SOURCE: Hadgraft, Cecil. “The Earliest Fiction” and “The Three Themes of Fiction.” In Australian Literature: A Critical Account to 1955, pp. 11-26, 40-52. London: William Heineman, 1960.

[In the following excerpt, Hadgraft reviews the principal Australian novels of the nineteenth century.]

THE EARLIEST FICTION

The first novel written in Australia was also printed here—in Hobart in three volumes (1830-1). In this novel, Quintus Servinton. A Tale, Founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence, its author drew upon his own experiences. He was Henry Savery (1793/4-1842), transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1825. He was a convict journalist with some degree of freedom; upon a second offence he was condemned to life imprisonment. In 1842 he died at Port Arthur—according to Henry Melville, owner of the Colonial Times (for which Savery wrote articles), by cutting his throat.

In the Preface Savery writes:

… it is no fiction, or the work of imagination, either in its characters or incidents … it is a biography, true in its general features …

This is written in the character of an editor, supposed to have received the manuscript from Quintus in England: but it is, as we can now see, a good example of the double bluff.

The novel deals with Quintus from his birth in 1772 (the fifth son and eleventh child of his parents), through his experiences as a merchant, his conviction, and his life in New South Wales until almost the granting of his pardon. Quintus is accused of issuing fraudulent bills, and despite protests on his behalf is condemned to death—a sentence later commuted to transportation. He is given the grab of the convict:

… grey cloth jacket, waistcoat and breeches; worsted stockings, and thick heavy shoes; two check shirts, and a broad brimmed, low crowned hat …

It is not until a third of the third volume has been covered that Quintus arrives in New South Wales. Here at first he is treated with consideration, but through the jealousy of rivals he loses his position and suffers hardships. He even tries to cut his throat. At length his wife comes to Australia and the ending, after various frustrations, does see the finish of his tribulations.

The novel contains details of the convict system recounted by one who knew them from experience. Savery, like his hero, had been a business man, had been transported for forgery, had met with jealousy and opposition in the colony because of his obvious capacity, and had seen his wife and child come to the colony and again depart. And if, as is possible, Savery cut his throat, then Quintus's own attempt at suicide is a striking fictional anticipation of reality.

The novel transfers to New South Wales a picture of Tasmania during Governor Arthur's regime. But its interest lies also in the story, and this despite the formality of the style, old fashioned even for 1830. It stalks to the verge of the ludicrous and sometimes topples over it:

… On the fifth morning after the trial, the Sheriffs visited him with much solemnity, and formally announced that his fate was irrecoverably fixed, and that fourteen revolving suns, would terminate his earthly pilgrimage.

The characters are often “humours” of the line from Ben Jonson to Sheridan, with names like Crabtree, Briefless, and Plausible. With no really organic plot, the novel is a sort of fictional autobiography, a picture of a brash, ambitious, energetic, almost at times irresponsible young man in whom perhaps Savery, repentant, saw his own youth reflected. But despite these flaws the book has power to keep the reader turning the pages. It is worth while remarking the readability of some of these early novels, which with all their faults contrast with the doughy competence of many Australian novels a century later.

One early novel by an anonymous author has only a tenuous connection with Australia. It is The Guardian, published in Sydney in 1838 by “An Australian”. The consensus of opinion is that the author was a woman of some breeding, born in England or Ireland, probably the wife of some official in Australia. Lady Darling has been put up as a candidate, but the identity still remains uncertain. The Australian affinity is restricted to the place of publication, the author's residence in Australia, and a few references to this country, all of them contemptuous or mocking.

The setting is Ireland. Jessie Errol marries Francis Gambier. An old waiting-woman, to ensure that a murder she has inadvertently acknowledged will not be revealed, tells Jessie that she and her husband had the same father. This fact—that she has married her half-brother—drives Jessie distracted in the orthodox Gothic manner. She lets fall her infant son, who rolls down a cliff, and then falls or throws herself into the sea. Today the revelation of this semi-incestuous relationship fails to move us in the same way. The potential horror of the theme (if we put aside Greek drama) stems from the Romantic blood and ghost and darkness tradition—the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century with nightmares and secret sins, Byron and the whispered rumours of his family life, Shelley and The Cenci.

It is altogether an interesting period piece. Much is told by letters, and these are revealing, or witty, or informative. The pictures of society are often nearly brilliant, and the conversation of people of fashion and of waiting-women is admirably rendered. When the novel is well under way, omens gibber for a moment and banish. Deaths grow more numerous. These are unmotivated, in the sense that they just occur—the author removes characters rather cavalierly; a fashionable count, for example, expires of a bout of immoderate laughter in two brief paragraphs. Nightmare or prophecy is made to render up its full flavour. Gambier asleep talks like a Gothic hero awake:

“—fiend! name her not!—she is not—she is mine for ever. You inhale corruption, and damned souls impede your loathsome breath …”

The transition is from a society novel to a horror romance. The Guardian starts like the end of a Maria Edgeworth and ends like the start of an Ann Radcliffe. Only the humorous parts can be taken seriously.

The references to Australia are not many. The future Governor of New South Wales (he dies before he can assume his position) says

he became sick when he thought of going to a country where society was divided into parties, dust blown as well as thrown in your eyes, children ran under your horses' feet, dogs lay about the streets, ladies talked of wool, and dressed like antediluvians; and one beautiful spot of land is styled Pinchgut, and another Longbottom.

So much for the general reference. A particular example, specific enough to be actual, is given by Althorpe, one of the minor characters:

“Sydney must be an extraordinary place. I read an advertisement in one of the papers I received, stating that a respectable servant was required in a respectable family, residing in a respectable neighbourhood, a respectable distance from the town of Parramatta.”

There are a few further sidelong glances down the nose, but it is clear that, written inside Australia, the novel sees the country from outside. Its incidental depreciations express the attitude of a cultivated woman coming into a society very different from her former one.

The next novel is the first of a family. The period of about two decades, from around 1840 to 1860, may be characterised as the Guidebook Period. It contains a sequence of novels, all providing information about the colonies, generally for prospective immigrants. With this group will be treated a few didactic novels with a rather different purpose, that of exhortation or reformation.

Charles Rowcroft (1795?-1850) was first in the field with Tales of the Colonies (1843). Despite the title, the book is only one story—the life in Van Diemen's Land of William Thornley, the narrator. It is a vade-mecum to the colony, and the narrative is, as it were, the chocolate coating on the pill. Thornley is the chief person in it, but the most lively and most entertaining is old Crab, a caricature in the manner of Dickens—testy, complaining, and pessimistic. He has had his fill of the colony, he insists, and will return to England; but he does not go:

“… you're rather short-handed for what you're about. You see, when one of the bullock carts turns over, you'll hardly be strong enough to set it on its legs again.”

The method is that of Defoe—details, numbers, costs, instructions, a sort of diary effect, with every opportunity taken of pointing a moral if not of adorning a tale. This latter function is fulfilled by a cascade of incident. Rowcroft leaves nothing out, and the book seems to burst at the seams.

Rowcroft's other novel with an Australian setting is The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land (1846). A brig with owner-captain, an intending immigrant, is captured by escaped convicts. Their leader is a resourceful and dashing figure, Mark Brandon, plausible but increasingly bloodthirsty. Practically all the novel is taken up with the search for Helen Horton, elder daughter of the immigrant. She is taken by Brandon as a hostage, but is captured by a tribe of Tasmanian aborigines. Brandon with a couple of followers, her lover (an Ensign) with a corporal, and her father with some soldiers and later some police all seek to rescue her. The result is an adventure story that found popularity as far away as America.

What was said of Rowcroft's other novel is equally true of this. It is full of such detail as might be unknown to outsiders, it contains a plethora of incident, and despite this queer mixture of instruction and melodrama is quite readable. At the end Helen and a fellow-victim of the natives, fleeing before bushfires and blacks, climb a steep rock. Here Brandon, wounded by the police, has taken refuge:

… they had, by a powerful effort, gained the summit of the rock, and then to their amazement, and not less to their horror, they beheld a powerful eagle, of the vulture species, with its talons firmly fixed on the body and garments of a man, who was lying prostrate on the rock and who was writhing under the creature's monstrous beak and claws!

At the sight of the strangers the gigantic monarch of the mountains flapped its huge wings, and shrieked with its hoarse throat, as it struggled to disengage its claws, which had become entangled in the clothes of the man, who moaned piteously, but seemed to be deprived of all power of motion. And still the great eagle screamed and struggled, and Helen and her companion looked on with horror …

So we have an eagle on the rock above, the fire behind, a river below, and the enraged natives ascending. It is like the ending of an instalment in one of the old (or even current) film serials.

It is not so much of a guidebook as the Tales. Rowcroft wrote it to show that transportation to the penal colonies was not at all pleasant:

… the circulation of the history, inculcating the certain punishment and remorse which follow crime, may assist in repressing that morbid craving after notoriety which of late years has increased with such lamentable rapidity.

Plus ça change … But the stress is more on adventures among dangers, of which the chief, in ascending order, appear to be spiders, scorpions, snakes, and aborigines. These last bulk large in this narrative. Though Rowcroft does put the case for them, on the whole he appears to regard them as an inferior and dangerous species, probably human, to be placated if possible, but likely to attack at any moment, and therefore to be fired on eventually. The novel, then, is a Southern instead of a Western thriller, with black Australians replacing Red Indians.

Very much more reformatory in aim are the next works, and it is difficult to take seriously some criticism expended on them. They comprise the Australian fiction of Mary Theresa Vidal (née Johnson) (1818-69), who spent five years in Australia, from 1840 to 1845. Her three volumes on Australian themes form a gradation: the first, a collection of tales, is apparently for Sunday-school children; the second is for servants; the third, for their mistresses.

Tales for the Bush (1845) contains nine cautionary tales, in which the actors are workers or ex-convicts or young servants. Their sins provide examples of retribution. The well-to-do, so it appears, do not afford such material. The principles inculcated are Sunday observance, self-restraint, honesty, respect for one's social superiors, thoughtfulness, and sobriety. It is important to remember that Mary Vidal was the wife of a Church of England clergyman and probably held the views common at the time to the members of that sisterhood. Every principle and every lesson she adduces we must perforce concede; every example she invents we must perforce find side-splitting. Her moralising was apparently an occupational hazard.

In the second book, a novel, Cabramatta (1850), the same note of patronising admonition recurs. And the rather childish style persists, though the characters are adult and the book seems intended for adults. John Lester yields to temptation, deceives his master, goes to the bad, becomes a member of a gang of cattle stealers, and is finally sent to Van Diemen's Land. His wife Grace suffers, John repents, and at last they are reunited. It is quite intolerable.

An advance is seen in Bengala (1860), both in the ease of narration and the capturing of characteristic dialogue. The main characters are a small group of fairly wealthy families living in the same country area and resembling to an extraordinary degree the gentry of Jane Austen. The book's resemblance to Emma is marked in the use of cross purposes, for example, and in the relations between the elderly and sensible John Herbart and the young self-willed Isabel Lang. There is some excitement among the lower orders, but the chief concern is with the social interactions of their betters. One rather unusual ingredient is the love of Father Mornay, a priest, for Isabel. The author inflicts a remarkable jargon upon him in his distress:

“Avaunt ye, Evil One! Pooh, I am doting. It is no spirit—it is myself.”

He finally takes poison. At last, after three almost unreadable chapters full of the worst Victorian rigmarole, she and Herbart marry. Almost the only living character in this volume is an old servant. It is remarkable what an ear the women novelists of the period had for the tone and idiom of those who worked for them.

Quite obviously the guidebook is Settlers and Convicts (1847), an Australian equivalent of Defoe's Plague Year or Robinson Crusoe—the recountal of incidents the author has never experienced and the description of background he has never seen. Long believed to be the product of a mysterious Alexander Harris, the work has been shown by Colin Roderick to be by Samuel Sidney (1813-83),¹ an English publicist who dealt with emigration, livestock, and railways. Sidney was a facile and voluminous writer, and this is but one of his works on the Australian scene. The details of colonial life and experience are so full and they square so well with contemporary accounts that the book might serve as social history. One suspicious circumstance, however, is that, as with Defoe, practically everything that could happen does happen to the imaginary narrator. Sidney apparently gained some of his information from his brother John, who returned to England in 1844 after six years in Australia. The young man who is supposed to tell the story of his adventures is shown as coming to New South Wales about 1825 and leaving about 1840. Starting with little money, he works hard and avoids drink and bad company. At the end of his stay he is the owner of stock, a married man with two children. Practically every aspect of colonial life outside Sydney is described, and he encounters all types from convicts, bushrangers, and free settlers to magistrates. His comments on conditions are often like brief official reports.

Another novel by Sidney, utilitarian like this but with more plot, is The Emigrant Family (1849). The Preface unashamedly sets out the aim: it is to be a guidebook and adviser as well as an honest and accurate account of colonial life. These guidebook novels are like certain more academic examples, the disguised school textbooks. Young students of the classics last century and even later had at their disposal books like Gallus, which gave the details in the daily life led by a boy in ancient Rome. To render the dose palatable, incidents and social minutiae were woven into a story. Such textbooks were more or less painless ways of absorbing what used to be called Greek and Roman antiquities. But the novelists like Rowcroft and Sidney and Spence writing about Australia had more exciting material at their disposal and were in addition more skilful than their professorial counterparts.

In Sidney's novel an Englishman and his family come to Port Phillip. On the way to Sydney they are advised by one of the native-born, Reuben Kable, to buy land at Rocky Springs, on the upper Morrumbidgee (sic). There is much information about the cost of the land, the methods of stocking, and the conditions to be met with.

The methods used to keep interest alive are the evolution of plot and the introduction of characters; so that love and intrigue and adventure are commonly woven into a story. One can only admire the ingenuity and dexterity of much of this, not in this novel only but in most others of the type. The consequence is that they are still of interest today, and have more than mere historical value. They are weak in character drawing, but often some eccentric or unusual character appears. Martin Beck, descendant of American negroes, is Sidney's best example, the embodiment of an inferiority complex.

There is in this novel, as in some others, not only a tolerant condescension towards things Australian, but at the same time an attempt to be impartial: both the attractive and the crude aspects of the people are noted. There is an unconscious surprise that the good is so good. Miss Smart, for example, the reader is made to feel, can hardly be considered a lady, but Reuben Kable is shown as acceptable—tall, lean, nonchalant, knowledgeable. And the Australian vocabulary is occasionally recorded in the use of such words as ghibber and gunyah and bogie.

Seen from a woman's point of view the colonies and the colonists must have presented a rather different aspect. The mixture of surprise, distaste, tolerance, and even admiration that Sidney displays is found again, but with different flavour, in another guidebook novel, this time by a woman, Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910). She made use of her own experiences as teacher and governess in her Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1854). Most other novels of this type stress convictism, bushranging, and aboriginal life, together or singly. They are by men and for men, and deal with a pastoral or agricultural background. Clara Morison is written by a woman for women, and most of the action takes place in towns, and when in towns, indoors.

Had Spence possessed a more pointed style and a greater command of irony, then the theme and its setting might have resulted in an Australian version of Jane Austen or, if that was overmuch to hope for, of Fanny Burney. But the style, clear and straightforward, at times chatty or chirpy, possesses too little nuance to rival the medium of these two. Only occasionally do we find a passage reminiscent of them. Clara's uncle is too mean to offer asylum to her on the death of her father:

Clara … saw that her uncle wished to be spared the mortification of seeing so near a relative reduced to be a nursery governess in his neighbourhood.

So Clara, aged nineteen, emigrates to South Australia in 1850.

Of the two volumes, the first is concerned with the hardships of Clara; the second takes in other characters and other scenes, such as the diggings. The picture of Clara—quiet, proper, respectful of others' opinions, very much the well-bred young woman—and of her misfortunes does not affect our sympathies today quite as it may have done then: we are at times more amused than stirred, and Clara, a picture of virtue in misfortune, takes on a slightly comic colouring. A few minor characters are very delightfully drawn eccentrics, the best being Miss Withering. This acidulous English spinster, omniscient, carping, finding fault with everything in South Australia, leaves rather a silence when she fades from the scene.

Like others of its class, it is a more or less loosely jointed narrative; and it is wonderfully unselfconscious about coincidence. But it carries the reader along. Its readability is partly due to the most natural conversation of ordinary middle-class folk that had so far appeared in any Australian novel.

In her attitude to the people of this new land Spence seems hardly to have made up her mind. Her descriptions of the employers for whom Clara works as a domestic servant are practically all unfavourable. Nor does she seem to have much respect for local critical judgment. One example may serve, a note on the singing of Miss Waterstone (“her charms … fully developed, her complexion florid, her voice loud, and her manner imposing”):

… a naturally fine voice, some musical talent, and a slight infusion of taste, rendered her song a very pleasing performance.

The comment here bears as much on the audience as on the performer. On the other hand, when Spence encounters a self-confident Englishwoman affecting superiority, then she finds the colonial types much more tolerable.

This novel has been classed with the guidebooks, but the aim is much less overt than usual. Indeed it is as a story that it provides most interest. It has liveliness, humour, some small irony, much good sense, and at least superficial insight into character. These qualities, together with its ease of style, make it the most entertaining of the class to which it has been assigned.

Australian background is packed into Tallangetta, the Squatter's Home. A Tale of Australian Life (1857), by William Howitt (1795-1879), who makes no secret of his intentions: the Preface tells us that “… it has been my object to depict the various phases of Australian life and character more fully than could be done in Two Years in Victoria”. (This last-named book, it may be noted in passing, was used by Charles Reade as source material for It is Never Too Late to Mend.) Howitt's novel, like its fellows, is built into the framework of a story, here one that is improbable in the extreme. Sir Thomas Fitzgerald loses his estate because of a lawsuit brought by a relative charging illegitimacy. As neither ambassador presiding (the marriage was solemnised at Florence), nor chaplain officiating, nor marriage certificate confirming is available, the unfortunate Sir Thomas is displaced, and takes his family to Victoria. At length the marriage certificate is produced by a relation, Peter Martin. He has withheld it at the earnest desire of Sir Thomas's mother, who has taken this rather unusual and ambiguous step in order to cure her son of a fever for gambling on the turf.

The book is crowded with incident, but still more crowded with local and contemporary detail. And as though one account might not be memorable enough, Howitt repeats his information; so that we meet bushrangers on more than one occasion and are given several pictures of the diggings. The account at first is of a pastoral paradise, almost a fête galante—“… the warbling crow piped its melodious chant”—and larger fauna in the shape of native companions and emus add a touch of the strange to complete the recipe for the romantic beautiful. As if aware of this, Howitt hastens to redress the balance and enumerate the defects of this Eden—centipedes, flies, heat, scorpions, and snakes. These are detailed by Peggy Wilks, the old servant, one of the more vivid characters. This capacity to strike out minor eccentrics Howitt shares with most of the others. Another oddity is Crouchy, the product of an English sailor and an Abyssinian woman, who is four feet tall, four feet wide, and possessed of inordinate physical strength. This gigantic dwarf is perhaps something that Howitt met on his travels.

Howitt does not introduce or elaborate many native-born characters. He was a visitor to this country and had what was apparently the prevailing attitude of such people to the land and the people born in it. This is glimpsed in an occasional phrase:

Mrs. Quarrier was a remarkably fine woman, who, though she was born in the colonies and had never quitted them, had all the quiet grace and tact of a lady accustomed to good society.

Howitt's mass of detail almost renders Tallangetta a source book: there is everything, from making tea to drought and fire and flood; from selling food to the diggers to escaping from bushrangers; from descriptions of the diggings to a Mormon chapel meeting; from the life of the Old squatter to that of the New. Despite Howitt's former literary experience in England, this volume is one of the most amateurish of its type and perhaps the most crowded.

Quite obviously the guidebook and even more obviously the tract is Gertrude the Emigrant (1857). Its author was Mrs. Calvert (1834-72), née Caroline Atkinson, the first woman born in Australia to write a novel. One point of interest resides in the use of the Australian idiom, then emerging as lost, meaning helpless (“I should be lost without mother”), knock up with the meaning of become exhausted, and some others. And Mrs. Doherty is “a character” in the making, masterful, abrupt, warm-hearted underneath. She takes Gertrude into her service as a sort of servant companion. The remainder of the book tells of life in the bush, with a goanna or a wombat or a group of aborigines every now and then to indicate local fauna, and sheep-dipping, shearing, bush fires, a “coroborry”, and the rest to fill in the picture.

As a tract it depends on Gertrude and Tudor, the latter the manager of the holding. After some change of heart by Gertrude and misunderstanding on the part of Tudor the book ends with their union, the marriage of as perfect a pair of prigs as Australian fiction can offer us. Gertrude is gentle, considerate, inflexible. She does not talk as much as Tudor, a non-smoker and non-drinker (“I am aware of the baneful effects of imbibing a narcotic poison into the system”), but spreads influence by quiet persistence. Both as characters are perfectly credible, except perhaps for their dialogue, and all of us must have met people like them. The objection is to the use made of them.

The novel has a great deal of conversation and a comparable amount of incident, the latter often being dismissed in a few paragraphs. If we read the novel at all hurriedly we are pulled up very frequently, for we suddenly become aware that something has happened almost in parenthesis. As a novel it is in no way a precursor, but among the last of its group, and was preceded by much more effective and well-knit examples.

To fit the next novel into this group requires a little stretching. It is didactic, ethical, hortatory. It gives a picture of convictism so far as female prisoners are concerned, and it warns the female reader. But it is not a guidebook in the sense of helping the intending immigrant: any immigrant it might closely concern would be coming to the colony willy-nilly.

This novel is The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859). Its author, Caroline Woolmer Leakey (1827-81), wrote under the name of Oliné Keese. She tells the story of a young girl of some breeding who falls victim to the charms of a stock character, a Captain Norwell, dashing and dissolute. He seduces her, tempts her to an unwitting forgery, abandons her when she is accused and convicted of the murder of her child, and at the last repents of his treachery. Maida dies in a prison hospital in Tasmania at the age of twenty-six. Norwell has come out to the colony, only in time to view his victim in her coffin. The sight drives him insane, and the novel ends on this note of gloom and madness.

Now such a theme was unusual in woman's fiction, and Leakey is aware of this:

I am told the subject is unbecoming a woman's pen. If it be so, and if there be censure attaching to a handling of it, I would face that censure, and deem myself happy in having written the “Broad Arrow,” if but one sister, now trembling on the brink of ruin, read it, and enter into my belief—that loss of virtue is (in most cases) the first and fatal impulse towards those depths of sin whose end it has been my painful lot to witness in Tasmania.

The aim in mind, then, is obvious—to draw a picture of the fate that can befall the young woman who yields to sexual temptation: first, unchastity; last, Van Diemen's Land. It is intended as a cautionary tale. There is much exhortation, and parts read like miniature and tearful homilies, illustrated by grim accounts of the sufferings of women convicts, of moral degradation and physical squalor and abuse and injustice. But nobody is likely to be convinced that the stage from Maida's yielding to Maida's conviction is very likely or at all typical. It is a very special case, and any potentially compliant young woman might well feel that it could not apply to her.

The style in which all this is conveyed is in many parts comically sentimental. At moments of death it reaches its lachrymose zenith, and then the reader encounters:

“They will take my babe from me, and I have not even wept over it! No! the scalding drops are fevering my brain, but they will not come forth. My babe! my child!” she continued, in the thrilling accents of despair, “the last comfort is denied thy wretched mother—she may not lay thee in thy grave.”

When moral indignation moves the writer's breast, then the style takes on another note, that of the sensational novelette:

The sated worldling … has drunk to the very dregs the purple cup of wantonness, which, while it palled his senses, has not allayed his thirst.

After this, one might imagine, the aptest treatment would be a kindly dismissal of the book. But the paradox of it is that a reader feels nothing of the sort; for the book has an undeniable power. One of its qualities is the capacity to convey atmosphere and to give very memorable descriptions. Often these are brief: one is the account of the religious service at the prison, Port Arthur. The bitter sketch of the audience, the convicts in the convict dress, takes the imagination; the eye sweeps across, at first pausing and then with horror lost in a sea of colour—yellow. A writer who can do this with some frequency is no inconsiderable artist.

Leakey has a second and rarer gift, the power to create a character or to give us some insight into one, to put us, as it were, in some measure into the skin of her creations. Indeed, with the exception of Spence's Clara Morison, this is the first novel written in Australia that has any such quality in any degree. It is of interest to note that both authors are women and their best creations are women. Leakey's most successful miniature is Mrs. Evelyn. The picture of the woman—a kindly mother, a devoted wife, convinced of her own good intentions, yet infinitely tactless, obtuse, and towards inferiors so unintentionally wounding—this is admirably done.

More ambitious is Leakey's picture of Maida herself as a convict. Maida is the female counterpart of Marcus Clarke's Rufus Dawes: both are kindly at the start; both suffer injustice; both under the iron mould of the convict system are transformed into unresponsive beings drawing what strength they can from their inner resources. Clarke is more successful, more powerful, more penetrating. But it says much for Leakey that critics should see fit to make the comparison at all. The picture of Maida is an unusual one in Australian fiction. At times she may take on the shape of an allegorical figure, of Resignation or Endurance; but in the main she appears a very lifelike creation, more and more withdrawn, developing a sort of steely resistance, an obduracy, almost, until at last—and here Leakey shows herself all too clearly a creature of her age and conventions—at last Maida yields to the softening influences of religion, and gratefully receives its consolations. The novel remains, despite its weaknesses, the most powerful written by a woman in Australia last century.

All these guidebook or near-guidebook novels have certain traits in common. All give some information about life in the colonies, though not all intend this as guidance for new settlers; all give advice directly or indirectly, and some give moral exhortation. The account of the various colonies, though we now as modern Australians think we have known it all along, can still wake our interest. This may be due to the fact that only one of the writers was born in Australia; they came out as young or middle-aged people and found the country strange, the inhabitants strange, their habits and pursuits strange. Seeing things in this way with new eyes, they were aware of the external with a freshness that long familiarity can dull. There must have been a demand for such works: some of them were popular and ran through many editions. The demand arose through interest in the new land. From the founding of the colony, and before it, official and non-official accounts had been written and had found readers. But now there was the added attraction of the story. A reader enjoyed as well as learned.

Two other points may be noted. Each of these novelists has in some degree the capacity to give the reader a brief and fairly lively picture of a minor character, generally an oddity or an eccentric or even a grotesque. It cannot be proved, but it seems likely enough that the influence of Dickens is seen here. The other point is that even the dullest of them can be read with some interest. They can tell a tale—at least they have that Victorian gift.

One more novel, this time of a different sort, must be discussed before we turn to the four best-known Australian novels of last century.

Its author was John Lang (1817-64), the first novelist born in Australia. The title varies—The Convict's [Forger's] Wife: a True Tale of Early Australia (1855) and Assigned to His Wife: or, the Adventures of George Flower, the Celebrated Detective Officer. It is short, about one-third or one-quarter the length of the novels we have just dealt with. Since the story contains just as much incident, it is obvious that the action must be very fast. The pace in fact is breathless: chapters are brief and crowded; incidents pile on incidents; climax on climax's head accumulates.

It is the first Australian mystery or detective novel. …

.....

THE THREE THEMES OF FICTION

Four well-known novels on typical Australian themes were written last century. Three of the four cannot be classed as much more than competent; yet each in its kind is unique. The four cover what were for long the three staple themes of Australian fiction—convictism, pastoral life, and bushranging. They are concerned with things, with movement and action and violence and adventure. And one of them concerns much more.

The earliest of the four is Ralph Rashleigh (1844-5). It was written by James Tucker (1808-66), who had been transported to Australia in 1827 for attempted blackmail. From the time he landed until he died, a mental and physical wreck, in Liverpool Asylum not far from Sydney, Tucker was either a convict or a ticket-of-leave man.

A mutilated version of his manuscript was published in England in 1929, the full text in Australia in 1952. The manuscript does not give Tucker's name—for over a century nobody knew who the author was. The tracking down was a triumph of literary detection carried out by its editor Colin Roderick. Indeed, to many readers his Introduction to the limited edition of the novel remains of greater fascination than Tucker's story itself.

The publication of the full text was the occasion for inflated claims. These claims cannot be sustained. Ralph Rashleigh gained its temporary fame from its full publication for the first time and from the discovery of its author; its permanent fame as a novel will derive from the setting—the convict system described by a convict.

It is a picaresque novel in the tradition of Smollett about a century before. A few humorous scenes are reminiscent of Fielding. Rashleigh is an English thief and confidence man sentenced to transportation for life. In Australia he is assigned to a schoolmaster in Sydney, then is sent to Emu Plains, west of Sydney; assigned to a settler at Airds, he is forced to accompany a gang of brutal bushrangers; captured and sent to Newcastle, he escapes and lives with the aborigines; then he rescues and preserves a white woman, and is ultimately pardoned. His experiences affect him; in the artless words of Tucker:

The sufferings of his early career in the Colony produced such an effect of reformation in his mind that he was ever after respected as a man of singular integrity by all that knew him, who united sincerely in lamenting his premature death, which took place in 1844 …

It is perhaps unreasonable to look for characterisation of any depth or subtlety in narratives of this kind. Rashleigh is two stock figures in one. From the time of his conviction he is portrayed as a victim, a passive sufferer under brutality, until his escape from Newcastle. He is a sort of magnet for misfortune. But from there until the end, that is, as a free man among the aborigines, he is a stock hero, powerful, resourceful, energetic. We may conclude that Tucker drew most of the first portion from his own experiences as a convict, and that he concocted the rest from what he had read and what he had heard from others and what he drew from his imagination.

But if we cannot expect vital and living characters, perhaps we may have vivid and exciting incident? Now the events related would as realities be exciting or revolting or moving; potentially they are ideal for the novelist of action. But the narrative is not particularly successful. The reasons lie in the very profusion of events and in the manner of narration. The early part of the novel has an embarras de richesse. The sequence of events is a crowded one: there is hardly a moment's breathing space except for the occasional pious reflections. The result is a sort of catalogue.

The style is the formal style of reports, a heritage of eighteenth-century official prose. The even tenor of its orotund address and inflated periods reduces everything to a bland, almost urbane, uniformity.

A meal was now prepared by Rashleigh, to which his three ruffianly companions did ample justice, making during its progress many coarse jests and brutal allusions to the death pangs of their treacherous associate, whose lifeless body hung within a very few feet of the spot they had selected for their repast.

It may easily be conceived that our adventurer had no appetite after the appalling scene of mortal suffering he had so recently witnessed, and he waited most anxiously for the signal to commence their march, so that he might at least be relieved from the sight of the dead ruffian.

The reality concealed by this piece of writing is monstrous; but the effect is that of a board meeting. After a few dozen pages of such prose a reader finds his eyes glazing.

The picture of the system that Tucker presents is a shocking one—floggings, near-starvation, work not to be distinguished from slavery, spiritual wickedness in high places, injustice, death. The period of Tucker's life in Australia up to the composition of the book covered nearly twenty years, and it is hardly possible that he observed or experienced no brighter lights in the sombre picture. The explanation lies in the facts of his own life—that of the condemned felon. Since few of us are willing to acknowledge the complete justice of our punishments, he felt himself a victim. The picture, then, is the next best thing to an exculpation—I was bad, true, but I did not deserve this.

Though he condemns the system, Tucker shows very little feeling for those who suffer under it. The emphasis is on the cruelty, not on the sufferers. They are wretched, they suffer, and they escape when they can. But they appear more or less as animals. Very few lawbreakers engage Tucker's sympathies. It is illuminating to read his comment on Foxley the bushranger's use of the word tyrant:

Such, it is to be observed, is the term used by all the convicts of New South Wales to designate any person, whether magistrate, overseer or constable, who may perform his duty more strictly than is agreeable to the exalted notions these worthies entertain of the deference and consideration with which they ought to be treated.

Tucker does not present the men as inevitable products. All appear cruel in their own right, as it were, whether convicts or overseers or magistrates or warders or even parsons. When a humane man is found, it is for the sake of some turn in the narrative: he is demanded by the exigencies of the story, not by the statistics of human nature.

Tucker thought of himself as apart from the usual run of convicts, picturing himself as Rashleigh (arrested by ill luck, convicted by the treachery of a confederate, condemned harshly). By the time of Rashleigh's escape from Newcastle he had come to the end of his own experiences. For the period after Rashleigh's escape he drew partly on his imagination. Rashleigh changes after that, and Tucker projects himself into a vision of heroic proportions. These two parts of the book, then, are an unconscious exoneration and a wish-fulfilment by a small-time criminal. It is the Convict's Lament followed by the Convict's Dream.

To pass from this story to the next is like passing from darkness to sunlight.

The reputation of The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) once stood very high. Its author, Henry Kingsley (1830-76), brother of the more famous Charles, was until the advent of Marcus Clarke commonly held to be the only novelist who had written a novel about Australia that was worth reading. Kingsley came out to the goldfields in 1853 and served with the police and worked on stations. The picture of Australia that his novel presents is one of pastoral life. It is a tale of families, the Buckleys, the Brentwoods, and the Thorntons, and the relations between them, told ostensibly by Geoffry Hamlyn.

For about a third of the novel the characters are in Drumston or in its neighbourhood; then they are shifted to Australia. There, in the heart of the bush, by a series of coincidences they all come together again. Bit by bit the tension increases as we learn or suspect that Hawker, husband of Mary (née Thornton) and now escaped convict and bushranger, is nearing the area. He gathers his gang, he strikes, and in an action of increasing speed is brought to bay and captured. The evildoers or those who have deserved punishment or have to be got out of the book are gone. There is a temporary dispersal, until in the closing chapters the important characters once more gather in their original homes in England. The long trip and stay in a foreign land are over.

The book is a novel of exile, an aspect well brought out by H. M. Green. The characters start in England, they are English of a few distinct classes, and they go to Australia to make their fortunes. When they have succeeded, they return to England, leaving the villains dead in Australia. They like Australia while they are in it, but they feel no reluctance in leaving it. The Australian background is full enough, what with kangaroos and parrots, aborigines and convicts, bush and drought and fire, but it is felt to be a background. All are English people transplanted to a new land for a period long enough to fill the book with their adventures. Australia is the backdrop to their interactions.

It is among the most class-conscious of Australian novels without being aware of it. The chief characters in it, naturally enough, are gentry and Church and Army. As English gentlemen of substance, they possess their little self-contained world wherever they are, observing with tolerance the odd behaviour of aborigines, convicts, colonials, and the rest outside their circle. And yet this does not become offensive, for there is no conscious snobbery; it is all taken for granted, and in the course of reading it one almost accepts it as the natural order of things—which in its period it must indeed have seemed to be.

Kingsley's background of family, school, and university sufficiently accounts for most of the attitudes in the novel, for the point of view and the assumptions. But Dickens, whom Kingsley read with enjoyment, and Thomas Hughes (of Tom Brown's Schooldays), who was a favourite with brother Charles and whom Henry Kingsley must have read, both appear to have influenced the book. Many of the adults are more mature Tom Browns, healthy and hearty, good English schoolboys, candid and uncomplicated. Kingsley's resemblance to Dickens appears in the crowd of characters, with individual and family stories that interact, the sentimentality, the unbearable coyness where young love is concerned, and the melodrama of threats.

A petulant critic might gird at the superficiality of the novel, and could find some warrant. The events are there for their own sake and the excitement and tension they produce. The characters are stock, the heroes orthodox—fine strong fellows, generally six feet tall, honest and reliable, muscular Christians with no complexity of any kind in their frank natures. One exception is the villain Hawker, though even he is mostly to be expected—handsome and plausible, shooting his man near the end and riding off with a laugh; the other is Mary Thornton, who develops in the book from the headstrong girl to the perplexed mother. All in all, though, they are fine animals. Indeed a passage like the following is ambiguous for a moment if the reader is not alert:

With broad intelligent forehead, with large loving hazel eyes, with a frill like Queen Elizabeth, with a brush like a fox, deep in the brisket, perfect in …

To that point one might, despite brush, think it a description of one of the characters. But the next word, markings, lets us see that the passage is dealing with a collie. It is a mixture of adventure story, when incidents like hunting or fighting blacks and bushrangers or escaping a bushfire are concerned, and fairy tale, when the child is lost in the bush across the river or excursions are held or characters are in love.

Its qualities are those of its kind. It is all so candid, and its artless outlook on life is so engaging, that a critic feels he should forgo his function. It is, after all, a book for boys of all ages and makes little pretence to be anything else. Kingsley can tell a story of incident with zest; he has control over dramatic feeling, for example in the gathering threat to the families from Hawker, and the fearful possibility that young Charles Hawker may kill his father; he has such good nature and such admiration for human decency; he apportions awards and punishments, with very few exceptions, just as we should like to have them in life. All these are things that account for the book's popularity. It is in addition almost an idyll, and events are viewed through a luminous haze. A reader has so few demands made on him that he feels a sort of responsive gratitude. As a novel it is hard to take quite seriously, but as a story it is only too easy to read.

The most powerful novel written in Australia last century is For the Term of His Natural Life, a story of the convict system in Tasmania. It is a very long novel in its original form, running to well over one-third of a million words. Often rambling, frequently verbose, it is nevertheless an Australian masterpiece in its kind. The picture it paints is sombre in the extreme, and parts of it today can hardly be read without discomfort.

Its author, Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke (1846-81), lived the first half of his brief life in England, where the death of his mother and the indifference of his father left him the plaything of youthful whims and not so youthful desires—“I was suffered at sixteen to ape the vices of sixty.” On the death of his father he came to Melbourne, aged seventeen, and dissipated his charm in a variety of jobs and his talent in miscellaneous writings. Some of his work, essays and topical productions, remains uncollected. His great novel was the result of a stay in Tasmania, where he pored over the convict records and gathered the facts and figures on which the novel was based. It appeared in 1870-1 as a serial in The Australian Journal. It was reprinted a few years later as a book in a shortened and modified version, and in 1929 for the first time in its original entirety. It remains, in either form, pre-eminently Clarke's magnum opus; and the reader must still wonder at the production of such a considerable work by such an unlikely author—spendthrift, feckless, inebriate, and charming—at the early age of twenty-four.

The novel in its serial form opens in Dickensian fashion—an inn, odd characters, the fat proprietor, the coach in the rain, the air of mystery enveloping two of the travellers. In the shortened version a melodramatic and improbable Prologue replaces the early chapters. From there on we are concerned primarily with the life of one man, Richard Devine, who is wrongfully convicted (of murder in the first version, of robbery in the second) and sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life. He goes under the name of Rufus Dawes. The sufferings he endures are almost beyond belief—privation, brutality, flogging, torture and, not least, despair of gratitude direly earned and hope often and long deferred. In the end, by a series of coincidences, he recovers his rightful estate and the means of proving his innocence. In the revision Clarke ends the novel tragically, and the whole effect is intensified, the note of tragedy is maintained, and the gloom, except for Sylvia's recognition of her preserver, remains unbroken to the last. The revision, about half the length of the original, is thus improved in its ending, but not in its beginning.

The picture that Clarke gives of the convict system in this novel, which is set in a period beginning in 1827, is one of unrelieved brutality. The cruelties are concentrated on the person of Dawes. In consequence the picture is made more hideous than the reality warrants. Clarke was much affected by his researches, and the book is an exposure, however belated, of the horrors that once prevailed. In a descriptive chapter in the original text he speaks of “the curse of convictism”, declaring that “the infamies current, as matters of course, in chain-gangs and penal settlements were of too horrible a nature to be more than hinted at here”. It is admitted that he blacks the chimney, but it was in all conscience black already. Though he focuses all types of punishment upon Dawes, and though this may strain belief, one is inclined to feel that the effect, overwhelming in force, justifies the violation. Under the iron flail Dawes changes in a way that Clarke describes with a skill beyond that of the other Australian novelists of the century. It is a picture of hardening and coarsening, with periodic softenings into humanity and tenderness that are followed by further access of grim resolution. It is not so much the creation of a character as the tracing of temperamental changes.

The intense force of the book derives from details and manner of writing. They serve to show the great difference in capacity between an author like Tucker, who had the advantage of knowing the horrors at first hand, and Clarke, who had merely read about them. There are as many horrors in Tucker as in Clarke, but the effect on the reader of Tucker's narrative is inconsiderable compared with that produced by Clarke's descriptions. Here, for example, is a brief extract from the description of Kirkland's flogging, Dawes being the unwilling executioner:

“Ten!” cried Troke, impassibly counting to the end of the first twenty.

The lad's back, swollen into a hump, now presented the appearance of a ripe peach which a wilful child had scored with a pin.

Dawes, turning away from his bloody handiwork, drew the cats through his fingers twice. They were beginning to get clogged a little.

In descriptions or vignettes of persons, again, Clarke stands by himself in his century. And he has a power to capture significant detail, to put down in a few words what the eye sees and retains after a sudden startled look:

With a long yellow hand, spiked as it were with long yellow fingers tipped with strong black nails …

In such descriptions, especially where the grim or the odd or the sinister is concerned, Clarke excels all his predecessors. He is, when dealing with such themes, our first stylist.

His Natural Life is the only one of these four novels that can be said to have a plot. And here, as in other respects, Clarke is like Dickens, with some stories running parallel and meeting at intervals, with reliance on fantastic coincidence, and (in the original novel) with a happy and huddled-up conclusion. The use of coincidence in this novel in both versions is an abuse, and if one were to judge it by structure alone, then it would be faulty. Clarke took his stand on actuality—he could point to documents proving that certain things had happened. But no documents justify a long series of convenient coincidences. Nor does life itself, with all its oddness. But there still remains a plot, ingenious if improbable. The consciousness of this and the expectation of changes of fortune that it awakens add something to the novel that the purely picaresque story cannot have.

In characterisation also Clarke is superior to the others. At the same time, though noticeably better, he is no prolific creator of characters. Rufus Dawes is shown as human nature changing rather than as a living individual human being. At least, however, the changes are credible and skilfully presented. But this does not apply to Maurice Frere. At the start he is a rather coarse, half-brutal young officer. In the system he has become the persecutor of Dawes, hating the victim whom he has wronged. That hate is very natural. But the change does not convince us. As a persecutor Frere is sadistic, possessed by a devilish and implacable malice that does not appear to be the natural development of his particular characteristics. The most successful piece of character drawing in the novel is to be found in the Rev. James North, a self-tortured parson, a drunkard, a man of intense sensibility and conflicting passions, complex and tortuous. His diary, by means of which a few sections of the story are told, has parts of discursive boredom, but it also has parts of bitter self-revelation. It is likely enough that Clarke here looked in his heart and wrote.

It is as a picture of men under the convict system, however, that His Natural Life will live. As a narrator of excitement and suspense and horror Clarke still remains the greatest Australian novelist of his type. Only Hay rivals him in suspense, and surpasses him in insight into and creation of character. The following taste of Clarke's quality may serve to give us his essentials. It is the end of the abortive mutiny on the Malabar.

Shaking his assailants to the deck as easily as a wild boar shakes off the dogs which clamber upon his bristly sides, the convict sprang to his feet, and whirling the heavy cutlass round his head, kept the circle at bay. … Gabbett, his stubbly hair on end, his bloodshot eyes glaring with fury, his great hand opening and shutting in air, as though it gasped for something to seize, turned himself about from side to side, now here, now there, bellowing like a wounded bull. His coarse shirt, rent from shoulder to flank, exposed the play of his huge muscles. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and the blood, trickling down his face, mingled with the foam on his lips and dropped sluggishly on to his hairy breast. Each time that a man came within reach of the swinging cutlass, he received a fresh accession of rage, and his form seemed to dilate and expand with passion. Viewed through the thunderous gloom of a tropical night, the aspect of this monster, surrounded by assailants who dare not approach him, brought to mind those hideously-grotesque pictures of the combats of evil spirits, drawn by the fantastic pencil of Goya. At one moment bunched with clinging adversaries—his arms, legs, and shoulders a hanging mass of human bodies—at the next, free, desperate, alone in the midst of his foes, with his hideous countenance contorted with hate and rage, the giant seemed less a man than a demon, or one of those monstrous and savage apes that haunt the solitudes of the African forests. …

Despite the over-writing typical of both author and period, this is effective in its place in the novel. A fastidious taste may reject it as melodramatic. So it is; but, sustained, it has its vocation. Clarke was of his age, and he can still give us, if not always the characters, at least the form and pressure of the period. In this work he is an inferior and savage Dickens.

Of these four novels the thinnest in texture and the easiest to read is Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms. Thomas Alexander Browne (1826-1915) took the name Boldrewood from Scott's Marmion. Brought to Australia as a mere child, he lived practically all his long life in this country, and was by experience and temperament the only Australian of the four. He was, among other things, pastoralist, gold warden, and police magistrate.

It was in intervals in his official duties that he wrote his novels. He was very prolific. As well as a bulk of memoirs, essays, sketches, and tales, he wrote eighteen novels. The best known of these are The Squatter's Dream (1878), The Miner's Right (1890), and A Sydney-Side Saxon (1891). They appeared first as serials, as did his most famous work, Robbery Under Arms. This ran in The Sydney Mail as a serial in 1882-3 and appeared as a volume in 1888.

The story deals with life in New South Wales in the forties and fifties, with the life, in particular, of the Marstons and the romantic Starlight, gentleman of fortune. It is a story of cattle-duffing, bushranging, and life on the Turon goldfield west of Sydney. The Marston brothers take to cattle-stealing in a spirit of bravado or youthful daring. The step to bushranging is easy. Most incidents that a reader avid for excitement could demand are there—arrests, escapes, hold-ups, night rides, narrow squeaks, betrayals, and a final stand against the troopers.

This sort of story may present a problem today; it presented a problem then, the problem of moral responsibility. The narrator is Dick Marston, survivor of the original gang, youthful, engaging, and dashing. Is he to be presented in heroic colours? And there is Starlight, not so youthful but just as dashing and even more engaging. Boldrewood kills off Starlight, so that problem is summarily solved. As for Dick Marston, he is captured, sentenced to imprisonment, and released years later, a reformed grey-beard, to marry his Gracey and live a model life.

And there are the incidents that Dick relates. This young man defies the law on many occasions—he steals cattle, he breaks jail, he holds up coaches, he shoots an escort—and all in the gay adventurous manner. But wickedness must not prosper. So Boldrewood has him telling the story (memoirs of an ill-spent life, as it were) in Berrima gaol. He must be repentant for the past; despite the thrill of adventure, he must be sorry he ever did these things. So the narrative is spattered with brief pious reflections, miniature moralisings:

How easy it is for chaps to take the road to hell! for that was about the size of it …

and:

What a thing it is to be perfectly honest and straight—to be able to look the whole world in the face!

and, to draw to an end with these:

That's the worst of not being straight and square. A man's almost driven to drink when he can't keep from thinking of all sorts of miserable things day and night.

There are dozens of these punctuating the sequence of criminal escapades. It is all very edifying; but we should feel more reassured if the repentant sinner were not in gaol at the time. It is perhaps significant that they become less frequent as the story progresses.

Boldrewood's style for the most part fits the dashing narrative admirably. It serves as one exception at least to Sheridan's generalisation that easy writing makes damned hard reading. He wrote with speed, with apparent ease, and with few corrections in his manuscript. He had, he said, a facile pen. The narrative, in the first person, is enlivened by the oral turns of speech—can't, don't, he'll, and so forth, and by the use of colloquialisms and slang. This note is struck in the opening paragraph:

My name's 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. As I lift myself now I can feel the muscle swell on my arm like a cricket ball, in spite of the—well, in spite of everything.

There is a sort of breezy braggadocio about it all like the story it tells—boot, saddle, to horse, and away. Boldrewood has, in short, the admirable quality of readability, a quality very hard to define, but equally easy to recognise when it occurs. His outstanding gift is that of the born storyteller.

Boldrewood does not handle this style with perfect consistency. Often enough the homely Dick Marston lapses into grammatical formality: the author starts to write as himself instead of in the person of the imaginary narrator. These passages the reader suddenly becomes aware of, and he sees then why a section has not been so interesting as others. Another point is that the colloquial fits incident, but is not so well fitted for other purposes; the account of the goldfields, for instance, informative and accurate as it is, is not so vivid. Near the end, however, style and theme marry. The account of the last stand of the bushrangers, the death of Starlight, and the mourning of Warrigal is as effective a piece of writing as Boldrewood ever managed.

Boldrewood had the advantage of material ready-made to hand. Many of the incidents and persons and places in the novel had their actual counterparts. The stealing of over a thousand head of cattle, the trek to Adelaide, and the sale there—this really occurred in the early seventies. Terrible Hollow is in the New England district. The Marstons were based on people that Boldrewood knew, and even Starlight, though based on no one character, was apparently a composite.

The transfusion of this reality into the novel appears most in the incidents, which are real enough, natural and naturally told. The characters, though, are less successful. The most striking is a major figure, Starlight. He is, to mature eyes, slightly larger than life. He represents Boldrewood's colonial attitude to gentle birth, an attitude that lasted until Furphy attacked it viciously and in so doing left one with the uneasy feeling that he protested too much. Starlight is grammatical, he is presumed to be of a family of note, he is soft spoken, suave and polished, but capable of rage and violence, and then he is efficient and deadly—an Australian Claude Duval, in short. Most youngsters wish in their hearts to be like Starlight, if not to be the author of all his deeds. His modern counterpart is, say, Raffles or, in another and legal line of country, the Saint of the thrillers by Leslie Charteris. It would require a greater novelist than Boldrewood to lend full credibility to such a creation.

The novel is an Australian thriller, valued still because it was one of the earliest competent novels in this country and because it is essentially Australian in setting and incident and most characters. There are no implications: all is pure straight narrative; its surface values are those it is to be judged by. And these values are a narrative excellence and the resulting excitement. The novel remains and is likely to remain the best Australian counterpart of the good American Western.

Notes

1. John Earnshaw puts a case for Willoughby Bean (Bulletin 11.5.55).