[In the following excerpt, Grattan offers a general assessment of Australian literature and remarks on five outstanding nineteenth-century Australian novels.]

I

As in all young countries, the culture of Australia is to a very small extent an integral part of the national life. It has not worked itself into the social fabric. It is something tacked on. Something apart. The economic bones of the country protrude themselves. Such cultural life as does exist is almost as unsubstantial as those idealized houses painted on billboards.

The dominant economic influence is British, and the literary culture derives from England also. It is to England that the writers of poetry, fiction, and drama have looked and do look. The French influence is nil. So is the American, and to my personal knowledge only one journalist has had the insight to point out that Australian writers have anything to learn from America. L. L. Woollacott in The Triad made the obvious suggestion that as America had developed out of a colony planted in recent years (recent from a cultural standpoint) and as her literature had suffered all the vicissitudes incident to that development, perhaps Australians would learn more to their advantage by studying American literature than by their intensive cultivation of English literature. At least it would seem more profitable, so far as contemporary writing goes, to concern themselves with a literature that is full of vitality, than with one that is in the doldrums. But what Mr. Woollacott says doesn't make much impression in Australia.

Contemporary Australian literature is not impressive. It is perhaps creditable, but even that is doubtful. An Australian Authors' Week was held in 1927 which called forth the best there is. There turned out to be a number of books by living authors no longer active, which were quite worth reading. But of the producing writers only four or five seem at all hopeful: Shaw Nielson, Kathrine Prichard (known in America by Working Bullocks), Vance Palmer, Louis Esson, and Mrs. Aeneas Gunn.

Nor is there any center of influence tending to improve this situation. The strongest paper with literary interests is The Bulletin. It has passed its greatest period of literary influence. In the late 'nineties and early nineteen hundreds it developed a definite school of writers, in particular a strong group of prose writers. The cardinal principles governing their work were careful craftsmanship and scrupulous reality. It was The Bulletin that discovered Louis Becke, did so much for Henry Lawson, brought forward Randolph Bedford and E. J. Brady, and published Tom Collins's powerful books. The literary editor in those days was A. G. Stephens. Today The Bulletin has lost its literary “punch.” It is still lively and entertaining in other fields. Its stories, however, are commonplace. It prints mediocre historical romances by J. H. M. Abbott, and the vaudevilish gaucheries of Steele Rudd. Its reviews and critiques of literature, with some honorable exceptions, lack any penetration, force, or modernity. The literary editor is David McKee Wright, a kindly soul to whom rhymes and poems are indistinguishable, and to whom literature is something “genteel” and “refined” in the most wishy-washy senses of those very wishy-washy words.

The Triad, a monthly, similarly declined from its excellent beginnings and in 1928 discontinued publication. All hands agree that its palmy days were synchronous with the career of Frank Morton, now dead, and whose work it is impossible to purchase. His partner, C. N. Bayertz, is still alive and functioning on the editorial staff of The Sunday Times of Sydney, a second-rate paper. There he has introduced the unique innovation of continued book reviews. One book lasts him a month of Sundays. His work is very thin and feeble. Morton must have been the strong member of the partnership. For a short time The Triad was in the hands of L. L. Woollacott, a very competent journalist, who tried diligently to drag the paper back to respectability after a period during which it survived only by cross-word puzzles and guessing contests. In 1927 Woollacott was retired and the magazine was sold to appear under the name, The New Triad, but its life in this form was brief. The last editors were Hugh McCrae and Ernest Watt. These gentlemen would have been very happy in America of the time of Aldrich, Stedman, and Stoddard—the post-Civil War school that fled from cruel America to the perfumed purple East. The New Triad was very “arty” in its literary matter—though not so bad as Vision, which ran for four issues a few years ago.

The truth is that Australia does not want literature. With a population, all white and literate, of 6,130,000, it has not the proportionate literary vitality of South Africa with a white population of 1,500,000. South Africa has writers like Sarah Gertrude Millin, Pauline Smith, Roy Campbell, and Ethelreda Lewis—who, if she is not much of a novelist herself, has demonstrated her acuteness by becoming amanuensis to Aloysius Horn.

II

Australia goes to Britain for her books and magazines. American books usually arrive in English editions. There is very little direct contact. American magazines of all kinds can be purchased in Australia, however, from The Saturday Evening Post up and down. Indeed it is alleged that the Post distributes more copies in Sydney every week than the Bulletin. The better American magazines can only be obtained on order. The literary influence of England naturally is through books. So, too, Australia is something Englishmen only read about. Very few English authors visit Australia. Probably the first British-Australian literary connection was provided by Jonathan Swift. After consulting William Dampier's maps, Swift located Lilliput on the south-west coast of Australia, and made Lemuel Gulliver claim cousinship with Dampier. The second connection was undoubtedly provided by Justice Barron Field, author of the first book of poetry published in Australia. It was then still a penal colony. The volume contained such charming lines as:

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!
Thou spirit of Australia,
That redeems from utter desolation,
And warrants the creation
Of this fifth part of earth.

This book was reviewed by Charles Lamb, who concluded that it contained too much evidence of the “unlicensed borrowing which helped colonize Botany Bay.” Lamb was also a friend of one of the transported criminals, Thomas Wainewright. Wainewright was a good enough painter to get into the Royal Academy, and he was also a man of letters. Oscar Wilde immortalized him, in an essay, as the perfect poisoner. A very early visitor was Erasmus Darwin, whose poem embodying his observations contains lines prophesying a bridge over Sydney harbor, a vision that is now being realized. During the gold-rush of the 'fifties, Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles, went to Australia to look for a fortune he did not find, but he gathered instead the material and wrote his first and best book, Geoffry Hamlyn, an important British-Australian novel. Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus, of course, paid a brief visit in 1836 and included his acute observations in The Voyage of the Beagle. R. H. (“Orion”) Horne spent two years in Melbourne during the 'sixties and aroused some interest in literature but made no permanent impression. James Anthony Froude recorded his impression of a brief visit in Oceana. Charles Reade in It's Never Too Late To Mend dealt with convict life, as did G. B. Barton in Margaret Catchpole. Joseph Conrad visited Australia several times while he was still at sea. John Galsworthy—before he began to write—and Leonard Merrick have paid visits. Havelock Ellis spent some years as a school teacher in northeastern New South Wales, an experience recorded in Kanga Creek. E. L. Grant Watson has won international fame with his novels, some of which have a personally observed Australian background. By far the most spectacular visitor of recent times was D. H. Lawrence, who made two books out of his cursory survey of the country, Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush. (Jack London and Mark Twain seem to be about the only important American writers who have ever made a visit. London cut a colorful swath through Sydney and Melbourne when he was in the South Seas. Twain's visit came when he was “following the equator.”) British-Australian literature is augmented every year, but nothing striking has emerged since the work of D. H. Lawrence.

Australia has never retained as a permanent resident any visiting writer of considerable stature. No more than a handful of writers left her shores to gain fame abroad. In this latter respect she is behind tiny New Zealand, birthplace of Katherine Mansfield and Hugh Walpole, and the scene of the generation of many of Samuel Butler's perversities, during his eight years residence there. Even if we add writers permanently resident in Australia who have made reputations abroad, the list is not very long. Barnard Cronin and Marie Petersen may be counted out as unimportant. They correspond to Zane Grey and Marie Corelli, respectively. Dale Collins, a bit up the scale, writes for a British and American audience even more than for the Australian. So does the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a native of Sydney. Louis Becke commanded an audience in all English-reading countries. Men like Henry Lawson and Rolf Boldrewood are read in England but are unknown in America. Dr. Charles McLaurin made a bit of a stir by applying medical analysis to literary and historical personages. Katherine Prichard is slowly making her way to an international audience. But by far the greatest novel written by an Australian is Maurice Guest and probably not one reader in ten associates its author, Henry Handel Richardson (a pseudonym), with Australia, though she has lately completed a trilogy, collectively entitled The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which deals with Australian life and may overshadow every other Australian novel. Nor do they associate Gilbert Murray, perhaps the greatest scholar Australia has produced—certainly greater than G. Elliott Smith—with his true homeland.

It is the prevailing critical opinion in Australia that Australian poetry is superior to Australian prose, but it is difficult, on investigation, to accept that opinion. Poetry bulks larger. (Over two thousand books of verse, for example, have appeared since 1900.) A good deal of it is competent—and mediocre. Most of it is rootless and while “pretty” and “charming” is quite unimportant. The first poet to gain wide fame was Henry Kendall. He is still the most respected poet in Australian literature, and yet a critical reader is forced to wonder why. Kendall is a barely respectable minor poet, leaning heavily on Wordsworth and Keats. Even less can be said for Adam Lindsay Gordon. He is appallingly overrated by all except a critical minority. Gordon's great prop was Swinburne. His popular appeal is based on his balladry. For some reason or other he is the only Australian poet included in the “Oxford Standard Poets” series, which bolsters up his work, and English sporting painters delight in illustrating his ballads, a further stimulant to his fame. It is apropos to note here that ballads are extremely popular in Australia. Several writers figure in the canon as poets but are really only popular balladists, for example A. B. Paterson, Will Ogilvie, and “John O'Brien.” [The author has an article on the genuine ballads—not the literary variety dismissed here—in The Musical Quarterly, July, 1929.]

When we come to the early prose writers something interesting turns up. The first Australian novel of importance is Henry Kingsley's Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). Henry Kingsley was the younger brother of the vastly more famous Charles Kingsley, author of numerous historical fictions and of much fictitious history. Henry Kingsley went to Australia in 1853 and lived there five years. He was attracted by the gold rushes of that period, but in his book he dealt with an earlier epoch, when the lure of Australia lay in the possibility of making money by raising sheep and cattle for wool and hides. His novel gives an authentic picture of the sheep station of those days, when life was a combination of idyllic peace and impending horror. The peace came from the more or less comfortable life of the station owners in a new land never before exploited. A few years of roughing it would put them in a sound financial position, forever beyond want. At least that is what happened to Kingsley's people. There is a reverse side to the picture. The impending horror of the life was produced by the fact that a large part of the labor was convict labor.

From the beginning of Australian settlement it was the custom to assign the convicts to the free settlers and they really made possible the development of the huge sheep stations. Naturally there were honest and reliable men among the convicts, transported for what would today be trifling offences, but there were also wild, incorrigible men who fomented trouble, made futile attempts to escape to the bush, and, with greatest danger to the free inhabitants, became bushrangers. So the characters in Kingsley's novel lived in constant fear of the convicts, and particularly of a band of bushrangers. Told in a leisurely, digressive fashion, Geoffry Hamlyn is yet a novel of considerable interest. It provides the best fictional study of the free Australian community in the days of convict labor. But nevertheless it is not definitely Australian, for it begins in England and nearly all of the characters return there after they have made their fortunes.

Much more famous and decidedly more Australian is For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke, published serially in Australia in 1870 and 1871 and issued in a revised edition in England in 1874. Clarke was an Englishman who arrived in Australia when he was nineteen and died there when he was thirty-five. He never ceased to regard Australia as anything but a colony; he never became an Australian; and it was with the greatest difficulty that the publishers got him to write his famous novel. He frequently said that there was not need to write another Australian novel, for the great one, Henry Kingsley's, had been written. Though crude and amateurish, and in places distressingly melodramatic, For the Term of His Natural Life is still a novel of significance. It casts a lurid light into the hell of transportation, and, since it was written from source material, gives an authentic picture of the terrible prisons maintained by the English government at Macquaries Harbor and Port Arthur in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and on Norfolk Island. It cannot for a moment be placed with Dostoevski's House of the Dead, but it is a credit to any literature, and is certainly one of the most gripping books that Australia has given to the world, and one of the very important stories of prison life.

The other disturbing element in the idyllic society, bushranging, is permanently rendered in Robbery Under Arms (1888) by Rolf Boldrewood. A few years ago an enterprising American movie-maker filmed this novel under the title Rolf Boldrewood, Bushranger. This both amused and offended the Australian public, for Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Browne) was a squatter (the term is applied without the denigrating American meaning to owners of sheep stations) and a magistrate—an eminently respectable person. He wrote about a dozen novels, all of which were successful, but not so permanently successful as this fictional study of bushranging. Nevertheless all of his novels were equally based on hard facts. Robbery Under Arms suffers from the fact that Boldrewood wrote it in what purported to be the semi-illiterate dialect of one of the chief characters. It deals with cattle and horse stealing, bank and stage-coach robbery, murder and miscellaneous deviltry. It is probably the lowest in quality of all of the Australian classics, but much better than the American novels dealing with the same sort of thing in American history.

While the Billy Boils (1896), Henry Lawson's most important book, is Australian even to the title. A “billy” is a vessel of moderate capacity in which water is boiled, usually to make tea, the universal drink (except whiskey) of the Australian bushmen. The book consists of short sketches, rather than stories. The characters include all of the types found in the bush (bush: the countryside—anything is bush—desert, sheep country, farming country or tropical areas) thirty years ago: swagmen or sun-downers, terms applied to itinerant laborers and tramps, spielers (gentle grafters in O. Henry parlance), sheep shearers, drovers, shepherds, boundary-riders and station hands generally, bullock-drivers, jackeroos (tenderfeet) and a glimpse or two at the squatters. These sketches, some of them of only two or three pages of large print, are alive to the last degree. Lawson wrote with a delightful ease and clarity, and while he never distorted his pictures or mitigated the hardships of the bushmen, he did introduce a humor that is native Australian. Some of the characters curse the country in hearty terms—its appalling aridity and killing heat—and the social system which so many bushmen believed was arranged for the sole profit of the squatter. While the Billy Boils aroused the enthusiasm of Edward Garnett (cf. Friday Nights), who declared that it rendered a continent.

Humor and hardship, denunciation and love, mingle in Tom Collins's Such Is Life (1903), a trite title for a superb book. The manuscript of this book was so long and confused that another volume was extracted bodily from it, Rigby's Romance, a much lighter performance. Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy) is the nearest approach to a Herman Melville that Australia has produced, and the curious thing is that he actually does bring Melville to mind. He has the same capacity for mingling the most abstruse speculation—discursive essays in history, sociology, morals, anthropology, and Shakespearean criticism—with veridic glimpses of actuality. Such Is Life portrays the same types found in While the Billy Boils, but seen through a tremendously complex mind. Collins' locale is the bush before the days of the railways, when stores were brought in and wool was carried out by bullock-teams. The squatter was still dominant, but his position was being challenged. The selector (the small holder, usually a farmer) was breaking in on the huge stations, under government protection, and the entirely landless class was restless. In spite of his undoubted intellectual superiority, Collins was an aggressive defender of the common man. He was for the bullock-driver and the station hands, and against the squatter. “The successful pioneer,” he wrote, “is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird, the latter is the worm.” The aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man seems to me to be one of the fundamental Australian characteristics. Nor is it obviously related to the doctrine of Rousseau. It is a local development. Australia is perhaps the last stronghold of egalitarian democracy. The great Australian literary philosopher of the common man is Tom Collins. Collins lacked fluidity, but he had vigor, originality, and independence, which are vastly more important. He was an adventurer of the mind as well as an adventurer of the body. He was a speculative materialist and he was a great writer. …