here we return to an earlier point about the role of journalism in a ‘new’ literary culture and colonial print economy. Although there were very few locally produced and locally directed books (especially fiction) published in Australia until the late 1880s, the Bulletin was launched into a flourishing market of daily and weekly newspaper and magazine publications in regional towns as well as in cities. This is an important point because, as Ken Stewart has argued, with the high cost or sheer unavailability of local book publication, throughout the nineteenth century ‘journalism remained in many respects the mainstay of colonial literary production … As a consequence, literary Australia was largely journalists' Australia’ (Stewart 1988:180). The majority of poems, prose sketches, essays and stories which were published first appeared in, and indeed were written for, newspapers or magazines. This remained true in the last decades of the century, even though local book publication began to develop. The role of the country newspapers, and communication links between country and city, is also important in this period. As Stewart argues:

In the towns, displaced journalists ran some country newspapers which attained a ‘literary-ness’ and quality unimaginable today … From the 1860s onwards the literary weeklies, companions to the metropolitan dailies, were sent by coach and rail to thousands of country readers, some of whom in turn contributed to these journals. A high proportion of the most influential city journalists of the 1880s and thereafter … were previously editors or associates of country newspapers. This emphasis is not intended to idealise … the literary culture of rural areas … It may, however, help to explain the fact that the overwhelming majority of recognised colonial authors and journalists between 1860 and 1900 either were brought up in rural areas or spent a significant part of their writing careers there; and to place in a wider perspective the arguments of recent commentators who stress the extent to which images of the bush were created by city journalists in urban publications for suburban readers.

[Stewart 1988:178]

Details of other papers and magazines are discussed in Green (1961), Walker (1976), Kinross Smith et al. (1978), Webby (1981), Gillen (1988). We need to note the range of journals which published fiction and verse. Lawson, for example, published in the Worker, Truth, and the Town and Country Journal as well as the Bulletin. Giles (1987) prints nineteenth-century women's fiction, including selections from the Australian Ladies Journal. Serialization of novels was also popular. Spender (1988) includes a novel by Ada Cambridge first published in the Age in 1881. Finally, in order not to isolate the Bulletin falsely, we quote the following discussion of the competing weekly papers: ‘It is well to realize that the practical, respectable matter-of-fact [Town and Country] Journal and its cousin the Sydney Mail must have had a combined circulation far larger than the Bulletin; they reflected and satisfied the tastes, interests, values, aspirations of country folk better than the noisy, impertinent Bulletin’ (Walker 1976:78).

This is the situation that the Bulletin grew out of and against which it defined itself. The wide range and mixture of seemingly incommensurable material in the Bulletin print circus was the expression of a new sense of the role of newspapers in entertaining a mass audience and appealing to a diverse set of local (which is not to say parochial) interests. The Bulletin also actively promoted itself as new. This set it apart from the established/Establishment press of the day, and its appeal to a wider audience also set it apart from the more narrowly defined sectional or political papers. (Neither was it a narrowly defined ‘literary’ paper for well-read ladies and gentlemen!) It conceived of its audience as nation-wide.

Rather than just addressing an audience that was ready and waiting, the Bulletin created an audience through its own textual mix and ‘forms of address’ to its readers; it ‘constituted’ a new audience, identified a new constituency, in a way no other paper had done. The distinctive mix of materials and tones is important in that it opens up a good deal of room to move for the reader so that the magazine could appeal to a wide audience—radicals and moderates, professionals and workers, town dwellers and bush people—including those readers who would not necessarily agree with its editorial line. We need to keep in mind that the appeal was broad, but that it was heterogeneous. It also had its limits: the implied audience was predominantly white and male. For attitudes to women and feminism in the Bulletin see Lawson (1983:194-204) and, more broadly, on the masculinist context, Lake (1986) and Schaffer (1988).

WRITERS AND EDITORS

The Bulletin came to be known as ‘the bushman's Bible’, a label its writers and editors cherished. But the centre of activity was definitely Sydney, especially inner-city Sydney—the Bulletin office, surrounding newspaper offices, some bookshops and publishers, and certain familiar cafés, pubs and boarding-houses (see map in Davison 1982). Most of the editors, managers and journalists associated with the Bulletin, from various parts of Australia and overseas, came to be centred in this inner-urban and cosmopolitan milieu, though we need to keep in mind the points about city/country influence raised earlier in the quotation from Stewart (1988).

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (Wilde et al. 1985) is a useful resource in coming to understand what kind of cultural formation the writers of the Bulletin comprised. (The term ‘cultural formation’ is used in a special sense derived from Williams (1981)—.) The careers of the writers and editors can be followed up in the Oxford Companion or in Cantrell (1977), which includes brief biographies of authors. It is revealing to look at birthplace/place of residence (city, town or country) and work or profession. A large percentage of writers were indeed journalists as Stewart (1988) suggests, and journalists before they were novelists or poets. On the other hand we meet someone like ‘Scotty the Wrinkler’, who has a short story published in the issue of the Bulletin that we selected. The Oxford Companion tells us that he was Philip Moubray, well known as a Bulletin short-story writer under his pseudonym. Moreover, he:

adopted the name … after meeting … a Scottish shepherd who claimed to be an expert on wrinkles. Of Scots descent himself, Moubray seems to have been a British army officer who served in India and Abyssinia before travelling to America and Australia where … he was a miner, drover, tutor, cook and whaler … Henry Lawson wrote a poem, ‘The Passing of Scotty’, published in the Bulletin, to mark his death.

[Wilde et al. 1985:496]

What does Scotty's biography tell us about writers of the Bulletin? Perhaps that they were not all city journalists, and neither were they all true native-born sons of the soil living in bark huts as the legend would have it. It also suggests a particular kind of interrelationship between outback, provincial town and city that the Bulletin was able to exploit or create; there were lines of communication through the magazine backwards and forwards between the metropolis and the regions that enabled someone like Scotty to be part of the same community as Henry Lawson (even if that community existed only in the pages of the magazine). Perhaps it also suggests links across the colonies, and the ‘new’ societies: the United States and Australia.

In ‘Bohemians and the bush’, chapter 6 of Inventing Australia (1981), White identifies as a distinct group the writers and artists who came to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s. He locates what he calls a ‘cultural generation gap’ between the new writers and artists and their predecessors, whom they saw as representing the cultural Establishment. Archibald, Stephens, Lawson and others were all in their twenties and thirties when the Bulletin began. This newer generation was more likely to be Australian-born, less likely to see ‘culture’ as something imported into the colonies as a civilizing influence. Many of them would have followed the path described above, moving from country to city (and possibly back again). The most important point in identifying this newly emergent group of writers and artists is that they represent a newly-professionalized intelligentsia. As White (1981:88) says, ‘Science, art and literature were increasingly the province of full-time professionals rather than educated amateurs or men of letters with a private income’. …

‘Professionalism’ here means a changed relationship between writer and market-place, writer and Establishment. One of the crucial points about the Bulletin, of course, was that it paid its contributors. There were careers to be pursued in journalism, literature and painting in ways that had not been widespread before. Not least among the contemporary developments enabling such professionalization was the growth of the popular press and popular literary forms, with the possibility of newspapers and books produced for mass consumption. The career of a key figure such as Henry Lawson is exemplary, despite his dismal rendition of what might be involved in ‘Pursuing Literature in Australia’, the title of one of his essays (Cantrell 1977:4-12). Indeed this document is precisely the plaint of a professional writer. We could also examine the careers of J. F. Archibald and A. G. Stephens, or a contemporary such as the painter Tom Roberts, in these terms (for Roberts, see Clark & Whitelaw 1985).

One example of this professionalization among the intelligentsia is ‘the discourse on journalism’ in the Bulletin, its constant preoccupation with journalism itself (Lawson 1983:182-6). The Bulletin writers spoke of the ‘new journalism’—meaning a mass-readership paper, critical of the Establishment and not self-interested, ‘newsy’ and not moralistic. This sense of their own newness and difference can be linked to the various journalistic and editorial practices in the magazine. Attention to the qualities of the magazine's writing overall might in turn affect how we understand its literary content. Archibald, Sylvia Lawson (1983:181) argues, did not have a narrow sense of literature: ‘“literary” qualities lay everywhere to hand—and literary craft was no less present in the sharpening of a two-line comment than in the choice of Henry Lawson's better lines of balladry’. At least for the practising journalists, literature was not in another realm altogether from the realm of work (writing and editing) and this influenced the styles, subject-matter and presentation of writing. Lawson (1983:154-81) provides an important discussion of the relation between the Bulletin's general editorial practice and its literary products.

The remarks above serve to demonstrate how simplifying it would be to attempt to understand the literature of the period just in terms of so many individual texts or individual authors. What was published and how it was read depended first on the sheer availability of papers like the Bulletin; the forms that writing would be liable to take, and the subject-matter it would consider, would then be influenced by the styles of the particular paper or magazine and the kinds of audience it sought to address. The magazine might help to define or create an audience for the literary writing, an audience that did not otherwise exist (so those who wrote for the Bulletin could address a much wider audience, conceived in different terms, than that addressed by more narrowly focused ‘literary’ journals). Further, a magazine might operate to forge a set of links between writers, to establish something like a ‘school’, and thus to encourage literary debate, literary self-consciousness, and group or local identifications.

We can analyse the writers and editors who congregated around the Bulletin in terms of Williams's notion of cultural formation. First, there were groups with more or less formal membership requirements, in particular the bohemian clubs like the Dawn and Dusk Club (White 1981:93-6). Though the Bulletin does not belong to any of these groups, they were certainly part of its milieu. Second, we might see the magazine in some respects as a collective public manifestation. Finally, we can identify a clear sense of group identification among these individuals, as professional, Australian writers and intellectuals. They were conscious of links between themselves rather than of links to any established group in society, a kind of self-conscious marginal status which, as White demonstrates, could take the form of urban bohemianism.

White's argument is part of an ongoing debate among historians and literary critics about the status and origins of the ‘bush ethos’, the celebration of certain values and attitudes, such as those of independence, anti-authoritarianism and mateship, associated with life in the bush. Most notably Ward in The Australian Legend (1958) has argued that this ethos arose among the nomadic workers in the bush but came to influence values and attitudes and the national image throughout society. In the 1880s and 1890s, Ward argues, the ethos finally emerged into expression in formal literature, in the works of Lawson, Paterson, and others associated with the Bulletin. Other writers, criticizing Ward, have reversed his picture and seen the bush ethos as a specifically urban product, the projection onto the bush of the values and attitudes—or the desires and anxieties—of urban intellectuals influenced by current literary and intellectual fashions and by the social effects of depression in the city (White 1981; Davison 1982). The variety of styles and themes in 1890s writing, beyond those dealing merely with the bush, has also been pointed out. The quotation given earlier from Stewart's article might suggest to us that we have a complex set of interrelations between country and city; between different intellectual and cultural traditions; and between individual experience and group identification. These complex interrelations suggest why we want to be as specific as possible about the role particular media played and about such questions as ‘who was writing for whom’.

In sum, then, the writers of the Bulletin were drawn largely from a newly-professionalized local intelligentsia. Certain radical, bohemian, democratic, nationalist, or even simply professional attitudes drew them together into what can be described as a cultural formation. The cultural and political activities of this formation can be seen, in Williams's terms, as in some respects alternative (for example, offering alternative publishing outlets) and in other respects as oppositional (often republican and anti-imperialist in sentiment).

THE READERS

There was of course quite another layer of contributors to the Bulletin—not only those like Scotty the Wrinkler on the fringes of the professional writing world, but also the host of anonymous or near anonymous readers who responded to the Bulletin's invitation and sent in newspaper clippings, anecdotes, yarns, verse sketches, bush recipes and so on. And, very importantly, these reader-contributors were acknowledged in the ‘Correspondence’ column (even if only to be rejected!). As Sylvia Lawson (1983:164-5) writes: ‘They responded to the weekly invitation, were answered, and so turned, even if for only three lines worth of fame, from readers into writers—which was enough to get the paper sold to their cousins and neighbours’. This unique sort of audience participation created the illusion of dissolving the distance between readers and writers and was very important in the magazine's ability to sustain mass circulation and appeal to its audience as an Australian magazine. It printed bits and pieces from all over the nation but simply by publishing them together in the same pages presented them as if they shared something in addressing the common, local (‘Australian’) interests of the readership.

The booms of the 1880s created a new audience for books, painting, theatre and music. Education Acts were passed in the colonies from 1866 through to the 1880s (Clark 1978:271-92). Widespread public education meant mass literacy, creating by the 1890s a new, mass market for fiction and newspapers. Overseas, popular writers had sales as large as Lawson and Banjo Paterson; nevertheless their books did achieve the first mass sales of any locally-written, locally-produced books. It was this new, increasingly literate, popular audience—in city, town and bush, in workshop, home and office—that the Bulletin tapped and formed into a readership that was given some identity in the magazine as a continent-wide, Australian audience.

The textual means of addressing and creating an audience are what is important for our case study of the magazine in its ‘institutional’ function. We have already noted the way the magazine announced itself as a national Australian newspaper; from the very outset it addressed its readers as Australians. What this means for the Bulletin, at least in its editorial pages, can be seen by examining the specific language employed, its value system, and the oppositions through which it operates. The Bulletin characteristically addresses its readers' common Australian interests (to which it gives a populist and democratic meaning): ‘This is not altogether Queenland's affair. It concerns, very intimately, the welfare of all Australia’. It can even appeal to these common Australian interests at a level beyond political factionalism: ‘Labourer and Capitalist, Socialist and Single-taxer, Protectionist and Freetrader, Unionist and Non-Unionist, Prohibitionist and Publican—everybody, rich and poor, drunk or sober, not in the swim, should march to the ballot-box with an equal mind’ (Bulletin, 15 April 1893:4).

Of course not all parts of the Bulletin address the reader in such a directly political manner. We might consider the ‘Personal Items’ column. It is very difficult to describe its contents—a mixture of titbits about people in the news, some political, some literary. There are curiosities:

Of the first eight names on the Melbourne Register of the Commercial Bank of Australia, five are those of clergymen.

Ibsen's latest psychological novel, ‘The Master Builder’, is advertised in a Melbourne daily as ‘The Masher Builder’.

It is averred that Justice Boucaut, of Adelaide (S.A.), refused to take a K.C.M.G. when in England, because the Colonial Office would not forego the fees. His reverence for money is proved by the fact that, on Wednesday, April 5, he gave a man five years' gaol for stealing £2 6s.

LONDON, April 3. Colonel North's famous grey hound Fullerton, which was missing, has been found. The dog was wandering, footsore, at Oxtend, Surrey.

[Bulletin, 15 April 1893:8]

What can be said about this odd collection of items? The column clearly expects its readers to have a lively interest in public life, and an interest not marked by inferiority or deference towards the rich and famous. The tone established is probably just as important as any information conveyed. The column seems always on the lookout for signs of hypocrisy, philistinism, incongruity and pomposity. Its response is comic, knowing, potentially outraged, and readers are invited to join in the game. Wherever they may be, in Sydney or the bush, in pages like this one the magazine locates readers in the ‘chattering promenade of the famous and notorious’ (Lawson 1983:112). The items are collected from all over the colonies and from overseas—like the last-quoted, which might be seen to have a pointed appeal to ‘colonials’ or rather ‘Australians’ (this one, of course, reproduced in the Bulletin for its comic value but also carrying a political point). Again, the magazine is negotiating the relationship between colony and metropolis.

Even on the ‘Personal Items’ page, then, we can see the Bulletin working to create a community of readers, a readership defined in populist, democratic and nationalist terms (and crossing certain social and political boundaries). There has been a good deal of argument over the years about the politics involved here—How socialist was the Bulletin? Was it merely bourgeois liberal? (see Cantrell 1977: intro.; McQueen 1970; Lawson 1983:150-4). Without entering into this argument, perhaps we can say that, liberal or socialist, the Bulletin's most significant social and cultural effects—its nationalism—lay in its relationship to its readership rather than in any explicit political platform it upheld. In establishing and sustaining a community of readers, a print community, the magazine for a certain period offered readers and writers the opportunity to participate in an imagined community, nationally conceived and frequently oppositional in its values (see Milner 1985 and discussion of Anderson 1983 in previous chapters). This was important for the literary writers because, however briefly, the magazine ‘created the sense of a national literary club’ (Stewart 1988:189).

We have to be careful not to become too folksy and reduce the magazine to a simple reflectionist or totalizing model (which might claim that the Bulletin expressed the spirit of the times or was the voice of the people). Again, it should be stressed that the implied audience was white, European and nearly always male. No doubt the actual audience was widely differentiated and there were specific audiences for particular parts of the magazine; some read it just for entertainment, some for political comment, some for gossip. The bohemians, the city lawyers, the shearers, the ‘family circle’, probably all read the paper very much in their own way. Though its wide range of materials did appeal to a wide range of readers we certainly should not imagine all, or even many, readers liking everything they saw in its pages. There were also Australians thoroughly offended by the Bulletin's style and comment (and they were none the less Australian for rejecting the Bulletin polemic). It is worth keeping in mind too that part of the Bulletin's success might have been due to its willingness to be controversial and to affront its audience.

The point is not that it was the voice of the people or the expression of the nation's spirit. What we have, rather, is a complex set of social and material circumstances involving, for example, an emergent group of journalists and writers; a newly formed mass readership; a political arena centred on arguments about the nation; new technologies enabling cheaper, better printing of newspapers; the absence of locally produced books; and changes in the dominant notions of literature all feeding into explanations of the Bulletin's format, its attitudes and its successes.

To conclude, the Bulletin addressed a diverse and widespread audience. Not only was a new mass audience emerging, the magazine actively constituted its own (implied) audience in its styles of writing and address. Though broadly anti-Establishment and frequently polemical it did not see its audience in sectional terms but rather as the nation, the national interest, the people, categories which were nevertheless race and gender specific. The address to the readership occurred as much in the entertainment as in the political pages—indeed it might not always be easy to tell these apart. The Bulletin also drew into its pages material (and readers) from rural and provincial areas. It printed provincial matters side by side with reports of political and cultural events overseas. A community of readers existed at least in the pages of the magazine, a community defined locally and nationally, but not as parochial, exiled or colonial.

JOURNALISM AND REALISM

Our final task is to bring the various points raised so far to bear on our understanding of the literary writing in the Bulletin. H. M. Green (1961:723) described the characteristic writing in the magazine as ‘concise, pithy, “pointed”, epigrammatic at times, self-conscious, rather artificial and full of mannerisms; disjointed but remarkably effective and entertaining’. This accords well with the examples we have examined. It is in the context of such writing, on a whole range of topics, that we can imagine the short stories, prose sketches and verse being read. This might lead us to expect stories and verse in relatively colloquial language, short rather than long, easy of access rather than highly formal or literary. We might also expect comic stories, possibly with a distinct local focus, and entertaining pieces directed towards a popular non-specialist audience. At the same time we would be looking for qualities which represent some of the shared values and attitudes of the professionals and intellectuals, for we also have writers here speaking to other writers. So together with the comedy and popular appeal we might expect to find in the writing a consciousness of doing something new, something local and Australian, something like the establishment of a national literature.

Of course not all of these qualities will be present everywhere, but they do provide a rough indication of the qualities of the stories and verse in the Bulletin. One exception is lyric poetry, which tended to be given an elevated role and was thus felt to be properly formal or sentimental. (Readers who enjoyed the irreverent editorials and vernacular tall stories could also, of course, feel properly sentimental or uplifted by lyric verse!)

We can identify two earlier critical approaches to the Bulletin writers which we might call, respectively, the nationalist and the universalist. The former, in ways suggested above, sees these writers as representing the first national school of Australian literature, and sees their writings as the first authentic expression of an Australian ethos or character, the first truly indigenous literary expression of Australia (see, for example, Inglis Moore 1971; Serle 1973; and discussion of radical nationalists in earlier chapters). We have suggested that the writers do need to be seen as constituting a school or cultural formation, though we would not define this in terms of their ‘authentic Australianness’. The universalist approach, by contrast, stresses the writers' individual sensibilities and their treatment of universal themes. This approach is not particularly interested in literary schools, sociopolitical movements such as nationalism, or the material context of writing. It prefers to isolate literary texts and to analyse their ‘literary’ qualities, and it comes up with a quite different set of values for the appreciation of the writing (see, for example, Wilkes 1962; Heseltine 1962; and Docker 1984, who provides a polemical discussion of both critical tendencies). We have already suggested the limits of such an approach, focusing as it does just on individual authors and individual texts.

More recent approaches have stressed the influence on the Bulletin (and associated) writers of contemporary English, American and European artistic and political movements, and emphasized the writers' urban intellectual milieu (White 1981; Davison 1982; Jarvis 1981). These more recent writings have been very fruitful in establishing an intellectual and social context, though at times they have a rather dismissive tone, as if to identify an overseas or metropolitan influence were to discount the writing's local or national significance. Also they have not always given great attention to the details of the writing itself. However it will already be clear that we have drawn extensively on this work for our own purposes.

We can proceed directly by examining a Bulletin short story, an item from 15 April 1893: ‘Blind Love’ by E. D. (most likely Edward Dyson). The story as originally presented was squashed in between advertisements for blood purifier, hair tonic and corsets—not the sort of thing found on the literary pages of today's newspapers in their weekly arts supplements, where the advertisements are for books, art shows, operas and similar high cultural events.

What can we say about such a story, if we can even call it a ‘story’? How do the points made so far about the Bulletin, its readers and its writers help us to read the story? We can probably begin by saying that if we were reading the story looking for evidence either of a national(ist) school of writers or of literary qualities we would not find a great deal to say at all! But there are significant things to be said about it, both to explain its particular form and how stories in the Bulletin worked for their readers.

We might first note that in the array of materials that the magazine printed, such a story does not stand out from other types of writing—there are similarities of tone, style, even subject-matter. The same sort of qualities are valued throughout, indeed the news items are often like tall stories, the stories often like yarns or documentaries. The clear distinctions between news and literature or between journalistic and literary writing, which we would expect in today's periodicals, are not so evident here—though of course there were still appropriate rhetorics for essay, fiction and verse writing respectively. We can recall earlier points about the predominance of journalists among the literary writers and Sylvia Lawson's remark about Archibald (‘literary qualities lay everywhere to hand’). The sense of literature operating in the Bulletin was not the same as the narrower sense of the literary which has grown up for example in the institutions of academic literary criticism until recently; the Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Hergenhan 1988) shows a much broader approach.

Jarvis (1983) has examined the Bulletin in order to determine the magazine's taste in fiction. He sums up his findings by saying: ‘The Bulletin wanted a concise realistic tale, dramatically told and with an unexpected ending’. ‘Blind Love’ fits this formula very neatly. In a number of articles Jarvis has also traced the importance of contemporary European theories of realism in influencing the course of writing and its reception in Australia (Jarvis 1981; 1983). We can pick out a few points very briefly. First, realism was understood in opposition to other contemporary forms of writing, in particular popular forms of romance fiction (Giles 1988) and ‘high culture’ forms such as neo-classicism and Pre-Raphaelitism (Jarvis 1981). We might imagine the Bulletin writers taking up arms (or pens) against the types of writing advertised in another journal from the 1860s:

Historical romances and Legendary Narratives of the old country, will be mingled with Tales of Venture and Daring in the new; Nouvellettes, whose scenes will be laid in every nation, varied occasionally with Fairy Stories for the Young; and Parlour Pastimes for boys and girls.

[Quoted in Webby 1981:22]

In contrast, realism was seen to be contemporary and local in its concerns. For these reasons it was also seen to be the appropriate art form for a new society—vigorous, egalitarian and actual. Thus realism could be associated with nationalist and democratic politics. Art, at least prose fiction, was to be socially useful and critical, and speak to the real conditions of ordinary people. We might note here the similarities between the role of journalism in the Bulletin, as described above, and the role of fiction. Both brought with them a sense of novelty, a new task and a new audience, and both the new journalism and realist fiction were liable to be accused of sensationalism. Of course, what looked realistic in art to readers of the nineteenth century might look quite otherwise to readers today, and the Bulletin stories are full of what now looks like the stock-in-trade of Victorian magazine fiction: melodrama, seduction of innocents, redemptions, and so on (Lawson 1983:178-81). Also, someone such as literary editor A. G. Stephens could bring to the Bulletin a more elevated sense of the mission of literature while recognizing the local importance, if not the high literary quality, of what he called ‘the easy, detached, realistic sketch’ (quoted in Lawson 1983:172).

What we most commonly find in the stories in the Bulletin is a form somewhere between the conventional magazine story, with an overt plot and a moral or sentimental resolution, and the journalistic sketch, a prose sketch of a typical incident or character. The form of the fictional sketch, or sketch-like story, became particularly attractive to those writers looking for local and popular effects and concerned with realism (see Kiernan 1980).

To bring these points to bear on ‘Blind Love’: the story is presented like an anecdote or sketch, though with some passages of identifiably literary effects (‘to stem that crimson tide’ for example). The story's very abruptness and brevity seem to say that this is not just a pretty made-up piece of fiction but a slice of real life. Of course it is very much a stage-managed piece of fiction, but here there is no pious moral to be grasped. The surprise ending makes the point that real life is not like the writers of romance fiction pretend it is! One aspect of the story's realism is precisely its internal critique of sentimental romance fiction. Perhaps the overtly literary language and sentimentality of the first part of the story just softens us up for the anti-romantic ending, where a different sort of colloquial language breaks through. While it might not be great literature according to anyone's definition, ‘Blind Love’ is not merely naive or primitive writing; it is calculated to achieve certain effects, it makes skilful use of a particular narrative voice and diction, and it knows its audience.

There is no overtly Australian view in the story. What is significant is that its local audience and Australian setting are simply assumed—‘local colour’ is not added just for the sake of it. The story might also be seen, in its last two paragraphs, to belong to a genre of humorous writing that is usually set in the bush or country town. Some of Lawson's and Steele Rudd's stories would be the best known examples. Perhaps ‘Blind Love’ works on two levels, for some readers predominantly in terms of the familiarity of its setting and character types, for others in terms of the familiarity of its kind of humour (‘the loafing, horse-thieving son of Milky Morgan, the publican’). On one level the narrator of the story speaks not just about the ordinary workers but as one of them; the story implies a socially equal community of narrator, characters and readers. At the same time, on a somewhat different level, we can read the story as addressed to a ‘knowing’ audience, and it is not without a hint of irony at the expense of the innocent bushman. Perhaps it also contains just the type of misogynist joke to go down well among the predominantly male urban professionals. Certainly the story's anti-sentimentality, its style and tone, and its misogyny, fit well with writing going on elsewhere in the Bulletin of this era.

These points about ‘Blind Love’ could be tested by comparison with the other stories and sketches in this issue of the Bulletin. The variety of settings and subject-matter as well as the similarities should be noted; this issue includes one of Lawson's Mitchell sketches and a range of other short stories by such authors as Scotty the Wrinkler, Mulga Ned, and The Dipsomaniac. What, we might also ask, are the connotations of these pseudonyms?

This commentary on one particular issue of the Bulletin has addressed matters specific to that magazine, but at the same time a more general interest in literary periodical publication as one key aspect of the social institution of literature has been in play. By looking closely at one moment of the Bulletin we have seen how, in the nineteenth century, magazines and newspapers had a major part in the publication of local writing and the establishment of a locally directed literary culture. The diversity of the Bulletin, its writers and its readers, also provides a caution against totalizing historical approaches and literary criticism's isolation of individual texts and authors. The existence of the Bulletin as a newspaper, with a wide range of political, social and entertainment concerns, was crucial to its literary success. So was the apparent equality between editors, writers and readers (however much this was only a fiction acted out in the pages of the magazine). It allowed the publication of writing whose style and subject-matter had generally not been published in book form. Further, because of their context, the fiction and verse published in the Bulletin present themselves to readers as Australian writing (if not always as Australian literature).

Most important, this analysis of the Bulletin sets up not merely a description of diversity but a way of explaining and interpreting the complexity of literary production and circulation. To return to some of our earliest questions, we can see clearly that the magazine is not simply a neutral container for literary material. It plays specific roles for specific groups of writers and readers. No magazine can offer equal access to all writers and readers and each establishes its own implicit set of options and constraints. The very format of the magazine sets up relations between its various parts which influence how the literature is written and read.

Every magazine establishes a set of relations with an audience, both an actual readership and an implied readership, defined by its tones, styles, subject-matter, format, price and distribution. The readership of a magazine might be only half a dozen, but the implied readership might be something as encompassing as ‘all thinking Australians’ or ‘all white (male) Australians’. The reader becomes a Bulletin reader, though he or she might just as well become a Sydney Morning Herald or a Boomerang reader at another time. In short, the literary magazine provides us with a good illustration of how reading as well as writing is a structured or mediated activity, dependent, in this case, on the function of the magazine in a given print economy, a print economy itself determined by its colonial situation.

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