SOURCE: White, Richard. “Bohemians and the Bush.” In Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, pp. 85-109. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.

[In the following essay, White details the rise of national consciousness among Australian writers, artists, and intellectuals in the 1880s and 1890s.]

The brave Bohemians, heart in hand,
March on their way with spirits free;
They count not moments, sand by sand,
But spill the hour-glass royally.
With wine and jest and laughter long,
Their lives appear to pass, may be;
But still beneath the river's song,
There sounds the sobbing of the sea.

Victor Daley¹

From the 1880s, just as ‘The Coming Man’ was coming into his own, a conscious attempt was being made in Australia to create a distinctively national culture. At the same time, it should be remembered, literary, artistic and musical nationalists in Europe and North America were also ransacking history, nature and folklore to construct national cultures. It was an outcome of the rise of European nationalism and, as in Australia, it was often associated with the growth of local manufacturing industry and an urban bourgeoisie. In Australia this would result in a new image which was to prove more powerful than any other. It was essentially the city-dweller's image of the bush, a sunlit landscape of faded blue hills, cloudless skies and noble gum trees, peopled by idealised shearers and drovers. Australians were urged to respond to this image emotionally, as a test of their patriotism. For the first time, a basic distinction was made between the image of Australia created by Europeans, and that created by Australians themselves. Now European images were condemned as necessarily alien, biased, blurred; only the new Australian image could be clear, pure, true. The irony was that this new image inevitably remained trapped, as we shall see, within a European intellectual milieu.

A CULTURAL GENERATION GAP

The new image was painted in against a background of dramatic changes in Australian life. A series of liberal measures—payment of M.P.s, graduated income tax, old age pensions, wages boards—saw an expansion in the role of government, and made the colonies the world's social laboratory, a title they occasionally shared with Germany. The long boom, which had led to a steady improvement in the overall standard of living from the time of the gold rushes, came to a sudden end in 1891. In the depression which followed, amid the great strikes, the bank crashes, drought and unemployment, the old faith in constant progress collapsed. Labour parties were formed to carry the voice of the unions into the colonial parliaments, where they established themselves surprisingly quickly, and gave a new direction and tone to political life. At the same time, a middle-class federation movement held its first convention in 1891, and by the end of the decade, without much fuss or enthusiasm, the six Australian colonies had voted to become a nation.

These changes in political direction were accompanied by a new vitality in the development of art and literature from the mid-1880s. A new generation of writers and painters was giving creative expression to a fresh approach to Australia. It was claimed that the Heidelberg School of painters, which emerged after 1885, saw Australia for the first time with Australian eyes. The same was to be said of the coterie of writers and artists attached to the Bulletin: the Australia they described was supposed to be more ‘real’, more in tune with the democratic Australian temper. Too often this vitality is explained by saying Australian culture had reached its adolescence, marked by youthful exuberance, cockiness, pimples and all. But the analogy is a dubious one because it implies that a national culture ‘grows’ of its own accord, quite apart from the rest of society. The reason that cultural life changed direction at this time, and produced a new image of Australia, is much more complex than that.

In the first place, a new generation had arrived. Most of the writers and artists coming into prominence in the late 1880s and 1890s were born in the 1860s, as Australian society settled down after the upheavals of the gold rushes. In 1890, J. F. Archibald, the Bulletin's editor, was 34, A. B. Paterson was 26, A. G. Stephens and Edward Dyson were both 25, and Henry Lawson, Bernard O'Dowd, Steele Rudd, Randolph Bedford and E. J. Brady were all in their early twenties; among the artists, Tom Roberts was 34, Fred McCubbin 35, Arthur Streeton 23 and Charles Conder 22. Of the previous generation of artists, writers, teachers and critics, whose cultural values were being challenged, Marcus Clarke, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Louis Buvelot were already dead. Rolf Boldrewood was 64, Brunton Stephens 55, Ada Cambridge 46, Tasma 42 and Rosa Praed 39. Among those who taught the members of the Heidelberg School, Eugen von Guérard was 79 and G.F. Folingsby 60. Among other artists of that generation, William Strutt and Nicholas Chevalier had returned to Europe and W. C. Piguenit was 54, while James Smith, the most influential critic of the day, was 70, and the young Charles Conder was looking forward to the day when ‘the irrepressible Mr. J. S. [would] be gathered to his fathers’.² It was little wonder then that the younger generation saw themselves as rebelling against an outdated and stale set of cultural standards. They could believe they were presenting a vision that was new and fresh, and could make much of the virtue of youth.

The difference between the generations was accentuated by the fact that the older generation was centred in Melbourne while the younger generation generally looked towards Sydney. Indeed the sheer dominance of the cultural values of an older generation in Melbourne helped to drive many—Archibald, Julian Ashton, Roberts, Streeton, Victor Daley, and later Hugh McCrae and the Lindsays—to make the move to Sydney. There they found a more ready acceptance than in the Melbourne cultural establishment, centred on respectable journals or the National Gallery of Victoria. There was more work available for both writers and artists on the Picturesque Atlas of Australia—a large-scale project of the 1880s—and the Bulletin; and the New South Wales Art Gallery, with Ashton's encouragement, began to buy the work of the Heidelberg School. However, the differences between the generations and between Melbourne and Sydney, while emphasising the break made by the writers and artists of the 1890s, does not explain the direction they took.

What helps explain their direction towards what has been seen as a distinctively national culture, is the fact that the younger generation was more likely to be Australian-born. The Melbourne cultural establishment was largely made up of men who had arrived in Victoria around the time of the gold rushes, and who saw in culture a means of civilising and educating a materialistic democracy. The 1890s generation, predominantly native-born, felt more at home in the Australian environment and felt more need to promote an indigenous culture.

But this is a far from adequate explanation for the new direction, although some later writers have made do with it. Harpur, Kendall, Boldrewood, Praed, Tasma and Piguenit were all born in Australia or migrated as children, yet they still shared the cultural values of their immigrant contemporaries. On the other hand, important names among the new generation—although not the most important—were immigrants: Conder, Daley, Will Ogilvie, D. H. Souter and Price Warung all left Britain as adults. Both groups still looked to Europe for cultural attitudes and philosophies: Australia remained, undeniably, part of a broad Western culture. Both groups, in varying degrees, looked to Australia for imagery and inspiration, and although that perhaps came more naturally to the 1890s generation, it could still be artificial and painfully self-conscious, a matter of hunting around for ‘local colour’. It is significant that the younger generation itself liked to attribute its image of Australia to the entrance of the Australian-born on to the cultural stage. However it is not enough to argue simply that a native culture had replaced an immigrant one.

THE PROFESSIONALS' REVOLT

The real break between the two generations can be found in the changes taking place in the late nineteenth century—in Europe and Australia—in the role of the artist and his audience, in the way in which ‘culture’ was produced, its raison d'être, the meaning of the word itself. The intelligentsia in Western society was being professionalised. Science, art and literature were increasingly the province of full-time professionals rather than educated amateurs or men of letters with a private income. Although the process was a gradual one, the sheer growth of the professional intelligentsia is striking. In Britain for example, the number of ‘authors, editors and journalists’ listed in the census rose from 2148 to 14,000 in the 40 years after 1871.³

That increase owed much to the new readership created by virtue of the 1870 Education Act, and to technological changes which lowered the cost of paper and type-setting. The market for British writers, like the market for British manufacturers, was expanding internally. The new literature of Kipling, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson catered for a new class of consumer, as did the new journalism with its illustrations, advertising, sensationalism and immediacy. The standard mid-Victorian novel—what Kipling called the ‘three-decker’ because it normally filled three volumes⁴—was giving way to shorter novels, short stories and popular ballads in cheap illustrated editions. Their aim was not to moralise to the middle class, but to attract and entertain a mass market. At the other extreme, the aesthetic movement around Oscar Wilde and J. A. M. Whistler reacted to the same changes by promoting ‘Art for Art's Sake’ and flaunting their intellectual exclusiveness and studied decadence. Even so, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray could still appear in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in the same year (1890) as novels by Doyle and Kipling.⁵ A mass audience paid too well to be ignored.

The same changes were taking place in Australia and throughout the Western world. In Victoria between 1881 and 1891, the number of ‘authors and literary persons’, including journalists and reporters, rose from 461 to 1292, while ‘artists’ rose from 734 to 1502. After 1891 the census categories were altered, so they are no longer comparable with the earlier ones, but the figures given in the table below give a rough indication of what happened to the local ‘intelligentsia’ after 1891.

Authors, editors, journalists:		1891	1901	1911
	N.S.W.	530	595	955
	Vic.	534	606	702
Artists, painters, art students:
	N.S.W.	341	427	684
	Vic.	471	545	609

It is clear that the 1890s depression slowed down the growth of the intelligentsia in both colonies, but after that, the greater cultural vitality of New South Wales is marked. It is also noticeable that Australia was supporting a much larger ‘intelligentsia’ for its size than was Britain: in 1911, authors, artists and journalists accounted for about one in 3200 of Britain's population, while in Australia the figure was about one in 2100.⁶

Most striking is the fact that a large new community of professional writers and artists had emerged in Australia in the 1880s. Writing was no longer done for the love of it. It was even possible for a few, in their peak years, to live off their earnings from creative work as opposed to journalism, while others could use creative writing at least as a means of supplementing their income. This is not to say they were affluent by any means. Freelance writing could offer only a very precarious existence at best. In Australia writers could never attract anything like the large payments to the best-known of their contemporaries in Britain and America, and the depression hit them particularly hard. They had good reason to air the constant complaint that Australian writers were not properly recognised.

However the tenor of that complaint was changing. In 1872, Henry Kendall had grumbled that there was ‘not the ghost of a chance’ for those who aspired to join the ‘colonial literati’ to make a living outside journalism: so they ‘join the Press, and in due time forget their early aspirations and become plodding, satisfied newspaper hacks’. He wanted more recognition, patronage and encouragement from ‘that influential class in our midst who are lettered as well as leisured’.⁷ In 1899, Henry Lawson's complaint was that he was not earning enough. The Bulletin was prepared to pay him 30 shillings per column, but few other papers were, and he had earned only £700 in 12 years of writing. His solution was blunter than Kendall's: if a young Australian writer could not escape overseas, he should shoot himself.⁸ Lawson soon afterwards left for London and disappointment. But what is interesting about his outburst is a new professional concern about the protection of the local literary product, and about how to make writing pay. Kendall's desire had been for recognition from the cultural establishment.

Artists were also becoming professional. There was more training available for young artists, and it was of a reasonable standard. Particularly at the National Gallery School in Melbourne in the 1880s, and among Julian Ashton's students in Sydney, a much greater sense of an artistic community developed. They had a wider market for their work, in the new illustrated press—again the Bulletin stands out—and in the public galleries. Both writers and artists were forming part of a new intellectual community, a professional ‘Bohemia’ in which they could see themselves as men committed to their art. In this way, through both their professionalism and their bohemianism, they distinguished themselves from those educated middle-class laymen who were committed to cultural improvement and had dominated the cultural establishment since the gold rushes.

Accompanying the developing sense of professional identity was a new attitude to the role of the artist and the purpose of art. The earlier dominance of the layman or lay critic as cultural arbiter had led to a utilitarian approach to art and literature. Art was seen as the servant of society: it served morality, it educated the people, it could even aid commerce.⁹ Culture had become the great improver, the civiliser of nations, and so art galleries and libraries had been built in industrial Britain and materialistic Australia. John Ruskin, the epitome of the gentlemanly intellectual all-rounder, had dominated the British cultural establishment since the 1850s with his arguments about the moral function of art.

This view of art began to be challenged in the 1870s in Britain with the arrival of the ‘aesthetic movement’, proclaiming that art existed, not for morality's sake but for art's sake. Whistler, flamboyant wit and darling of the new aesthetic, argued for the independence of art from any moral purpose:

Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.¹⁰

As the artist became professional, he claimed art as his province alone, not that of laymen or critics whom he increasingly portrayed as philistine boors. In time the moral earnestness of Ruskin was to give way to the sensuality, cosmopolitanism and exclusiveness of the aesthetes, but only after a struggle.

This difference of opinion came to a head in 1878, in a celebrated public clash between Ruskin and Whistler. Reviewing an exhibition of Whistler's work, Ruskin had attacked it savagely, writing of ‘the ill-educated conceit of the artist’, ‘wilful imposture’ and ‘cockney impudence’, and declaiming ‘I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face’.¹¹ Whistler promptly sued him for libel, and turned the trial into a battle between artist and critic. During the trial Whistler argued that ‘none but an artist can be a competent critic’, and later satirised the Ruskin cultural ‘scheme’ in which ‘the public, dragged from their beer to the British Museum, are to … appreciate what the early Italians have done to elevate their thirsty souls’.¹² It was a sign of the times that Whistler won the case and was awarded a farthing damages.

Eleven years later, the same battle between critic and artist, between one generation's view of art and another's, was fought out in Australia, although with rather less showmanship. James Smith embodied the cultural evangelism of the immigrant generation. A trustee of the Melbourne Public Library and the National Gallery, an enthusiastic founder of cultural societies, a critic of art and literature, he was—it is hardly necessary to add—a follower of Ruskin. As a cultured layman proud of his wide intellectual interests, he was offended by the new values of the younger generation. And so, when he came to review for the Argus the famous 9 × 5 Exhibition of ‘impressions’ by Roberts, Conder, Streeton and others in 1889, his comments were scathing:

In an exhibition of paintings you naturally look for pictures; instead of which the impressionist presents you with a varied assortment of palettes. Of the 180 exhibits catalogued on the present occasion, something like four fifths are a pain to the eye. Some of them look like faded pictures seen through several mediums of thick gauze; others suggest that a paint-pot has been accidentally upset over a panel nine inches by five; others resemble the first essays of a small boy, who has just been apprenticed to a house-painter; whilst not a few are as distressing as the incoherent images which float through the mind of a dyspeptic dreamer.¹³

This review is often seen as evidence of the inability of the immigrant establishment, represented by Smith, to appreciate the ‘real’ Australia as portrayed by the Heidelberg School. In fact it was a repetition of Ruskin's attack on Whistler. When the artists concerned replied to Smith in letters to the Argus, they repeated arguments similar to those Whistler had used in court. They defended their ‘impressions’ against the charge that they lacked ‘finish’; they found beauty in the commonplace, and questioned the ability of Smith, as a non-artist, to judge artistic merit: ‘as it takes an artist to paint a picture, so also it takes one to appreciate it’.¹⁴

Later some of the new artists were to make the conscious effort to produce an ‘Australian’ art, with Robert's and McCubbin's paintings of ‘typical’ bush life and Streeton's landscapes. The important thing is that the starting-point for this lay not in their Australian nationality, but in their interest in overseas trends (Impressionism in France but also as filtered through London) and in their stance as professional artists. Both provoked Smith. He condemned their ‘Impressionism’ as ‘a craze of such ephemeral character as to be unworthy of serious attention’, borrowing the judgement of W. P. Frith, R. A., who had been a witness for Ruskin. In response to the argument that only artists could fully appreciate art, he dismissed Roberts and company as ‘a few young artists who have formed themselves into a Mutual Admiration Society’. In support of the layman, he cited the patronage of art by ‘the Manchester cotton manufacturers’ and ‘the Birmingham steel-pen makers’.¹⁵ It is unlikely that such examples convinced the artists.

The new writers associated with the Bulletin also openly rejected the old values of the British cultural establishment. Few could have been quite as irreverent at Ruskin's death in 1900 as A. G. Stephens of the Bulletin, who gaily debunked the ‘superfluous veteran’ as one who ‘intellectually … does not count’, and whose theories of art were ‘imaginative gibberish’.¹⁶ Irreverence provided the starting-point for the new image of Australia which the Bulletin writers helped create. The genial bohemianism, the scoffing at Victorian morality, the idealisation of the ‘Common Man’, the commitment to naturalism, were all aspects of a common revolt against received literary values. They were not initially distinctively Australian. Even the Bulletin's republicanism was based on an English radical tradition and Irish nationalism.¹⁷ It had little to do with a sense of Australian identity or even the earlier Australian republican tradition derived from identification with America.

What came first was the revolt. As Archibald put it later: ‘It was a Cant-ridden community … Socially, politically, all was a mean subservience to a spirit of snobbery and dependence … Sydney invited revolt from existing conditions, and the Bulletin was the organ of that revolt’.¹⁸ Yet it should not be forgotten how much that revolt owed to the old cultural evangelism. The writers and their audiences were often the products of the Education Acts, the older generation's proudest achievement. The artists owed a debt to the public galleries and the associated art schools in which they trained. Even the young Norman Lindsay, the most irreverent of all, owed his introduction to art, and perhaps to sex too, to the Ballarat Art Gallery.¹⁹ There were other continuities. Plein air painting, so closely identified with the Heidelberg School, had been preached by Buvelot; the Bulletin balladists owed much to Adam Lindsay Gordon; Henry Lawson was named after Kendall.

Their Bohemianism too owed something to a local tradition. In Sydney in the 1850s a loose literary circle had developed under the patronage of N. D. Stenhouse.²⁰ In Melbourne in the late 1860s, a rather self-conscious bohemianism had developed around Marcus Clarke, the Yorick Club and, when that became too respectable, the Bohemian Club. Clarke enjoyed looking back nostalgically: ‘I fear we did not live virtuous lives … wicked and natural, and happy’.²¹ From that bohemian outpost, he had praised Balzac, ‘immortal Balzac’, preached realism and, through his advocacy of a literature of everyday life, pleaded for an Australian literature. And yet, in all his attacks on established religion, his satires on local politics, his exposures of bourgeois respectability, his Gothic prose, even his experiments with marihuana, there remained a certain moral earnestness which bound him up with the values of his generation.²²

The new bohemians of the 1890s were consciously hedonistic, and not so earnestly wicked. There was still something of the old style among the Melbourne group: Marshall Hall, for example, professor of music, poet and patron of the Heidelberg School, insisted on being seen in his pyjamas by Sunday church-goers.²³ Generally, however, the stress was on conviviality. It centred on the Bulletin office, bohemian clubs such as the Dawn and Dusk Club in Sydney and the Cannibal Club in Melbourne, and the various artists' camps where the new generation of painters discussed their work, smoked, talked, shared picnics and enthusiasms with their friends, and taught their students, usually girls conforming to the style of the ‘New Woman’. In a letter to Roberts, Streeton reminisced about one of the camps:

How we made sketches of the girls on the lawn. The lovely pure muslin, and gold, sweet grass-seeds and the motherly she-oak with its swing, spreading a quiet blessing over them all … the silver dusk of night simplified the group of quiet happy boys and girls.²⁴

Lionel Lindsay likened this happy life to ‘pagan Greece, before Christianity came to throw its ominous shadow of melancholia and “purity” upon the blytheness of life.’²⁵

There were also Artists Balls, Smoke Nights and, to raise money for friends, entertainments such as ‘A Night in Bohemia’ in the Sydney Town Hall.²⁶ When they could, they would act the part of bohemians in their dress—Roberts was noted for his crush hat and red cape—and furnish their studios exotically. Life was not easy for the writers and journalists especially during the depression: marriages broke up, Lawson turned to drink, Barcroft Boake rather dramatically hanged himself with his own stockwhip. But occasional poverty and uncertainty was all part of the irregular life they sought in bohemia.

Their sense of community tended to be exclusive and elitist. They shared Clarke's scorn for Philistines, but extended it to non-professionals and ‘the public’. As artists they claimed for themselves, as we have seen, a higher appreciation of art. As professional artists, they demanded more say on artistic matters in the established art societies, which were dominated by amateurs and laymen intent on cultural improvement. The result was that in 1886 the younger professionals left the Victorian Academy of Art to form the Australian Artists' Association, and in 1895 a similar group split off from the Art Society of New South Wales to form the New South Wales Society of Artists. The names of the new societies were significant, for they implied the recognition of professional interests which needed protection. In both cases, Roberts led the walkout, and his followers included most of the important younger artists. As Streeton put it, they had mobilised ‘for the sake of ART’ against ‘those old chaps’.²⁷ Later the splits were healed, but on the artists' conditions: the new Victorian Artists' Society, for example, ruled that non-exhibiting members ‘shall not be entitled to vote … on any matter affecting Art’.²⁸

The Dawn and Dusk Club was also exclusive. Its membership included writers (Daley, Lawson, Brady, Bedford) and artists (Roberts, Mahony), but excluded ‘the detestable Philistine’, as one member put it, in order ‘that soul may commune with soul alone’. Mocking the traditional criticism of the cultural possibilities of new societies, they included among their objectives ‘one … to establish a society for the erection of ancient ruins in Australia; another to form a fund for the establishment of Australian Old Masters’.²⁹ They were also exclusive in that they tended to be young single men, firmly rejecting middle age and respectability; when they did get married it was often to the sisters of their fellow bohemians.³⁰ In contrast, the older generation of writers was often linked by marriage to the colonial gentry.³¹

FRANCE, BOHEMIA AND THE BUSH

These then were the dimensions of the new generation's revolt: professionalism, youthful hedonism, fellowship and a rejection of the Victorian era's values. By the 1890s, ‘Victorian’ was already a derogatory term.³² Out of that revolt—almost as a by-product since the same revolt was taking place in London—the new image of Australia emerged. It was not seen then as being particularly nationalistic. The rejection of the values of the British cultural establishment did not necessarily involve the celebration of peculiarly Australian ones. Indeed the revolt could take other directions altogether.

There was, for instance, an attraction towards France. As in Britain, French realism in both literature and art was an important influence on the younger generation. Paris was the new centre of the art world, and French literature was considered by people such as A. G. Stephens and Francis Adams as setting new standards for local writers. It went deeper still. The idea of France appealed. As O'Dowd put it:

A wind hath spirited from ageing France
To our fresh hills the carpet of romance.(33)

Archibald, the greatest Francophile of all, changed his name from John Feltham to Jules Francois, allegedly because of his ‘inborn objections to everything that sounded English’.³⁴ He dreamed of establishing ‘a “froggy” paper, utterly unlike anything under the British flag, with … a column of smart local paragraphs written in French’.³⁵ He left the Archibald Fountain as a memorial to French-Australian friendship. Becke was another who Frenchified his name, changing it from George Lewis to Louis. Sydney's bohemia liked to eat at the Café Français and the Paris House restaurant (‘oh! the Bohemian orgies that were supposed to go on at Paris House!’).³⁶ Melbourne's equivalents were the Maison Dorée and Fasoli's. To the British mind, France was traditionally associated with a rejection—if only for a sordid weekend—of conventional values.

Another direction this rejection could take was towards the idea of bohemia. Melbourne had already been introduced to, and had recoiled in shock from, ‘a certain French picture … likely to suggest improper ideas’.³⁷ Lefebvre's stunning nude, Chloe, had proved too much for the National Gallery in 1882 and, despite a defence of the painting by McCubbin and others, it had ended up in Young and Jackson's Hotel. The new generation would continue to shock their more respectable elders by their open opposition to Victorian prudery. It should be remembered that this group of artists not only dabbled in ‘impressionism’ and created a new image of Australia, but they also introduced the nude into Australian settings. Indeed Roberts had been instrumental in having a life class established at the National Gallery school. There was a strand of naughtiness in bohemianism which culminated in Norman Lindsay's philosophy of art. He celebrated sensuality and contrasted the creative bohemian with the philistine wowser.

A bohemian outlook could also lead towards a generalised political radicalism: republicanism, free thought and socialism of a sort found recruits among Bulletin writers. A series of ‘progressive’ causes were linked by the Bulletin and, later in the 1890s, by the emerging labour parties, and these were contrasted with prevailing conservative British values. But that radicalism, and the contrast, were themselves imported from Britain as part of the international urban culture. It is significant that labour parliamentarians were more likely to be recent immigrants and less likely to be native-born, than their non-labour colleagues, a point that is often lost in discussion of radical nationalism.³⁸ It is also worth noting that both bohemianism and radical republicanism were essentially urban, part of a world of artists' studios, cafes, bookshops, boarding houses and political meetings which could only exist in large cities such as Sydney or Melbourne.³⁹ Victor Daley acknowledged the allure of this world:

The town's confined, the country free—
Yet, spite of all, the town for me.(40)

In rejecting the values of the cultural establishment, the new generation could turn to the idea of France, or the idea of bohemia. Most importantly, they could also be attracted to a cluster of symbols and principles which they associated with Australia: sunlight, wattle, the bush, the future, freedom, mateship and egalitarianism. This, like other images of Australia, was essentially artificial. It did not spring, in full bloom, from the Australian soil, but rather grew out of a set of attitudes to which the new generation had attached themselves and which provided a reference point for their revolt. They generally found this new Australia, which they thought of as the ‘real’ Australia, in the outback.

While this image of Australia was usually developed in the city, there were occasional forays into the bush to gather material. For his most consciously ‘Australian’ works—Shearing the Rams, The Breakaway and The Golden Fleece—Roberts visited sheep stations to make sketches, then finished the paintings in his city studio. His response was typically romanticised: ‘If I had been a poet … I should have described the scattered flocks on sunlit plains and gum-covered ranges, the coming of spring, the gradual massing of the sheep towards the one centre, the woolshed’.⁴¹ Henry Lawson too found what he had wanted on his trips, except that he had gone with a different set of expectations and in a season of drought:

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.(42)

The most ludicrous expedition was surely that undertaken by four self-styled bohemians associated with the Dawn and Dusk Club. One of them, George Taylor, a Bulletin artist, described it in his nostalgic Those Were the Days:

It was decided that a real back-country adventure should be experienced. What was the good of posing as Australian artists or writers unless one had been ‘there’. Harry Lawson got his ‘local’ color [sic] through personal experience, so it was up to the other Bohemian boys to do something in that line.

They took a train to Byrock, the first time any of them had been so far from Sydney. They waved wildly to any swagman they saw ‘as if to a “brother of the track”’ but ended up hiring a horse and buggy to carry their portmanteaus and other gear. On the road, they were soon depressed by the ‘soul-destroying sameness’, relieved only by ‘dreams of city pleasures and delights’, so they turned off the track to the Bogan River. On reaching it,

It was only the work of a minute for Jessie to be unharnessed, and with four naked, joy-wild excitedly shouting Australians, to be trotting down to the welcome water to drink, to bathe and splash around with the very joy of living.

Ah, it was worth while living in the back country to have such sport. ‘City life holds no joys like these’, said Artie. He was going to string some impromptu rhymes together, but thought better of it.

Oh, those were the days!

Time can never efface the joy times spent by the bank of that Bogan River. Gone were all thoughts of Gongolgan and Bourke … It was unanimously agreed to stay by that lovely river till it was time to go home.

Then they returned.

Back to Sydney! Back to Bohemian haunts; and four happy chaps brought back the ‘local’ color [sic] to tinge their story, verse and picture for ever more.⁴³

Taylor's account of getting ‘local’ colour is a good illustration of just how self-conscious and artificial the process could be. The bush simply provided a frame on which to hang a set of preconceptions. At the same time it shows how the sense of freedom, comradeship and youthful spirits associated with the bush overlapped with the values which they infused into their bohemia. Thus, while it is possible to isolate the different directions rebellion could take, the various strands—outback Australia, bohemia, even France—were in fact closely interwoven. There were differences of emphasis, but men such as Francis Adams and A. G. Stephens could quite comfortably combine passionate attachments to France, the bush, radical politics, the artist and Australia, all to some degree based on a rejection of dominant British cultural values. Thus French literature and English aestheticism could both find a place in A. G. Stephens' vision of Australia:

Verlaine's cult of Faded Things, extolling the hinted hue before the gross colour, finds a natural home in Australia,—in many aspects a land of Faded Things—of delicate purples, delicious greys, and dull, dreamy olives and ochres. Yet we have been content to let strangers foist upon us the English ideals of glaring green or staring red and orange … This, though intelligent Englishmen themselves revolt against their tradition of crude colouring, and declare, like returning Morley Roberts, that ‘… the tint of grass after the soberer dull greys and greens and browns of Australia was extremely unpleasant to my eye. I thought the colour glaring, not to say inartistic …’ To see the many-blossomed gum-tree moving in a breeze … is to receive an aesthetic education … In a word, let us look at our country … through clear Australian eyes, not through bias-bleared English spectacles, and there is no more beautiful country in the world.⁴⁴

Stephens shared the preference of Whistler and other aesthetes for delicate tints rather than bright colours.

The connection between bohemian and bush values is also clear in a group of paintings beginning with Roberts's The Sunny South (1887), which portrayed naked Australian youth as part of a sunlit bush landscape, with occasional art nouveau overtones. The whole effect was one of freedom and healthy sensuality. Conder, McCubbin and Long produced similar work. George Lambert could even turn Anzacs into naked hedonists.⁴⁵ Will Ogilvie, a Bulletin balladist, dedicated a volume of verse to Fair Girls and Gray Horses, while other poets invested the bush with nymphs and satyrs. Henry Lawson could find in mateship the virtues which others had found in bohemia:

There were between us bonds of graft, of old times, of poverty, of vagabondage and sin, and in spite of all the right-thinking person may think, say or write, there was between us that sympathy which in our times and conditions is the strongest and perhaps the truest of all human qualities, the sympathy of drink. We were drinking mates together.⁴⁶

Even the masculine exclusiveness of the bush ethos was repeated in the bohemianism of the 1890s. Women were as out of place in the Dawn and Dusk Club as they were in the shearing shed. George Taylor's emphasis on being ‘Bohemian boys’ together, for example, excluded all women except an artist's model, ‘our sexless pal’.⁴⁷ For Arthur Jose, the romance of Sydney's bohemia was on the whole:

devoid of feminine interest … It was not that kind of romance. There were a few girls among the Boy Authors, but they were tolerated there mainly because they made tea and organized refreshments.

The only women writers who managed to penetrate that particular charmed circle were Louise Mack, who ‘was on the whole taken as a joke by her fellow Boy Authors’, and Amy Absell, who married the artist George Lambert and then ‘absorbed her ambitions in her husband's’.⁴⁸

One reason for this smothering sexism was that ‘feminine’ values were associated with the ‘respectability’ which the young bohemians condemned: they talked of Melbourne's literary circles as being ‘obsessed with respectability, the respectability which they believed fervently to be of the ruling English type, for which Ada Cambridge wrote her polite and soothing novels’.⁴⁹ Another reason women were excluded was that their interest was assumed to be ‘amateur’ when the men were striving to protect their professional interests. Finally the 1890s generation joined in the idealisation of the ‘masculinity’ of ‘The Coming Man’, and helped forge his image: Streeton, for example, when he watched railway builders in the Blue Mountains, admired the ‘big brown men … toiling all the hot day’, ‘the big, stalwart men … big and bronzed’.⁵⁰ There were women of this generation, notably Mary Gilmore and Barbara Baynton, who competed effectively as writers, but necessarily on the men's own ground. Women artists, although they actually outnumbered males at the National Gallery School, were not awarded the major prizes or scholarships, and generally failed to break into the professional bohemia of the period.⁵¹ It is significant that at a time when women were making advances in politics and education, they were largely excluded from the newly professional artistic community of the 1890s. They had received more recognition in the earlier generation, and were to become prominent again after World War One.

THE REAL AUSTRALIA

Thus this new intelligentsia carried into their image of the bush their own urban bohemian values—their radicalism, their male comradeship, their belief in their own freedom from conventional restraints—and presented it as the ‘real’ Australia. They also projected on to their image of the bush their alienation from their urban environment: they sought an escape from what the city represented. A few escaped in other directions, Brady to sea, Becke to the islands, and found there a similar freedom. Most chose the bush as an imaginative refuge. The contrast between the cramping, foetid city and the wide open spaces became a cliché for that generation: Paterson's ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ was its most famous expression. In part it represented a personal response to the poverty endured by many of the artists and writers, the sort of life which, as Lawson put it, ‘gives a man a God-Almighty longing to break away and take to the Bush’.⁵²

But it was more than this. The city could be identified with the values of the older generation, their respectability, their philistinism, their faith in progress which had turned sour in the depression. Even in 1885, Francis Adams's objection to Sydney had been that it was ‘the home-elect of the six-fingered and six-toed giant of British Philistinism’.⁵³ Later he would turn with relief to the bushman, his version of ‘The Coming Man’, as Australia's saviour from the soft, debilitating city. Paterson also contrasted Clancy, the drover, with the city:

… the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.(54)

It is important to note that this city-bush contrast was expressed in very similar terms to those used by Kipling in depicting the relationship between the metropolis and the fringes of empire. Lawson resented any comparison with Kipling. However they were writing for similar audiences, and as a result had the same relationship to the dominant literary culture and adopted similar literary forms. The cheap, popular editions of the work of Lawson and others of his generation, published and tirelessly promoted by the Bulletin, Angus and Robertson and, later, the New South Wales Bookstall Company, were modelled on the early Macmillan editions of Kipling.⁵⁵ The two writers also espoused many of the same values, particularly in the identification of their heroes of the wide frontier—Kipling's bearer of the ‘white man's burden’, Lawson's ‘real’ Australian—with the cluster of ideas embodied in ‘The Coming Man’. Lawson's affinity with Kipling, and his association of the ‘real’ Australian with ‘The Coming Man’, is most explicit in a poem published in the Bulletin in 1892:

Ye landlords of the cities that are builded by the sea—
You today ‘Representative’, you careless absentee—
I come, a scout from Borderland, to warn you of a change,
To tell you of the spirit that is roused beyond the range;
I come from where on western plains the lonely homesteads stand,
To tell you of the coming of the Natives of the Land!
                                                                                Of the Land we're living in,
                                                                                The Natives of the Land.
For Australian men are gathering—they are joining hand in hand
Don't you hear the battle cooey of the Natives of the Land?(56)

The attachment of Lawson and others of his generation to the bush-worker, as opposed to the older generation's preference for the squatter, was also parallelled in Kipling's idealisation of the ‘Common Man’ over the educated English gentleman.

Russel Ward has pointed out that the ‘noble frontiersman’ provided Western culture with a symbol of escape from urban, industrial civilisation, a romanticising of imperial expansion, and a focus for patriotic nationalist sentiment, especially in ‘new’ societies.⁵⁷ Ward himself was concerned with the third element, and argued that the nationalist image of the Australian bushman had a distinctively Australian inheritance in the nomadic bush-workers of the outback. However all three elements are so closely interwoven that the isolation of any one is distorting. We have already seen the contribution of urban bohemianism to the imagery of bush life. It must also be remembered that the bush-worker was an integral part of empire and, when he was ennobled as ‘the Bushman’ and his capacity for drunkenness and blasphemy forgotten, contributed much to imperial ideology. Even the London Times could ‘value him as a part of the Empire … to leaven with his fine youthfulness our middle-aged civilization’.⁵⁸

The imperial significance of the bush-worker rested on two points. Firstly the bush-worker, rather than the urban or agricultural worker, gave Australia its identity in the empire. The economic basis of empire was that the colonies provided a variety of raw materials for English industry. Australia's main contribution was wool. With that in mind, the suggestion could be made in 1849 that in the decoration for the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster, Australia should be represented by mines and sheep stations.⁵⁹ Australian shearers and squatters featured prominently in the literature of empire. Like the furhunter of Canada and the backwoodsman of the United States, they had been in the vanguard of white settlement of new frontiers: they had entered an alien landscape and made it profitable.

In the late nineteenth century the Australian economy was diversifying. From the imperial point of view the wool industry remained of special significance, and its drovers and shearers continued to contribute to the romance of empire. However, in the colonies, local manufacturing interests, particularly in Victoria, were increasingly influential in directing economic policy in their own interests. The idealisation of the bush-worker by Tom Roberts, A. B. Paterson and others was a reaffirmation that the wool industry was the ‘real’ basis of the Australian economy and of Australian prosperity, despite its imperial connections.

The second contribution that the bush-worker made to empire was in his role as ‘The Coming Man’ on whom the new imperialists pinned their hopes. The qualities which he was believed to display were the newly-respectable qualities of ‘The Coming Man’ on the fringe of empire: comradeship, self-confidence, generosity, restlessness, resourcefulness. It was to such men, ‘the men who could shoot and ride’ as Kipling put it, that the empire looked for its superior cannon fodder. So Australia chose contingents of ‘Bushmen’ to send off to the Boer War, and was thrilled when Chamberlain was impressed enough to ask for more.⁶⁰ In this light, bush-workers were respectable enough for a contingent of mounted shearers to be selected to lead the procession at the Federation ceremonies in 1901. They had the full approval of the conservative Sydney Morning Herald which praised the shearers as:

men that could be sent anywhere to do anything, from shearing to soldiering—men who would give a good account of themselves in any company in the world … fine-looking backblocks men with a certain freedom of bearing and suggestion of capability that was very effective.⁶¹

So when the professional writers and artists of the 1890s contributed to the idealisation of the bush-worker, they did so within a more general context of changing Western ideas, tastes and attitudes, which included new imperialism, Social Darwinism and the exalting of the common man, as well as the desire to create a nationalist symbol.

Much the same can be said about the image of the Australian landscape popularised by the Bulletin writers and the Heidelberg School artists. In terms of expressing what was distinctively Australian, the new generation dealt with little that was entirely new. The lost child, for example, almost a Jungian archetype in the Australian landscape, was used by McCubbin and Furphy, as it had been used earlier by Marcus Clarke and Henry Kingsley. Bushfire, flood and drought, pioneering, campfires, bush and station life, even the artistic problems of the gum tree, can all be found in the literature and art of both generations. Both were aware of the problems of ‘local colour’ and of the temptation to reduce Australian literature to conventional wattle and bushrangers, a temptation which a few writers in both generations managed to resist. Both generations realised that it was possible to be ‘too’ Australian, by unnaturally adding swagmen and gum trees at every opportunity.⁶² Just as the younger generation owed institutional debts to their elders, they also owed much to their sketching-in of the possibilities for the writer and artist in Australia.

The differences between the generations in their depiction of landscape were essentially differences in taste. In terms of subject, for example, fashions had changed. Ruskin had turned the Swiss Alps into ‘monuments of moral grandeur’⁶³ and Chevalier, Piguenit and von Guérard had done the same to the mountains of Tasmania and northern Victoria. By the time of the Heidelberg School, fashion demanded a more intimate approach to landscape, with gentler scenery and more attention to colour values, space and sunlight than to careful drawing, dramatic romanticism or heroic gloom. Similarly in poetry, Kendall's romanticism had attracted him to the eastern seaboard and fern-filled gullies; by the 1890s, fashion led Paterson towards sunlit plains and wide open spaces.

Changes in taste also demanded a different treatment of the landscape. By the 1890s, many critics were condemning one of the classic descriptions of the Australian landscape:

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry—Weird Melancholy … The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair … The lonely horseman riding between the moonlight and the day sees vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plains, hears strange noises in the primeval forest, where flourishes a vegetation long dead in other lands, and feels, despite his fortune, that the trim utilitarian civilisation which bred him shrinks into insignificance beside the contemptuous grandeur of forest and ranges coeval with an age in which European scientists have cradled his own race …⁶⁴

Marcus Clarke had written this in his preface to the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon in 1876 but it had been adapted from descriptions of paintings by Buvelot and Chevalier which he had written earlier. From the 1890s on, this preface was continually held up as typical of a negative, alienated ‘English’ view of the Australian landscape, and compared unfavourably with the cheerful, sunlit vision of the 1890s generation. They professed to be seeing the landscape positively for the first time, because they saw it with ‘clear Australian eyes’, ignoring the fact that the settlers of the early nineteenth century also had a favourable image of the Australian landscape.⁶⁵

A. G. Stephens was one of those to condemn Clarke's gloomy vision when he depicted Australia as a land of ‘Faded Things’ in his preface to The Bulletin Story Book.⁶⁶ Both men were conscious that they were writing prefaces to Australian literary landmarks; both men presented their images of Australia primarily in artistic terms; both, interestingly enough, had a literary commitment to naturalism. Yet the differences are stark, for the simple reason that Clarke conceived his vision within the conventions of late romanticism, with its fashionable gloominess, while Stephens conceived his within a framework of cheerful, fin de siècle bohemian aestheticism. Neither was more ‘real’, or more naturalistic, than the other: naturalism itself had its own artificial conventions. What had happened was that one standardised version of the Australian landscape had given way to another.

MAKING A LEGEND

From where, then, comes the legend that it was only in the 1890s that writers and artists first gave expression to the ‘real’ Australia, seeing it for the first time with ‘Australian eyes’ rather than with the eyes of an alienated exile? It was a common view after the Second World War, when many intellectuals sought to give the national identity a radical heritage. It was a common idea too in the 1920s, when national insularity sought a pure and uncorrupted Australian golden age. But the legend can be traced even further back, to the ‘Bohemian Boys’ themselves. They simply created their own.

After all, their commitment to naturalism required them to portray the ‘real’ Australia with the implication that all other versions of the landscape were artificially contrived. It was also a matter of self-interest. The Bulletin created its own legend as a sensible commercial enterprise: self-advertisement was part of the new journalism. For the writers and artists, it was in their professional interest to adopt and popularise a nationalist interpretation of Australian cultural development, to perpetuate the idea that the particular image of Australia which they had created was somehow purer, and more real, than any other. So they boosted each other as the only true interpreters of Australia. Victor Daley described Stephens in 1898 as

… the blender of the pure
Australian brand of literature.(67)

Later McCubbin could not ‘imagine anything more typically Australian’ than a painting of Streeton's, The Purple Noon's Transparent Might:

this poem of light and heat … brings home to us so forcibly such a sense of boundless regions of pastures flecked with sheep and cattle, of the long rolling plains of the Never-Never, the bush-crowned hills, the purple seas of our continent. You could almost take this picture as a National Symbol.⁶⁸

By 1905, Sydney Long was arguing that only artists who were Australian-born could produce a truly Australian art.⁶⁹

In effect, Australian intellectuals were doing what Australian manufacturing interests were doing when they sought to protect local industry by tariffs, and advertised local products as superior to foreign imports. Once they were aware of themselves as a professional group, writers and artists began to make a claim for a sort of intellectual protectionism, seeking support for the local cultural industry. When faced with the argument that ‘creative intellectual work’ could easily be imported from Britain,⁷⁰ they retorted that the local product was superior, at least in Australian conditions. Joseph Furphy sub-titled his Rigby's Romance as A ‘Made in Australia’ Novel. In 1889, Victorian artists asked the Minister for Customs to impose a £10 duty on imported paintings. In 1910, one group formed an Australian Writers' and Artists' Union to protect their interests, but they were superseded by the Australian Journalists' Association. In 1912 writers and artists demanded tariff protection from imported magazines and novelettes to save ‘the pioneers of culture’ in Australia from ‘semi-starvation’.⁷¹ The irony was that the pastoral industry, which played such an important role in the national image developed by this generation, was always staunchly opposed to protectionism.

The link between economic self-interest, as a professional group, and their nationalist credentials as interpreters of Australia, is most explicit in E. J. Brady's account of Australian cultural development, written during the Great War:

Once it was unfashionable to recognize Australian science, applaud Australian literary effort, or praise work of Australian artists.

A persistent preference for the foreign article so discouraged local genius that it grew timid and deprecatory, or else fell a prey to a melancholy which reacted upon all its aesthetic output …

Australian writers of my own generation have … loved our young country and realized her. In spite of social and monetary disadvantages, under which we all laboured, we have endeavoured, to the best of our abilities, to express our free and glorious motherland.

A few years ago a little group of writers and associate artists, who mostly found expression through the Sydney ‘Bulletin’, struck the first definite national note in Australian literary and artistic thought. Their influence has grown beyond expectation …

Literary and artistic genius of the next generation will not suffer the neglect and opposition which made life's highway more flinty to our feet … It is possible that a majority of them will be enabled to reap an adequate harvest from their life's efforts.⁷²

As a spokesperson for his generation, Brady had impeccable credentials: a participant in the maritime strike, a balladist with the Bulletin, bushman and bohemian, he also had links with the next generation of nationalist writers who came into prominence after the Great War. His generation passed on to the next a national self-image, forged, they said, out of their Australianness, although in fact as we have seen there was little that was distinctive in it. It had already begun to sour.

Notes

1. Cited in George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’: Being Reminiscences of Australian Artists and Writers, Sydney, 1918, p. 9.

2. R. H. Croll, Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, London, 1946, p. 128.

3. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, [Baltimore: Penguin, 1969,] p. 157.

4. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, [London: Macmillan, 1955,] p. 212.

5. Ibid., pp. 166-67.

6. Victorian Census, 1891, 1901; N. S. W. Census, 1891, 1901; Commonwealth Census, 1911; Great Britain Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1912. See also Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, Historical Studies, 18(71), October 1978, p. 193.

7. Henry Kendall, ‘Men of Letters in New South Wales’, in Punch Staff Papers, Sydney, 1872, pp. 229-30.

8. Henry Lawson, ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’, in Cecil Mann, The Stories of Henry Lawson, 3rd series, Sydney, 1964, pp. 402-04.

9. John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870, Nelson, London, 1970, pp. 142-46, 282.

10. J. A. M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, London, 1892, p. 128. See also Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 172.

11. Cited in J. A. M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p. 1.

12. Ibid., p. 6, 32-33.

13. Bernard Smith (ed), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, [Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975,] p. 203.

14. Ibid., p. 207.

15. Ibid., pp. 204, 209.

16. A. G. Stephens, The Red Pagan, Sydney, 1904, pp. 19-21.

17. Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush’, [in J. Carroll (ed.), Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, Oxford University Press: Melbourne, 1982,] p. 199; C. N. Connolly, ‘Class, Birthplace, Loyalty: Australian Attitudes to the Boer War’, Historical Studies, 18(71), October 1978, p. 230.

18. Cited in Ian Turner, ‘The Social Setting’, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed), The Literature of Australia, Penguin, 1976, p. 35.

19. Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1970, Melbourne, 1971, p. 109.

20. Ann Mari Williams, The Stenhouse Circle: Literary Life in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sydney, Melbourne, 1979.

21. Michael Wilding (ed), The Portable Marcus Clarke, [St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1976,] p. 668.

22. Ibid., p. xi.

23. Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, Sydney, 1933, pp. 41-42.

24. Bernard Smith (ed), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, [Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975,] p. 253.

25. Cited in Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, [Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965,] p. 104.

26. George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’, pp. 47ff; Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush’, pp. 206-08.

27. R. H. Croll (ed), Smike to Bulldog, [London, 1946,] p. 13.

28. Victorian Artists' Society, Memorandum and Articles of Association, Melbourne, 1895, p. 13. See also Art Society of New South Wales, 15th Annual Report, 1895, p. 3.

29. George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’, pp. 10-12.

30. Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty-Three, Sydney, 1944, p. 288.

31. David Denholm, The Colonial Australians, London, 1979, pp. 151-53.

32. J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951,] p. 2.

33. Cited in Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, p. 43.

34. Ibid., p. 52.

35. J. F. Archibald, ‘The Genesis of “The Bulletin”’, Lone Hand, June 1907, p. 166.

36. Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, p. 26. See also George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’, p. 113.

37. Cited in Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich, [Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1971,] p. 159.

38. C. N. Connolly, ‘Class, Birthplace, Loyalty’, pp. 228-29.

39. Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush’, pp. 192ff.

40. Victor Daley, ‘The Call of the City’, in Wine and Roses, Sydney, 1911.

41. Cited in Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, p. 88.

42. Cited in Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush’, p. 208.

43. George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’, pp. 54-60.

44. A. G. Stephens (ed), The Bulletin Story Book 1881-1901, Sydney, 1901, pp. vi-viii.

45. In his painting, ‘Anzacs Bathing’.

46. Cited in Russel Ward, The Australian Legend [Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958], p. 233.

47. George A. Taylor, ‘Those were the Days’, p. 20.

48. Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, pp. 34-35.

49. Ibid., p. 40.

50. R. H. Croll (ed), Smike to Bulldog, pp. 21-23.

51. Victorian College of the Arts, von Guerard to Wheeler: The First Teachers at the National Gallery School 1870-1939, Melbourne, 1978 (photos and prize lists); Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists 1840-1940, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 24-37.

52. Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush’, pp. 207-09.

53. Ian Turner (ed), The Australian Dream, [Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968,] pp. 219, 225.

54. A. B. Paterson, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ [1889].

55. Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, pp. 19, 47.

56. Cited in Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 227.

57. Ibid., p. 252.

58. Cited in C. M. H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History 1851-1900, [Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950-1955,] p. 806.

59. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, p. 154.

60. Frank Wilkinson, Australia at the Front, [London: John Long, 1901,] p. 68. See also L. M. Field, The Forgotten War: Australian Involvement in the South African Conflict of 1899-1902, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 135, 186.

61. Cited in Russel Ward, A Nation for a Continent, [Richmond, Victoria: Heinemann Educational Australia,] p. 12.

62. For examples see John Barnes (ed), The Writer in Australia, [Melbourne, 1969,] pp. 3, 17, 38, 47-48, 57; Ken Levis, ‘The Role of the Bulletin in Indigenous Short-Story Writing during the Eighties and Nineties’, in Chris Wallace-Crabbe (ed), The Australian Nationalists: Modern Critical Essays, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 49-52.

63. Leslie Stephen cited in James Laver, The Age of Optimism, [London: Weidenfeld, 1966,] p. 176.

64. Ian Turner (ed), The Australian Dream, pp. 101-02. See also Bernard Smith (ed), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, pp. 135-38.

65. Helen Baker Proudfoot, ‘Botany Bay, Kew, and the Picturesque’, pp. 30-45; Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, pp. 133-34.

66. A. G. Stephens (ed), The Bulletin Story Book 1881-1901, pp. vi-viii.

67. Cited in Arthur W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties, p. 10.

68. Bernard Smith (ed), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, pp. 274-75.

69. Ibid., p. 263.

70. John Barnes (ed), The Writer in Australia, p. 52.

71. Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: 100 Years of Censorship in Australia, Sydney, 1961, pp. 105-06; Australian Writers' and Artists' Union, Rules, Sydney, 1910; Geoff Sparrow (ed), Crusade for Journalism: Official History of the Australian Journalists' Association, Melbourne, 1960, pp. 23-24; Bookfellow, June 1912, p. 156.

72. Edwin J. Brady, Australia Unlimited [Melbourne: G. Robertson, 1918?,], pp. 123-24.