[In the following excerpt, Mitchell concentrates on the principal Australian novels written between 1844 and 1889, categorizing most of them as romances and appraising the language, style, plots, and themes in these works.]

James Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh is something of an anomaly in the history of Australian fiction. Written apparently in 1844-45, it was first printed in an abridged and re-written form as a volume of memoirs in 1929, and then published in full in 1952. Since then it has established itself as an impressive early novel, for it is both interesting for the particular light it sheds on convict life, and attractive in its own right.

It is highly entertaining, lively, and not least because it works by a muddle of styles. Tucker's delight in the manufacture of fictions is infectious, and for all the horror and brutality that he describes, the picaresque sequence of Ralph's experiences is most fully confirmed by that narrative zest. It is an uneven work, but its lack of discipline almost amounts to cheerful insubordination, especially for the first half of the novel.

It has a minimal sense of structure. Things happen to Ralph for the most part haphazardly; he is never master of his own fate. After Ralph's brief career in London as an occasional thief, the novel falls into three main areas of activity: Ralph's experiences as a convict, his enforced participation in bushranging, and his extraordinary life as a member of a tribe of aborigines in northern Queensland. Tucker is not a mere primitive novelist however, for he shows some literary awareness. There are numerous pert literary allusions, the early sequences are in the manner of Fielding and Smollett, and the Newgate novel, while in the final section (which hints obliquely at the topical Eliza Fraser story) Tucker's rendition of the Aboriginals at times seems derived from an acquaintance with the fictional American Indian. ‘The world is wide. Dwell where you think fit, but come no more near our hunting-grounds … I have spoken. Do I say well, my brothers?’ says a tribal elder; and Ralph's end comes when, in pursuit of a marauding party, he is ambushed by the sable plunderers: ‘the native war-whoop sounded as the prelude to a volley of spears …’ In two highly entertaining chapters describing amateur theatricals by a group of convict players, Tucker changes his mode again, to the mock-bombastic. A sustained interplay of irony and facetiousness coordinates all these.

For all the narrative play, and display, the convict experiences are evidently real enough, though no-one else writes of the system quite like this. Tucker is unique. Vaux and Savery, for example, who are like Tucker in writing from within the system, protest their distinction from it, where Ralph accepts as it were the fact of being a convict. Other novels of the convict system, by Caroline Leakey (The Broad Arrow, 1859) and John Lang (The Forger's Wife, 1855) and later by Marcus Clarke and William Gosse Hay and others, all take an external view. As the subject became increasingly available for historical fiction with the passing of time, so it increasingly became the practice to elaborate the imagined responses of the convict close up to its brutal enormities and moral outrageousness. Tucker is much less sensational, and displays in Ralph a curious mixture of detachment and self-possession, an almost comic impersonality about what happens to him. The effect is only in part explained as a consequence of Tucker's modification of the usual picaresque mode, from first person memoir to third person narrative.

Ralph Rashleigh is two kinds of hero. While he is restrained within the System, he is an anti-hero, and when he is captured by the bush-rangers he is called by them ‘a crawler’, for he does not share their insane desire for revenge. He is distressed by their blood-lust and revolted by their viciousness, but he can do nothing to prevent them. He makes a sane unheroic appraisal of his circumstances, which leaves him helpless to intervene in the torture, the murder and the rape that take place in front of his eyes, even though it sickens his very soul. If he is no hero, he does not become brutalized; he survives.

The other Rashleigh is the heroic Rashleigh of the second half of the novel, Rashleigh the romantic hero. Once Ralph escapes from the Coal River settlement, he suddenly acquires tremendous strength, drives off hordes of Aboriginals in an amazing display of bravery, courage and physical prowess, and demonstrates a degree of bush-sense, cunning and endurance far beyond anything that could have been expected. We are not prepared for this Tarzan of the antipodes. And while Tucker's facetiousness remains, it is now directed away from Ralph.

The two parts do not reconcile, even when they are considered as a sequence of the convict's lament and the convict's dream. Tucker imitates two different and irreconcilable conventions, and these no doubt reflect his changing ideas about the novel. He begins well in the picaresque yet ends with the romance. In the second half Ralph begins to show evidence of sensibility; from time to time tears appear in his eyes, he develops an affectionate bond with his lubras, and mourns the death of his first aboriginal wife, and he demonstrates an excess of sympathy typical of the popular romance novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And his eventual restoration to society, dramatised in a symbolic final apotheosis (he sheds his stained skin to reveal newly-formed cuticle ‘more delicate and pure than ever he could recollect it to have been before’) is confirmed by public recognition of his sensibility. ‘I cannot believe that a person who is amenable to such generous impulses as have prompted Rashleigh can possess a corrupt heart!’ But Tucker handles the sentimental mode awkwardly, and he fails to achieve the fluency that this seems to require. He is much more at his ease in the picaresque vein, when he does not need to attend to narrative evenness.

The increasing sensationalism of the events he describes is matched by a change in language. In the early section of the novel Tucker, like the other convict writers, is at pains to demonstrate his familiarity with the flash language. On most occasions this underworld and convict slang is italicized, and sometimes explained. Italics are also persistently used to point a heavy irony or sarcasm, occasionally a pun. In the bushranger chapters, the language changes appropriately. The distinctive feature of convict speech is its esoteric vocabulary (as detailed by James Hardy Vaux); the distinctive feature of the bushrangers' speech is the energetic oaths, the hair-raising, defiant swearing. Here Tucker is writing close to the edge of the barely acceptable. In the third major phase there is rather less dialogue, and that little tends to be an appropriation of an idiom becoming consolidated in fiction of the North American Indian—the novels of Fenimore Cooper were quickly very popular in New South Wales. The different phases in Ralph's life are reflected by different language interests, and Tucker must be given some credit for attempting that.

Although the writing is by turns stilted, arch, flat, and preposterous, there is energetic liveliness in his narrative, just as there is weakness and extravagance. Tucker derives his particular charm from the colourful mixture of styles; the book's historical interest, however, lies in the many fascinating insights it permits into convict life, and as evidence of the growing taste for the romance adventure.

Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison: a Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854) the first of seven she wrote (only four were published in her lifetime), was highly regarded but not much read. Frederick Sinnett in the earliest important survey of Australian fiction, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), praised it as ‘decidedly the best Australian novel that we have met with’, yet the book had very limited circulation even in Adelaide, and virtually disappeared from sight. In part this is because she refused to write the kind of fiction that was appearing serially in the papers and fiction magazines. She was resolutely opposed to the romance, and in particular the romance of the bush, which was already shaping into a fictional formula. She later summarized this stereotype as a novel about

the ‘deadbeat’—the remittance man, the gaunt shepherd with his starving flocks and herds, the free selector on an arid patch, the drink shanty where the rouseabouts and shearers knock down their cheques, the race meeting …¹

That was not the Australian reality, but a false impression too often foisted on the outside world, ‘and on ourselves’.

In contrast, she determined to write ‘a faithful transcript of life in the Colony’, hardly an original thought but none the less serious. The effect of such realism in Clara Morison is that the colony has more life than the characters. Clara emigrates from Edinburgh to Adelaide but cannot find a position as a governess or lady's companion, and resolutely takes a situation as a servant. She soon discovers that the young people next door are her cousins, and all that is left then is the eventual happy outcome of her love for Mr. Charles Reginald. That rather thin story has to compete with the enfolding portrait of the manners of Adelaide, which are observed astutely and with a deft irony that is from time to time reminiscent of Jane Austen.

The location of the action is for the most part in Adelaide though the climax to Clara's personal affairs takes place in the country. Adelaide is not the whole colony; town and country require their own loyalties, and Spence preserves a careful distinction between the two. She is not at all interested in pastoral romance, and the only point in sending Clara into the country is to isolate her, a more indignant Pamela trapped in a country residence with a more boorish Mr. B., in this case a Mr. Beaufort.

Clara's isolation and vulnerability are stressed throughout the novel. Her circumstances are to an extent a replica of the town's: Adelaide is a separate community, holding itself aloof from and morally superior to the Victorians and the Swan River settlement, suddenly rendered vulnerable by the exodus of almost the entire male population to the goldfields, yet taking practical measures to meet these special circumstances. Although Adelaide is criticised for its provincialism, that criticism comes from a blighting Englishwoman, Miss Withering, contemptuous of all local attempts to imitate genteel manners. Gilbert and Margaret Elliot take a larger, more thoughtful view. Their loyalty is to the colony, and is expressed through carefully reasoned views on political and social reform.

The love story of Clara and Charles Reginald runs a mildly troubled course. It is a rather tame affair, and their mutual attraction is most nearly expressed when they discuss books with each other. This is not quite as artificial as it sounds, for it is Clara's character as much as Catherine Spence's to have an over-mastering passion for books, but it is also the means by which Clara and Reginald declare and understand their essential nature, the means by which each can assess and approve the other's taste. Through these discussions it is revealed that both understand that life consists in a struggle between affection and duty. There are no villains in this novel. Concepts of good and bad character belong to the kind of fiction Catherine Spence rejected. Rather, characters are identified by their opinions, and measured by their behaviour.

Clara Morison is weakest where it is most conventional. The plot is mechanical, and the action is unremarkable. Certainly the subtitle can be misleading. The goldrushes have no bearing at all on the main concerns of the novel, other than to distress the residents of Adelaide as suddenly it is drained of its manpower. The real subject of the novel is the fabric of colonial life, observed as people meet each other in each other's houses—the essential life of the community goes on indoors, not as is customarily proposed, in the great outdoors. In even, unexcited prose, with a quiet, intelligent awareness of the ironic distance between the values of the community and the ambitions of the individual, Spence maps out the character of Adelaide life in the period of the gold fever, 1851-1852.

Her novel works against the grain of what was emerging as the typical matter of Australian fiction but, more than that, it works against the expected patterns of fiction too. The usual main features, plot and character, are subordinate to opinions and what more conventionally is the background, the setting, here moves towards the foreground. That setting is not the visible features of Adelaide, but the cultural context, the very character of the community.

The chapter in which Clara starts work as a servant, begins:

When young ladies in novels are set to any work to which they are unaccustomed, it is surprising how instantaneously they always get over all the difficulties before them. They row boats without feeling fatigued, they scale walls, they rein in restive horses, they can lift the most ponderous articles, though they are of the most delicate and fragile constitutions, and have never had such things to do in their lives.

It was not so with Clara, however. She found the work dreadfully hard, and by no means fascinating …²

This is an objection much like Furphy's reaction against the romanticists, especially Kingsley. Catherine Helen Spence is not so caught up in the created world of her fiction that she cannot find an amused detachment from it. On the one hand, as in Furphy, her work of fiction separates itself from the conventions and customs of fiction, and on the other it reminds us that it is nevertheless a fiction itself. Catherine Spence has not written an anti-novel, but it is certainly very different from the prevailing fashion, and taste, and that perhaps accounts for its rather faint reception. The recent revival of interest in her work will no doubt lead to an increased understanding and finer awareness of just how accomplished it is.

Frederick Sinnett's high estimation of Clara Morison was published several years before Henry Kingsley's Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859); that judgment was superseded in 1869 when Marcus Clarke asserted that Kingsley's novel was ‘the best Australian novel that has been, and probably will be written’.³Geoffry Hamlyn is almost the complete antithesis of Clara Morison. It is a large, sweeping novel, spreading itself at a leisurely pace across generations; it celebrates the masculine accomplishments, the daring and excitement of pioneering life, and admires the ownership of large estates. It elevates its central figures into heroic, almost mythic proportions. Even its politics are directly opposed to Catherine Spence's, for Kingsley distrusts the urge to self-government. Australia, for all its natural advantages, lacks the benefits of social influence; and to migrate from England is to give up

an old, well-ordered society, the ordinances of religion, the various give-and-take relations between rank and rank, which make up the sum of English life, for independence, godlessness, and rum!⁴

When Rolf Boldrewood declared that Geoffry Hamlyn was an immortal work, ‘the best Australian novel, and for long the only one’,⁵ he dismissed in a phrase the published and serial fiction of the preceding half-century. This had amounted to a handful of convict fictions and a sprinkling of emigrant handbooks disguised as novels; and, with the goldrushes in the fifties, an increasing number of elaborated notations of their personal experiences by writers who may be collectively described as literary tourists. Again the basic form is the memoir: the interest is not autobiographical, but in the recollection of actual experiences as observed and appraised by the individual traveller, and as they happened to him. Most of this literature was designed for the English market, which had developed an interest in Our Colonies, Canadian, Indian, South African, New Zealand, as well as Australian. Some of these publications were by Americans (W. H. Thomes, for example), who compared experiences on the Californian and Australian goldfields, and published their books in the United States.

Geoffry Hamlyn became at once a very popular work, and an influential model for subsequent Australian fiction. Boldrewood's contention that it marks the beginning of the Australian novel is on those grounds defensible. Its success confirmed the romance as the dominant form in Australian fiction, a primacy that lasted until virtually the Second World War, and persisted beyond that—Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country (1975) is the most recent grand romance. But while Kingsley provided the basis for subsequent developments in Australian fiction, he also appropriated the other dominant mode, the memoir, and adapted it to the romance: these are Geoffry Hamlyn's recollections.

The practical advantage of using Hamlyn as narrator is that he provides Kingsley with a mask, so that incongruities of style or bluntness of perception can be seen as limitations in Hamlyn rather than in the author. Further, it allows Kingsley to move his narrative from the chronicle of the past, to the present in which Hamlyn calls attention to his difficulties as memoirist. The momentary transfer breaks the pace and changes the tone of the main narrative whenever it begins to grow tedious. This technique is handled quite successfully, and Boldrewood imitated it closely, and to advantage, in Robbery Under Arms. But when Kingsley repeated the technique in his subsequent novel of Australia, The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865), he forced it into a relentless alternation of first person and third person narrative (as in Bleak House, but without Dickens's genius). The Burton sequence is, interestingly, still largely cast in the form of memoirs, with Jim Burton in his old age recalling the past in much the same manner as Hamlyn.

In terms of the development of Australian fiction, the most important feature of Kingsley's novel is not the subject matter or the narrative technique, but the vastness of its scope. This is a pastoral romance on the large scale. The characters are heroic: the men are of enormous stature, or if not enormous then powerful. The women are beautiful, proud, graceful (Mrs. Buckley, we are told, even had ‘an imperial sort of way of manoeuvring a frying-pan’). The actions are heroic too: fights with Aboriginals or bushrangers become a type of military campaign, there are daring rescues, and when the Buckleys are moving their cattle to their new property, that is seen in patriarchal terms. The very landscape is heroic:

A new heaven and a new earth! Tier beyond tier, height above height, the great wooded ranges go rolling away westward, till on the lofty skyline they are crowned with a gleam of everlasting snow. To the eastward they sink down, breaking into isolated forest-fringed peaks, and rock-crowned eminences, till with rapidly straightening lines they fade into the broad grey plains, beyond which the Southern Ocean is visible by the white sea-haze upon the sky.⁶

The landholdings are vast, the fortunes immense, yet life is relatively effortless. It is all a large slow dream, a dream of ancestral figures, larger than life; a dream in a pleasant summer haze. Kingsley's image of station-life is likewise idealized. The characteristic image is of sitting on the verandah, taking in the view, an image that seems closer to plantation life than to the station. (Indeed, the fact that his grandfather had owned a plantation in the West Indies, and that his books were in the family library, may be just as pertinent as the more commonly proposed view that Kingsley wrote at least part of Geoffry Hamlyn while staying at Langi-Willi.) One image only of the real world intrudes, a brief description of the rise of the commercial city, Melbourne; and that is ‘Unromantic enough, but beyond all conception wonderful.’ That kind of reality is specifically excluded from the novel.

Although there is plenty of action—a bushfire, kangaroo hunts, fights with hostile blacks and bushrangers, escaped convicts, storms, an earthquake, and more orthodox excitements such as branding the cattle—this merely provides an occasion for the display of physical prowess. None of it really tests moral character, because it is in the nature of romance that moral character is unvarying, simplified, and idealized. The good are always good, the brave never doubt, and the wicked are discovered to have a trace of decency in them. George Hawker is a criminal, but he is not damned utterly.

Kingsley's gift lay in re-creation rather than invention. He relied on the conventional for the basis of his characters, though it appears that the enigmatic Dr. Mulhaus was based on von Mueller, the famous botanist. It is not clear that this serves any particular purpose, since Mulhaus is peripheral to the novel's main concerns. There is rather more point to the factual basis of the political skirmishing in The Hillyars and the Burtons.

The characters are based in convention, the action merely adventitious, and the life-style idealized. The world of Baroona and Garoopna is separate from Australian society, an enclave of the English landed gentry with virtually no contact with the world outside. A currency lad, ‘one of those long-legged, slab-sided, lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree-hatted lads’, makes a brief entrance into Hamlyn's memoirs but is treated with a shade of amused condescension. Indeed, Hamlyn at one point is bluntly critical of Australia in its social aspect, ‘Australia, that working man's paradise’, because he is frankly contemptuous of the working orders, with their drink, dirt and sloth. Kingsley's accomplishment is in creating, and popularizing, a particular image of the Australian landscape.

The kind of landscape he describes both expresses and demands an emotional response. It expresses a mood, or a feeling, or reflects a character's state of mind; and for the most part, given the genial gloss that Hamlyn's own personality throws over the entire narrative, it is a landscape of blessedness and delight, the golden landscape of pastoral romance. This sets Kingsley at odds with the other conviction about the Australian landscape, that it was in Clarke's phrase a land of weird melancholy, a primitive landscape filled with the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. Kingsley displays a much more congenial image of Australia, despite the bushfires, the heat and the storms. His descriptions are built up from large general features (valleys, ridges, ranges, forests) but with a few precise or small details carefully placed (e.g. the names of birds or plants). The method is pictorial, and the end product is highly visual. These are appreciative sketches. Yet the effect is deceptive, for the scene is, in fact, not as precisely envisaged as it appears to be: the details are much more evocative than definitive. Kingsley indicates rather than describes a scene, a scene that the reader responds to, just as to a vista; but the sense of extensiveness is also carefully related to the coming action, and all the explicit details contribute to this. And although it is characteristic of Kingsley to take in his views from a height, as was the fashion in topographical painting of the period, that continued elevation contributes its part to the novel's total effect.

One of the curious consequences of choosing Hamlyn as his narrator and chronicler is that Kingsley compromises the achieved heightening of his narrative—or possibly he protects himself against undue inflation. For Hamlyn is the least heroic of the central characters. His own modest history is only tangential to the main story, but temperamentally he is suited to his self-chosen function as chronicler:

in short, all through my life's dream, I have been a spectator and not an actor, and so in this story I shall keep myself as much as possible in the background, only appearing personally when I cannot help it.⁷

Yet the portrait of himself that Hamlyn allows to emerge through the long pages of his chronicle does not show him as retiring, for he is fond of conversation. He is a cheerful, decent man, approving the values and the sentiments and the ideals of the English landed gentry: but his early obsession with sport (hunting hares, or fishing, or wrestling in the village) and his predisposition to a slightly slangy idiom, the jollity of the sporting man, shows a touch of adolescence in him, and in his Recollections, which Kingsley himself does not seem to notice.

In The Hillyars and the Burtons, Kingsley writes quite a different, and less accomplished kind of novel. Not only is his handling of point of view obvious and mechanical, and his use of geographical and social divisions clumsy, but his reliance on coincidence and the fortuitous turn of events confesses a shallow story, and the characters are not clearly envisaged. The chief objection, however, is to the over-elaboration of initiating circumstances and subsequent motives and plot. As with the first (serial) version of Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life, there is too much preliminary ‘stage business’. Fully one half of the novel elaborates at length the bitter history of the Hillyars, and the reasons for the virtual dispossession of the elder son; as well as an accompanying mystery that involves the Burtons, a Chelsea blacksmith and his family who, with their domestic affections, honesty, industry and sturdy acceptance of their social position, are unmistakably Dickensian in inception.

The Hillyar side of the story, all melodrama and romance (a missing will, step-brothers, exile and revenge …), reverses the idyllic image of the landed gentry in Geoffry Hamlyn, for with all its wealth and property the family is spiritually blighted; the elder son, George, is degenerate, while the beautiful younger son, Erne, is too epicene to be a likely agent of regeneration.

Jim and Joe Burton, in making such a success of their life in Australia, are in marked contrast to Sam Buckley who, having made his fortune, returns with it and Kingsley's approval, to England. The Burtons' future is in Australia. Kingsley may be reflecting changing attitudes to the reasons for immigration in this, for Geoffry Hamlyn is a novel of the golden age of the squatters, whereas The Hillyars and the Burtons displays an Australia after the goldrushes, an Australia whose interest is now politics and economics, government and investment. The pastoral world is remote from all this. Kingsley has been conscientious about incorporating the chief topics of political debate and public contention of the period, such as land rights and suffrage, and much of the Australian sequence is taken up with discussing the tactics and the goals of the opposing factions. The change of emphasis between the two novels is most aptly dramatized in the day the Burtons arrive in Palmerston (Melbourne). Although Jim is affected at once by the landscape (‘more infinitely melancholy than anything we have seen in our strangest dreams’), this impression is quickly subordinated to the political interest. Joe and Jim attend the opening of the House of Assembly, and Jim reflects that the story of the life of everyone here is ‘to some extent mixed up with the course of colonial politics’.

But the transition is also signalled by the ‘arrival’ of the worthy tradesman. The Burtons in fact repeat and confirm the colonial success of another blacksmith, Dawson, a wealthy man and one of the leading political figures in the colony. The aristocrat withdraws from the colonial experience, and the leading figures in the colonies increasingly come from the common people. In Kingsley's scheme of things, the gentleman will of course return to his proper station in life, in England. Yet Kingsley is not just confirming a prejudice. Other writers were to make the same observation of colonial life, for example Boldrewood in Robbery Under Arms and Henry Handel Richardson in her period reconstruction, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Kingsley's novel is not to be accounted for in terms of its appropriation of historical fact, however discernible the factual basis may be, for that is only one of the strands in this strange and apparently unco-ordinated book. The key lies in the attempted link between the two stories. In his preface, Kingsley proposed as his theme ‘the old question between love and duty’. But the expected link between Emma and Erne is not what really binds together the Hillyars and the Burtons. Erne Hillyar also has a very close relationship with Jim, a friendship which Jim acknowledges as love. And the value Jim sets on this love is surprising, to say the least. The love of a good woman is acknowledged, but it does not compare with the rarer and finer ideal of men's affection. Kingsley increasingly emphasized this kind of relationship in his fiction. It is present in a subdued form in the friendship of Geoffry Hamlyn and Jim Stockbridge, in their comfortable bachelor quarters, and is much more explicit in The Boy in Grey (1871). Yet he does not analyse the special relationship that may exist between men, and his treatment of it can become embarrassing for the cloying sentimentality that gradually adheres to it and because Kingsley is so disconcertingly oblivious to the real nature of the attraction. It remains at the level of boy-friendships and ‘boy-dreams’.

In retaining the purity of the ideal, and preserving the relationship from passion and intensity, however, Kingsley foreshadows in his celebration of the ideal of male friendship, the code of mateship. That convention, so widely held to be one of the distinctive features of the Australian tradition, has to be understood in a much broader context of male loyalties in the nineteenth century. Not all the male relationships are as precious as that between Erne and Jim. A more recognizable version of the mateship pattern is provided in, for example, Tom Williams' care for Erne on the Omeo goldfields, in which we can see love and duty reconciled.

Kingsley's image of Australian life is controlled by his conception of fiction. The Hillyars and the Burtons is, like Geoffry Hamlyn, a romantic novel, and its romanticism is emphasized above all by the persistent dreaminess of everything attaching to Erne Hillyar, and by the cosy recollections of Jim Burton's narration. It is a novel with a strong sense of the past, not a nostalgic past but a past impressed with unhappiness. The novel's romanticism is sufficiently responsive to the harsher realities for the final dreams, by Erne Hillyar and Lesbia Burke, and perhaps James Oxton, to be of sadness and regret, a wish that things might have been otherwise. The kind of imaginative vision Kingsley offers here might be called a discoloured romanticism, a vision somewhere between the ‘medieval romance’ of Sir Walter Scott and the ‘romance of reality’ which Marcus Clarke identified in Dickens.

In both novels Kingsley added a special romantic frisson by letting a convict loose in genteel society. George Hawker, as the notorious Touan, alarms the Snowy district in Geoffry Hamlyn, while Sam Burton in The Hillyars and the Burtons is a much more insidious figure, a study of malice and deviousness. In neither case does Kingsley fully understand the nature of the character. By the 1870s, it was possible to take a much more fully considered view of the convict system; but for Kingsley the convict was ultimately an agent of his fiction, where for Marcus Clarke and later writers such as William Astley (‘Price Warung’), there was a conscientious attempt to understand both the meaning of the system and the experience of the convict. The brutal horrors and prolonged suffering of the system were, of course, a temptation to sensationalism not easily resisted. But the impetus to investigate imaginatively and re-assess this aspect of the colonial past came not from an increasingly uncomfortable public conscience, but from the widespread interest in questions of crime and punishment emanating from Europe. Clarke, for example, was influenced by Charles Reade's It is Never too Late to Mend (1853), and Balzac's Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes (1839-47) has also been suggested as one of his models for the novel of convict life. Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862) had caused a sensation by treating its hero sympathetically and at great length (‘The story of a criminal need not necessarily be repulsive—Victor Hugo has made it almost sublime’,⁸ wrote Clarke); and Alexandre Dumas is another for whom the prison concept held a special fascination. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) may have been slow in reaching Australia, but confirms the universality of interest in the theme at this time. Clarke did not rate Dickens' Great Expectations (1860-61) as highly as some of the other novels, but he relished Dickens' low-life characters generally. G. P. R. James based The Convict (1847) on the life of the notorious Matthew Brady, the escaped convict who terrorized Tasmania for several years. All these novels appearing at more or less the same time indicate a larger than local interest in the possibilities of convictism for fiction.

When Clarke came to write his powerful novel of the convict system, His Natural Life, he had two sets of resources. More thoroughly than any other writer of convict novels, Clarke drew his material from the old convict records, and from diaries and letters and official reports. (He even listed these in an appendix to his novel.) His account of the system is verifiable, that appendix tells us; it is true. However sensational the scenes of prison life, they all actually happened. The other source material is in the various models available in all that recent European activity. There Clarke saw that the convict theme could be treated seriously, that it afforded a special opportunity for examining, in these intensified conditions, questions of good and evil, moral and social responsibility, the problem of accountability, and suffering. They likewise established a new romantic convention of the convict hero, the wronged man who maintains his human integrity in spite of the extreme brutal treatment he must endure. But chiefly from these literary models Clarke learned the moral and psychological interest of his subject.

His Natural Life was written for serial publication in 1870-72. In 1874 it was published as a novel, still with that title but with extensive modifications to the text. (The longer title, For the Term of His Natural Life, only appeared on posthumous editions, and it is still not known on whose authority the substitution was made. The change blurs the irony of the original.) Clarke quite properly removed a long, involved and implausible preliminary section that explained why Richard Devine was tried for murder and transported to Van Diemen's Land under the assumed name Rufus Dawes. In its place he substituted a new and briefer Prologue, not entirely satisfactory, but a considerable improvement. Clarke also changed the ending of the original story, by deleting everything after Dawes' escape from Norfolk Island—his life on the goldfields under yet another name, and his eventual return to England and re-integration with his original life. There was to be no escape, no happy conclusion. His is a life sentence.

In terms of weighting, the effect of these revisions is to concentrate the novel wholly on the convict material. There is no relief from the multiplying horrors of the entire system, the chain gangs, the floggings, the suicide pacts, the homosexual rape, the cannibalism, the cruelty of the gaolers, the carefully delineated distinctions between the different prisons. By deleting the patently invented material of the first and last sequences of the original version (although his Eureka Stockade sequences clearly owe something to Rafaello Carboni) Clarke avoids impairing the meticulously established authenticity of the convict experiences he describes. Evidently his genius lay in the imaginative transformation of the factual, for where he invents he drifts towards the fantastic, the artificial or the conventional. Either by journalistic habit, or by conscious approximation to what he understood of the current movement to realism in France, he chose to build upon documented evidence.

Rufus Dawes, totally enclosed within the world of the convict system, becomes the focus for all the suffering, the brutal victimization of this unnatural life. And the intensification amounts to a rather sensational heightening of the horrors of the system, compounded by Clarke's highly visual and dramatic presentation of individual scenes. Not every one of the atrocities recounted in the book happens to Dawes, but they all affect him, for he is contained entirely within this special world, and every atrocity contributes towards the definition of it. Yet a further effect is generated by this very intensification: certain of the sequences take on a heightened significance, somewhat in the manner of Melville.

The underlying premise of the novel is that Rufus Dawes is innocent of the crime for which he is convicted. A simple treatment of the theme might have ventured to show that virtue would emerge unsullied at the end. But Clarke takes the position that man is a creature of circumstance, and although Dawes is from time to time permitted to re-assert his innate sense of good (‘good Mr. Dawes’), every brief resurgence of spirit is crushed, and Dawes is progressively reduced until, well past the point of despair (the suicide takes at least enough interest in life to put an end to it), he lapses into an apathetic indifference to whether he lives or not. Maurice Frere, the tyrant of the system, derides all protestations of innocence: ‘Innocent man, be hanged! They're all innocent, if you'd believe their own stories.’ Yet so they are, effectively; at another level, no man however guiltless, could emerge untainted from the horrors and the depravities of the convict experience. The system makes short work of Kirkland, the Methodist minister's son; it takes longer to wear down Dawes, but it breaks him at last.

Richard Devine has accepted the sentence of transportation and life imprisonment in order to protect his mother's name. Yet the question of innocence and honourable action is not adequately answered, for Devine is protecting the name of a woman who has committed adultery. He is her illegitimate issue, and so can have no claim on his father's estate; but his disinheritance remains moral rather than legal, for his father dies before the will is altered. From the beginning, it cannot be said that Devine's position is unambiguous. Although he has performed no criminal action, he is for all that the product of circumstances, and those circumstances quickly begin to sort against him. Clarke does not analyse the implicit moral complexities in this opening gambit, however, but leaves them unresolved; all that is seen instead is an over-elaborate set of coincidences. Yet it is evident from these opening pages that more is at stake than a novel of protest against the inhumanity of the convict system. It is that, but it is also concerned to look at what is happening to an individual. In terms of the gradual unfolding of Australian literary history, Clarke takes the important step of looking at a man, rather than depicting an image of colonial experience, life in its general portraiture. He does not fail to attach his moral vision of the world to an individual. His deepest feelings are humanitarian before social.

The irony of circumstance continues to work against Devine, or Dawes as he now calls himself. At Macquarie Harbor, where he has been sent for instigating the attempted mutiny on the convict ship—in fact he had exposed the plan, and the grim irony of the convicts' revenge in naming him as the ring-leader reinforces the oppressive pattern of his fate—Dawes becomes a pariah among pariahs. Here he loses any residual affiliation with his past. Although he had declared his old identity dead on board the convict ship, the reasons for his action in informing the authorities of the mutiny, and his private views of the other convicts, show that he still preserved much of his former self. At Macquarie Harbor, the transformation takes place, and Dawes becomes embittered, solitary, hostile, hardened in his attitudes, indistinguishable from the other convicts. Such signs of decency as he manages fitfully to show are those of the common man.

Dawes is given his chance at regeneration when he rescues Frere, Sylvia and Mrs. Vickers. The episode becomes a parable, for in this little society of four, stranded on the wild west coast of Tasmania, necessity re-arranges the customary social order. The outcast, the convict, becomes the most indispensable member (‘Maurice Frere's authority of gentility soon succumbed to Rufus Dawes' authority of knowledge’). Dawes is won over by Sylvia's simple trust in him, yet he is at once dashed by her innocent reminder of the harsh reality, that even if he were to win a pardon he would always be regarded as less than a full member of society. He can never be rehabilitated. Further, by being so completely competent Dawes incurs Frere's antagonism. His authority of knowledge offers no place to Frere, and consequently his efforts on behalf of the others lead to yet another reversal. In this sequence Clarke clarifies for a moment the real issues underlying the narrative. Here the reality of Dawes's situation is displayed, here his inevitable defeat is recognized.

Dawes's subsequent history is, in Matthew Arnold's sense, painful. By Book IV, the persistent brutalization has started to lose its dramatic edge. The convicts are reduced to listlessness, and to preserve the reader's moral bearings Clarke has to introduce a new character, for the marriage of Sylvia to Frere is likewise a degradation, and becomes durance vile. The Rev. James North, with his own personal conflict and spiritual agonies written down in his diary, serves to enlarge the moral scheme of the novel, by carrying it explicitly beyond the convict system. Yet his is such a different order of character that another effect of his late introduction into the novel is artistic imbalance. He seems to belong to a different mode of fiction, as well as a different world. He has a freedom that even Frere does not have. Frere belongs to the convicts, just as they admire and hate him for his personal authority over them; and his resemblance to them, especially in the coarseness of his nature, is often noticed. And for all his torments, North's freedom allows him a moral and spiritual latitude that is not possible for the prisoners. The difference in character may also emerge from the narrative procedure, however, for by using the device of diary extracts and the first person point of view, Clarke allows the reader a much more detailed knowledge of North's cast of mind, his temperament and his moral nature. North, writing in the first person, is responsible for his destiny. The other characters are accounted for in the third person.

His Natural Life, for all its melodrama and its sensational horrors and far-fetched coincidence, has a brooding intensity unlike any other Australian novel of the nineteenth century. It is remarkable for tracing, with some subtlety and psychological astuteness, shifts in states of mind. It seizes on telling events from the old convict days, it describes authentic features of a limited, specialized community, but it also offers a serious moral vision.

Clarke's other work has faded into relative insignificance. He wrote three other novels, and published two volumes of short stories and sketches in his lifetime; and while these have nothing like the power and moral imagination of His Natural Life, some of the stories show Clarke to a degree anticipating Lawson and the Bulletin school, both in the range of his subject matter and in some aspects of the narration.

At the beginning of his enthusiastic review of Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, ‘We have always urged upon Australian writers of fiction the importance of delineating the Australian manners which they see around them every day …’.⁹ Clarke's thoroughly enjoyable Bullocktown stories are examples of the realism he had in mind. In these, the manners emerge through the narration itself. The narrator is one with the country town he describes, but he is also wryly amused with it, and with himself. The projected attitude is that his values have been formed in the country, though there is also a degree of sympathetic but critical detachment from it (‘the stationary dance of the bush hand is a fearful and wonderful thing …’). Like so many of Lawson's sketches, these operate as brief anatomies of up-country life.

In a more orthodox style is his set piece, ‘Pretty Dick’, a story well-received in its day; the excessive pathos and the propriety of the sentiments are, however, no longer tolerable. The story of the child lost in the bush was a commonplace of colonial fiction, yet it was not a theme to take lightly. The subject seems to have exerted an unvarying and compulsive interest, and becomes one of the key images of the colonial experience. Even Furphy broke with his habitual stance to record his version of the lost-in-the-bush story in Such is Life, and without criticizing Kingsley's mawkish efforts in Geoffry Hamlyn.

The bulk of Clarke's writing was journalism, and Clarke was one of the liveliest journalists in Melbourne. There, he was witty, provocative, facetious, anti-sentimental. His practice was most often to propose only one side of an issue, either to enforce its absurdity or to provoke an argument; it was not cantankerousness on his part, but a means of dramatic heightening, humorous in his sketches and enthusiastic and serious in his essays. This might be the satirical edge of ‘The Future Australian Race’, or the bemused ironies of the ‘Peripatetic Philosopher’ series. The heightening sometimes led to extravagance; Clarke is always colourful, always presenting a personal attitude (flippancy, superiority, mockery, impertinence). But his criticisms of materialism, vulgarity and humbug in his sketches of city life are well taken.

Another Melbourne journalist, ‘Julian Thomas’ (Stanley James) took over the mask of peripatetic philosopher, or roving correspondent, popularized by Clarke, and over the signature ‘Vagabond’ regularly wrote articles and sketches of Melbourne life. These were collected and published in The Vagabond Papers (1876-78). They are sensible, readable, and lucid, although their clarity of observation is sometimes overlaid with moral and sentimental orthodoxies.

Melbourne was the real centre of cultural activity at the time. Its prosperity, derived from the goldfields, attracted a large and varied population. Numerous papers, magazines and periodicals emerged to cater for the wide range of interests; and the journalism kept pace with its bustling and lively self-importance (‘marvellous Melbourne’) as well as its increasing respectability. Literary societies and literary coteries sprang up, such as the Yorick Club and the Cave of Adullam founded by Marcus Clarke. Yet fiction continued to avoid the city, turning as always to the up-country experience for the location of Australian manners and Australian life. City life was essentially the domain of the journalists. Even Boldrewood's reminiscences, Old Melbourne Memories (1884), are about country life, the pre-lapsarian ‘golden age before the gold’.

‘Rolf Boldrewood’ (T. A. Browne), author of fourteen novels, was not only prolific but popular. He acknowledged the influence of Henry Kingsley, and followed Kingsley's lead in his novels of the pastoral world. But a greater influence was Sir Walter Scott (the pseudonym ‘Boldrewood’ comes from Scott's Marmion), for Boldrewood's novels of adventure and excitement, romantic action and simplified moral idealism, are all fashioned on some aspect of Scott. In particular, Boldrewood admired the aristocrat and the gentleman, although (again like Scott) he was a local patriot too, and throughout his novels approved the developing colonial virtues.

The one novel for which he is remembered, Robbery Under Arms (1888—it appeared as a serial 1882-3), dramatized that double loyalty clearly, for it offers a choice of hero; Starlight, heroic in the conventional (romantic) sense, brave, a natural leader, a gentleman, and Dick Marston, Sydney-side native, the narrator. The novel was immediately well-received by the public, though Boldrewood was surprised by several rejections when he offered it for serial publication. The success can be accounted for by its topicality, and by the freshness of its narrative manner. Ned Kelly had been hanged only shortly before the serial publication; yet bushranging was increasingly a thing of the past. In Boldrewood's handling of the material, as in the bush ballads, the bushranger is seen as a romantic hero, a fearless and dashing outlaw rather than a criminal, defiant of authority yet abiding by a code of decency. Like Kingsley, Boldrewood has combined the reminiscent narrative with the conventional romance, not pastoral romance this time but romance of adventure. By using a narrator who is not a well-born Englishman, he protects himself against his customary weakness, narrative intervention and the clumsy intrusion of authorial rhetoric. In those other novels in which he uses a narrator, the chosen figures are not as distant from Boldrewood as Dick Marston, and their definition as characters becomes blurred. The narrator in Robbery Under Arms is a wholly realized, sustained dramatic creation.

Dick Marston is the making of Robbery Under Arms. It is his perspective and his language that shape our response to the novel. The novel begins sensationally, both in language and situation:

My name is Dick Marston, Sydney-side native. I'm twenty-nine years old, six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. Pretty strong and active with it, so they say. I don't want to blow—not here, any road—but it takes a good man to put me on my back, or stand up to me with the gloves, or the naked mauleys. I can ride anything, anything that ever was lapped in horsehide—swim like a musk-duck, and track like a Myall blackfellow. Most things that a man can do I'm up to, and that's all about it.¹⁰

Nobody else in Australian fiction announces himself quite like that. This sounds like nothing quite so much as the heroic boast, the vaunt of the American backwoodsman. It is brash, confident, assertive,—and for a moment, self-forgetful. For Dick Marston, ‘as strong as a bullock, as active as a rock wallaby, chock-full of life and spirits and health’, has been sentenced to death for bushranging, and is to be hanged on the gallows in thirty days.

Dick is writing down his story while he awaits his execution, and as his narrative progresses he again and again comments on the foolhardiness of his nature, draws attention to the unwise decisions and lost opportunities, but most of all regrets the suffering he has brought upon those who care for him. The novel is, amongst other things, instruction literature, perhaps the most accomplished in Australia in the nineteenth century, because its intention of moral example and moral reinforcement is wholly integrated with the narrative action, rather than (as is usually the case) drawn from it. The sound advice is in the first instance Dick's self-criticism. Dick hardly has the oblique and reflexive relation of the memoirist to the matter observed and experiences recorded, yet his narrative is not a personal history either, and nothing like an autobiography. For Dick is not the dominant figure in his own life.

Dick truculently insists he is inferior to no man—he is too much the emergent young Australian for that—yet he is also candid about what is not admirable in himself. When in his narrative he disapproves of his actions, it is invariably by comparison with the steady goodness and patient love of the women who wait and weep for him, or with his brother Jim, whom Dick admires as a better man than himself. Jim and Dick, though brothers, are also mates, and Dick is not at all envious that Jim is better liked than he. They understand each other completely in a firm handshake and a searching look; nothing needs to be said. Interestingly, Boldrewood also notices one of the corollaries of mateship. Jim is led into ‘the game’ (cattle-duffing) by his loyalty to Dick. Mateship imposes awful responsibilities.

Starlight, by innate superiority of character, is the centre of interest for another part of Dick's narrative, for Dick is both a ‘realist’ and a romantic. The realist side is expressed through the details of country life, images of the unexceptional—fencing, shearing, mustering, some aspects of the gold-diggings, the early memories of the bush school—but the romantic side of Dick's nature is captivated by Jim's last-minute rescue of Miss Falkland, or by the dashing figure and daring exploits of Starlight. Even Ben Marston admires Starlight, prompting Dick to reflect:

… I don't think there's any place in the world where men feel a more real out-and-out respect for a gentleman than in Australia. Everybody's supposed to be free and equal now; of course, they couldn't be in the convict days. But somehow a man that's born and bred a gentleman will always be different from other men to the end of the world.¹¹

Boldrewood does occasionally manage to break through the screen of the projected narrator, it seems, yet if his generalization is rash, the sentiments are not really challenged in the course of the novel.

Robbery Under Arms offers the interesting spectacle, then, of two kinds of hero, one romantic and one ‘real’, and one contained within the narrative of the other. Boldrewood does not resolve the conflict, because he does not see that the two are in competition. Provided the action is moving forward, he is content; as he is quite unembarrassed in offering Terrible Hollow, isolated in the most inaccessible country, not only as a haven but as park-like, resembling in some details ‘the old country’.

Dick's language is general and colloquial, and the thoughts it expresses are uncomplicated. It is highly idiomatic, the idioms serving to colour the descriptive rather than the reflective parts of his narration: Warrigal's horse could kick the eye out of a mosquito, Starlight works the oracle (just as Tom Collins does), and Billy the Boy's eyes were sharp enough to see through a gum tree and out the other side. Although Boldrewood has quite evidently busied himself in collecting colourful expressions, it is credible that Dick Marston would use language in this way. For Dick is a word-conscious narrator, not quite as extravagantly so as Tom Collins, but likely even at the most serious moments to inspect a metaphor for its literal and alluded meaning.

The effect of the language is ultimately to suggest that life is sportive, a game, and the most common terms of measuring experience consolidate this view. ‘It was as good as a play,’ says Dick, watching Starlight mixing with the swells in Adelaide, and Billy the Boy and Maddie and Bella Barnes use the same formula on several occasions, when recounting how they have misinformed the police. The outlawry of Starlight and the Marstons is kept to pleasant, exciting adventures. They avoid violence, and while Dick rationalizes that the police must expect to be shot at, they do not shoot to kill. On several occasions they directly oppose their occasional associate, the criminally vicious Moran, because his villainy compromises what Dick presents as the essential fairmindedness and decency of their scrapes with the law.

Because Dick Marston's is essentially an innocent world, there is no place for Moran in it. Nor, really, is there any place for Ben Marston and Warrigal, grim, threatening, mysterious figures who come and go unexplained through the bush. They are ‘other’, not known. The mystery of Starlight is quite a different kind of thing. In such an innocent world, there can be no conviction of crime (it is in this sense that one speaks of the increasing secularization of the Australian experience), and Dick's reprieve is inevitable. He is not a bad man, though he has done wrong. What one senses is that Boldrewood, in projecting Dick as a type of the emerging Australian youth, is also projecting a vision of an innocent Australia. He is closer to Kingsley than to Clarke, closer to Paterson than to Lawson.

Mrs. Campbell Praed has no such innocent vision. Like Boldrewood she was a prolific novelist, and as with him her novels inevitably converge towards certain favourite patterns of commentary. Her best work, Policy and Passion: a novel of Australian life (1881), was written early in her career before she discovered her formulae, and retains the freshness, charm and confidence of original reflections. It is not free of convention; the love interest of a beautiful young heroine having to decide between two suitors, one an English aristocrat and the other an Australian squatter, is trite. Honoria Longleat, daughter of the Premier of Leichardt's Land (Queensland) is seriously compromised by the Englishman, and the pity is that Rosa Praed allows the clichés of the conventional romantic novel to intrude at this point, for not only is Honoria very deeply shaken indeed, but there are important political repercussions.

Mrs. Praed's interest is in ‘the inner workings, the social interests’ of Australian life. Her novels are not committed to the exotic and the unusual in colonial experience, nor are they overly preoccupied with the external narrative of action, of man living against an elaborately described landscape. Policy and Passion begins with an ‘outside’ view, an Englishman looking out at a country town, but the novel is increasingly about exchanges of ideas and revelation of character, whether this takes place in the study, the drawing-room or the House of Assembly.

In the first chapter she rapidly sketches in the look of the township: ‘Brassy clouds were gathering slowly in the west, and the sun, beating pitilessly upon the zinc roofs of the verandahs, was mercilessly refracted from the glaring limestone hills …’ But at once she begins to make social distinctions. One of the bars is frequented by the roughs who come down from the bush for a spree, the squatters sit at chairs and tables on the hotel verandah, while idle navvies and rowdies form the admiring mob when Longleat arrives. The reason for starting in this way is apparent; the township, Kooya, is the heart of Longleat's electorate, and these are the people whom he both represents, and of whom he is representative. He is unashamed of his origins as a bullock-driver, and as a land-owner he also has the interests of the squatters at heart. This is a novel about a political figure in which the interest is largely in the personal life of the politician; that is, it is not strictly a political novel. But as the daughter of a Queensland parliamentarian, Mrs. Praed conveys a much more precise acquaintance with the realities of political life than, say, Spence or Kingsley.

Longleat is the novel's most important and original accomplishment. In some of the circumstances of his life and in his political actions he appears to be modelled on a premier of Queensland, A. H. Palmer; but he is also the fore-runner of a number of such figures in later novels of Queensland, by Vance Palmer, or Brian Penton for example, in which one single character overshadows all those around him, and opposes himself to the vastness (or spiritual amorphousness) of the State. Longleat is a powerful figure, a man not only big and strong, but of enormous will and determination, and with a deep commitment to political integrity. The signs of his working-class origins are evident in his appearance and his manners; he is not ashamed of them, and it is a mark of his honesty that he is rough, unpolished. It is also the source of his political strength.

The secret of his past is that he was a convict. His life as Longleat began after he had served his sentence; since then his life has been exemplary. Convictism may have coarsened him, but it has not corrupted him, and the public revelation of his shameful past is essentially irrelevant to him. What corrupts Longleat is his growing passion for the wife of a member of the Opposition. Though his personal actions are no more than socially indiscreet, he is persuaded by her to make an expedient political appointment that compromises his political integrity. The discovery that she has deceived him comes just at the time of the exposure in Parliament of his convict past, and Mrs. Praed succeeds admirably in combining the tensions of the public and private levels of action, the buzz of excitement and anticipation of the Opposition attack, the anxiety of the Government party, the effect of the divergent pressures on Longleat. His collapse is inevitable, but unfortunately Mrs. Praed once again fails to distinguish clearly enough her own particular perception from the sentimental cliché. For Longleat's is a collapse of will; shattered by his own misjudgment of Mrs. Vallancy, he can no longer sustain the world he had been at such pains to create. Yet all is not lost with his suicide, for both his political vision and his daughter's good name are secure with Maddox, the man he had chosen to succeed him as Premier.

Policy and Passion is a better novel than it at first appears. Mrs. Praed's imaginative understanding of Longleat is impressive, and tactfully conveyed. She understands but does not insist upon the nature of his solitariness. With Longleat she is true to her vision, but elsewhere her writing becomes tight and artificial, as in passages of frozen dialogue designed not to express character but to prove that Australians knew about discriminating taste and discerning judgment. Mrs. Praed surrendered her very real talents and her originality to the popular demands of the Home market.

Ada Cambridge, another of the prolific novelists of this period, also yielded to that combination of pressures, to what the English reading public expected and to what was easy for her to write, to custom and convention. She was astute enough to recognize how much ‘the laws of the literary romance’ are at variance with ‘the laws of nature’, but her practice led her away from the real to that which could be taken for granted, particularly in action and setting. It would be wrong to describe her work as merely conventional, for throughout her novels she maintains some independence of thought and criticism of social custom; yet that independence amounts to a little rattling of the orthodoxies, and the thought is neither subtle nor profound.

‘Tasma’ (Mrs. Jessie Couvreur) wrote much less than Ada Cambridge and Mrs. Campbell Praed, but she wrote rather more finely. The range and social vision of her novels is limited, but that becomes her advantage, for all her effects are light, witty, compact. There is nothing fragile about her writing, for there is too much cool sense, too much controlled irony for us to doubt the very pointed intentions of her fiction. Her best novel, an immediate success, is Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill: An Australian Novel (1889), and here she displays a charming wit that is quite beyond Ada Cambridge and Mrs. Praed, a sense of humour that Catherine Helen Spence rarely approaches, a playful narrative irony that is distinctively her own.

The conception of the novel is not very wide ranging, nor is the sense of structure strong. It is a novel of the affluent class of Melbourne, with a slender action in which a group of young people all manage to fall in love with the right partners eventually, despite the opposition of the near-apoplectic Uncle Piper; and yet it is quite unsentimental about love, and that is the source of much of its comic effect. The relationships are confined to one family, so that little of the world outside ‘Piper's Hill’ is seen, though the description of the decaying country township, Barnesbury, is even more succinct than Mrs. Praed's Kooya. There is nothing of the ‘rowdies’, ‘navvies’ and ‘roughs’ who were about to become the main interest of the Bulletin school. Furphy's first story appeared in the Bulletin in the same year that Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill was published.

Uncle Piper is not at all a bushman, but he is a colonial type recognizable through the caricature. He has been Tom Piper the butcher, and has made his pile in Melbourne, and now he is a blustering, obstinate vulgarian, uncomprehending rather than unkind, a secret sentimentalist, and disguising in affected pragmatism his uneasiness about anything that might require him to think for himself. He is another example of the ascendancy of the working class; and although ‘Tasma’ deplores his want of social grace she allows some endearing qualities to emerge through the very simplicity of his cantankerousness.

Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill is really about the ironic intelligence which is responsible for the narrating, the undisclosed ‘I’. All ‘Tasma's’ effects flow from the amused detachment of the narrator's stance. In her use of the author-narrator, in her study of the pretensions to refinement and manners, in her awareness of a larger cultural framework in which her own narrative may be set (as for example in the allusions to the great writers and painters), and in concentrating her study on one ‘enlarged’ family, she anticipates Martin Boyd. Yet her effects are bolder than his, unless in his Outbreak of Love mood. Her narrative disconcerts by its mockery yet acceptance of the formulae of romantic fiction, especially the sentimental pretence of concealing interest.

The novels of Mrs. Praed, Ada Cambridge and ‘Tasma’ most closely resemble each other in choosing to represent a particular level of society. They write of the daughters of men of property, having a fairly limited social life either at the homestead or in the town or, as in Policy and Passion, quietly making the transition. The issues that concern them are marriage and inheritance, and the watchful discrimination between the realities of social behaviour and the mere affectation of gentility. Theirs are not necessarily artificial values, for the effort to maintain social standards was as real a part of Australian life as the determination to dispense with them. Kingsley and Boldrewood and Mrs. Praed and the like may have been guilty of treading the flowery pathway of the romancer, but their novels are not to be abruptly dismissed as ‘insufferable twaddle’; for while they may not imitate reality with the strict veracity of Furphy's annalist, they reflect the values and aspirations, the point of view, of a considerable portion of the Australian public, as the popularity of the books indicates. The ‘Bush’ school of writing pretended to do away with such idealism, and claimed to face directly the realities of life in a landscape that was no longer pastoral. This literature too proved to be very popular.

Notes

1. Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography, ed. Jeanne F. Young, Adelaide, 1910, p. 97.

2. Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, with introduction by Susan Eade, Adelaide, 1971, p. 70.

3. Marcus Clarke, preface to Long Odds, Melbourne, 1869.

4. Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, Cambridge, 1859, vol. 2, p. 145.

5. Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories, Melbourne, 1884; 1896, p. 172.

6. Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, vol. 2, p. 1.

7. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 51.

8. ‘Charles Dickens’, Marcus Clarke, ed. Michael Wilding, St. Lucia, 1976, p. 632.

9. Ibid., ‘Review: The Luck of Roaring Camp’, p. 637.

10. Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms, London, 1889, p. 1.

11. Ibid., p. 37.