[In the following essay, Hamer highlights recurrent themes in Australian novels published between 1859 and 1889.]

The period 1859 to 1889 is a distinctive period marking the beginnings of the Australian novel. The first known Australian novel was published in 1830—Quintus Servinton, a tale of convict life written by a convict, Henry Savery—but the first novel of note, written by a novelist of note, was The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), written by Henry Kingsley, who subsequently made a name for himself as an English novelist. Between 1830 and 1859 there were a number of books of fiction published on Australian subjects, by Australians and others, but they were on the whole mere sensational tales. The names of Charles Rowcroft and Catherine Spence stand out, both enjoying a contemporary popularity. Geoffry Hamlyn marks the beginning of a period when writers saw in the Australian scene a wider wealth of source material embracing the whole ambit of human experience and not simply a highly coloured background against which picaresque tales could be easily set. There was one noteworthy novel written in this earlier period, but it did not see the light of day until 1929, and even then in an abridged version, and did not appear in full until 1952. This was The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh, attributed by Dr Colin Roderick to a convict, James Tucker. It was written in 1845, and is perhaps the most outstanding product in the field of Australian fiction before 1859. Yet it need not be considered in this account of the early Australian novel, because its date of publication precludes any possibility of its having influenced any of the novels that come within the scope of this examination.

The novelists from Henry Kingsley onward begin to see more in Australia than convicts and bushrangers, and look forward to a better, more vigorous Australia, a new nation being established in the Antipodes; but they still look to England as their spiritual and cultural Home. It can be said that by 1859, and certainly by 1889, even the educated Australians regarded themselves as permanent settlers, and not mere visitors, though there were still those who hankered for Home, and hoped to retire there after making fortunes in Australia. Few actually did so, mainly because fortunes were rare. Some families, even amongst the educated classes, had already been established in Australia for two or three generations, but none of the novelists of this period was native born. T. A. Browne (Rolf Boldrewood) came closest to being a currency lad, having arrived in Sydney at the age of four, and having had the advantage of an Australian upbringing; while Marcus Clarke came out as a youth of seventeen. Thus, writers of this period were still writing for an English audience or at least for an audience of Englishmen transplanted to this new country. Few wrote consciously for Australian readers, and fewer still simply forgot their audience in order to reproduce faithfully the Australian social milieu. There is no unselfconscious picture of the broad Australian society; but Clarke's image of the convict settlement is a faithful one drawn from careful study of the records; while de Boos has written the most faithfully Australian novel of the period, though its social setting is a restricted one. Many of the writers of the time show a love for Australia in varying degrees; many laud it as a land of promise for immigrants, and many show a warm enthusiasm for its future. Yet some are more Australian in spirit than others. In the main, they all, (except de Boos) portrayed that part of Australian society that was closest to the English, and the image of the Australian society that emerges from the novels of the period is an idealized, anglicized picture of the upper-class squattocracy that aped English ways and customs. This is the society represented by Kingsley, Browne (for the most part), Mrs Cross (Ada Cambridge), Mrs Praed and Mme Couvreur (‘Tasma’). If anything, Clarke and Farjeon may be grouped with de Boos as being more Australian in spirit than the others. Certainly, there was no novel written in the period which is more Australian than de Boos's Fifty Years Ago.¹ Towards the end of the period we have Mme Couvreur pointing out to immigrants the hope of wealth and happiness in Australia, whereas Kingsley's and Browne's heroes would have looked for consummation of their life's work back Home; and all of them, Kingsley, Farjeon, Mrs Praed and Francis Adams especially, expressed approval of the progress Australia was making towards national unity and independence, and in varying degrees showed faith in her future. Not the least sincere and warm in his love of Australia was Kingsley at the beginning of the period. He has been castigated severely, particularly by Furphy, for being un-Australian, but his novels show that he loved the Australia he visited for only five short years. He describes it with affection and goes out of his way to affirm his faith in its future. Read again Dr Mulhaus's vision of Australia in the future,² or the fine descriptions in The Hillyars and the Burtons, to sense his quiet, determined optimism. But de Boos's novel exudes the sap of the gum tree; his faith in Australia is implicit rather than expressed. He is incapable of the poetic descriptions that Kingsley gives; nor does he, like Francis Adams, insist on the development of nationalism and a spirit of independence. He could scarcely do this in a tale set at a time when the colony of New South Wales was barely fifty years old; instead, he portrays an independent Australian, taking for granted his sturdy manhood; and there is no need for him to boast self-consciously about the future greatness of this promising land. He simply accepts the Australian background for what it is, describes it truthfully, and sets against it a true-to-life, exciting novel of human passions, albeit extending the melodramatic tendency of most of these early writers to its fullest. Even Furphy, the prophet of Australianness, does not so confidently assume the worth of Australia and Australians; he aggressively flaunts our virtues, is sensitive to criticism, ever-ready to fly to our defence, which almost invariably means contrasting us (not always fairly) with English people and institutions, and with other foreigners. He does, of course, recognize our faults, and sees virtues in certain Englishmen; but de Boos, not living in an age of surging nationalism, is not even interested in such a comparison.

One thing that unifies this period is the common attitude (again excepting de Boos) of regret for Australia's lack of culture, but coupled (in most cases) with a faith in the future emergence of that culture and a general but vague faith in the progress of Australia towards nationhood. This attitude is expressed clearly by Mrs Praed in the Introductory Note to Policy and Passion, where she says:

It can be no matter for conjecture that when in the course of years Australia shall have appropriated to herself an independent position among those occupied by more ancient nations, and shall have formulated a social and political system adapted to the conditions of her development and growth, she will possess a literature of her own as powerful and original as might be prognosticated from the influences of nature and civilization brought to bear upon the formation of a distinct national type.

But Mrs Praed's characters constantly lament the lack of social and cultural life in the Australian outback. In fact, she herself seems to resent Australia because of her own unhappy experiences here. She uses Australian scenery and settings for its sales value in London, not because she loves the Australian bush. Some of the novels of the time show little real appreciation of or sympathy for the local environment; they were written by Englishmen who were impatient to end their exile in this land of contrarieties and oddities. But other novels of the period grow as true fruits of the Australian soil. All the writers (including de Boos) reacted strongly to the differences between the Australian and English landscape, seasons, flora and fauna; but there was an increasing number who, while still emphasizing these differences, now did so affectionately to stress the individual characteristics of Australia. Many, of course, cashed in on the English taste for Australian peculiarities. Kingsley sincerely portrays station life as something attractive, exciting at times, even if his account is to some extent romanticized and unreal; but he still regards it as a poor substitute for English country life, because it lacks the social advantages. Mrs Praed paints a truer picture, neither eulogizing nor condemning station life, but regretting the loneliness and lack of intellectual and social contacts for women outback. Neither Kingsley nor Mrs Praed minimizes the dangers and hardships, but Mrs Praed does not have romantic heroes unrealistically triumphing over impossible odds, as Kingsley tends to do. Browne is an interesting writer from this point of view, since his position is ambivalent. There is a sharp difference between his bushranging and mining novels on the one hand, and his novels of station life on the other. The first group seem to be intended for local readers—two were serialized in Australian magazines—and the latter for English readers. The first group by and large portray real Australians, sturdy and manly, whose behaviour and talk are true to life, the kind of Australians who today would be regarded as typical; but the second group have heroes who are pale replicas of English country gentlemen. But even Starlight is a gentleman of the romantic English mould.

We see in this period the evolving of the true Australian novel, with one novel (de Boos's Fifty Years Ago) already emerging true to the type. The new environment was naturally influencing these writers, though some may have resisted the influence or tried to fashion it to fit the English formulae that were part of their cultural and literary heritage. There came a time, however, when the English values were superseded by the Australian. English models, of course, were still copied, but Australian experiences sooner or later began to evoke Australian responses in literature. In the period under discussion, the English values still dominated, but these influences were gradually being worked out, until an individual Australian note was struck. This did not happen, of course, until the nineties, and in this earlier period of gestation there is no clear chronological development towards the new Australian literature; de Boos towards the beginning of the period was more Australian in tone than Mrs Praed or Mme Couvreur towards the end. At the end of the period that marks the real beginning of the Australian novel there is little that is different from the prevailing spirit of what Kingsley wrote. Mme Couvreur's faith in Australia is no greater than Kingsley's and certainly not expressed as forcefully or plainly. Mrs Praed and Francis Adams are hailing the approach of federation, for example, but Farjeon and Kingsley had done the same twenty and thirty years earlier. The period has little internal integration or progression, but it has a homogeneity that sets it apart as the generation that preceded the emergence of the distinctively Australian novel. Furphy was already writing the book, unquestionably Australian in tone, that marked the beginnings of maturity for the Australian novel; Miles Franklin, Mrs Gunn and William Hay began writing theirs in the nineties or shortly after the turn of the century; but de Boos had forestalled them by a generation; yet his novel was a true product of the period that inspired it, springing essentially from that class of English colonist who immediately made Australia their home and severed all ties and shed all hankering to return or to establish a new England beneath the Southern Cross. De Boos had emancipated himself from all nostalgic pinings, and set about to face squarely the task of struggling with this new environment, forbidding and cruel as it was. A new spirit began with the nineties, different, but descended from this earlier spirit of resignation that was the feeling of the emancipists, the ex-soldiers, the shepherds, the gold diggers, the shearers, the selectors, as the nineteenth century progressed. It was the spirit of the lower classes. De Boos identified himself with this spirit in its earlier stages, while the others, except for Farjeon and O'Reilly, either refused to recognize it, or tried to restrain it or oppose it, especially where it expressed itself in a demand for democracy, or the unlocking of the land, universal education or trade unionism, or in the feeling that Jack's as good as his master. The educated classes in general fought desperately to maintain their links with England and Europe, the source of culture and social refinement; but increasing numbers of the masses were becoming educated, some being already educated when they came here and failed to find fortunes in gold, and others gradually seizing opportunities to better themselves, through hard work, and with the help of enlightened policies of egalitarian governments. By the nineties the new nationalism found its feet, and there were strong moves to sever altogether political connections with the Old Country. This found expression in literature not only as nationalism, but also as realism, because a nationalistic literature was more closely related to and sprang more essentially from the Australian way of life. The Bulletin came into its own in the nineties, and with it Australian literature sprang to life.

It is the period of the labour pains that we are concerned with here. An examination of this period can help to discover what made Australian literature what it is; we can see what were the influences on the embryo during the period of gestation. Some of the characteristics, of course, were inherited from the English parent, but some were the result of prenatal influences of the environment. Many of these influences are geographical and historical, and these must be examined. The earliest settlers were repulsed by some of the startling aspects of our strange land, and wanted to escape from it as soon as possible. The poorer classes, convicts, ex-convicts and poor immigrants had no choice but to stay, and so more quickly became reconciled to the strange new environment than the rich did. The following extract from Barron Field's Journal³ epitomizes this attitude of simultaneous repulsion and fascination:

But this is New Holland, where it is summer with us when it is winter in Europe, and vice versa; where the barometer rises before bad weather and falls before good; where the north is the hot wind, and the south the cold; where the humblest house is fitted up with cedar (cedrela toona according to Mr Brown), where the fields are fenced with mahogany (eucalyptus robusta), and the myrtle trees (myrtaceae) are burnt for firewood; where the swans are black, and the eagles white; where the kangaroo, an animal between the squirrel and the deer, has five claws on its fore paws, and three talons on its hind-legs like a bird, and yet hops on its tail; where the mole (ornithorhynchus paradoxus) lays eggs and has a duck's bill; where there is a bird (meliphaga) with a broom in its mouth instead of a tongue; where there is a fish, one half belonging to the genus raia, and the other to that of squalus; where pears are made of wood (xylomelum pyriforme), with the stalk at the broader end, and the cherry (exocarpus cupressiformis) grows with the stone on the outside.

Many of these oddities do, of course, exist, although Mr Justice Field had a tendency to exaggeration, and was unaware of the facts in some instances; but is it any wonder that the first immigrants were shocked! Many writers, apparently taking their cue from Barron Field, wrote in similar strain about the Antipodes, playing on the credulity of their English readers to the full. Charles Reade, (who had never been to Australia), with his penchant for sensationalism, recorded the following conversation in his novel of the penal system, It's Never Too Late to Mend, published in 1856:

‘Prejudice be hanged, this is a lovely land.’

‘So 'tis, Tom, so 'tis. But I'll tell you what puts me out a bit; nothing is what it sets up for here. If you see a ripe pear and go to eat it—it is a lump of hard wood. Next comes a thing the very sight of which turns your stomach—and that is delicious, a loquat for instance. There now, look at that magpie! Well it is Australia—so that magpie is a crow and not a magpie at all. Everything pretends to be some old friend or other of mine, and turns out a stranger. Here is nothing but surprises and deceptions. The flowers make a point of not smelling, and the bushes that nobody expects to smell or wants to smell, they smell lovely.’

‘What does it matter where the smell comes from, so that you get it?’

‘Why, Tom,’ replied George, opening his eyes, ‘it makes all the difference. I like to smell a flower—flower is not complete without smell—but I don't care if I never smell a bush till I die. Then the birds they laugh and talk like Christians; they make me split my sides, God bless their little hearts: but they won't chirrup. Oh dear no, bless you, they leave the Christians to chirrup—they hold conversations and giggle, and laugh and play a thing like a fiddle—it is Australia! where everything is inside out and topsyturvy. The animals have four legs so they jump on two. Ten foot square of rock lets for a pound a month; then acres of grass for a shilling a year. Roasted at Christmas, shiver o' cold on Midsummer day.’⁴

A poem, probably written by Barton Field⁵ asks the unanswerable question:

Now, of what place can such strange tales
Be told with truth, but New South Wales?

This view of Australia had wide currency throughout the period we are dealing with. Mrs Cross protests against it in her autobiographical book Thirty Years Ago in Australia; for when she left England in 1870 that was the kind of concept of Australia that she had. She says:

As for the physical characteristics of the country, there were but the scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stone outside (none of which actually is the rule, and I have found nothing to resemble the description of the latter) [Unlike Barron Field, she had not visited the Shoalhaven], and the kangaroo that carries its family in a breast pocket, which we felt able to take for granted.⁶

Marcus Clarke attempted also to reply to this concept, first in an article in a catalogue of photographs and pictures in the National Gallery, Melbourne, (1874), and later in his famous Preface to Gordon's collection of poems, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1876). He said:

Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learnt to walk on all fours.

But he went on to insist that ‘weird melancholy’ was the keynote of the Australian scenery, whereas this is merely the earlier bewilderment romanticized according to Clarke's personal response to the local landscape. Of course, Clarke is deliberately striving for effect, since he is writing blurb for a book of pictures, but he was also expressing something of his own makeup, as well as voicing an aspect of the intellectual and spiritual outlook of the time. Several novelists of the period alluded to this view of the contrarieties of the Antipodes, including Farjeon (The Golden Land, 1886), Mrs Praed (Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land, 1915) and Jules Verne (The Children of Captain Grant, 1877). Barron Field applied it to aboriginal and convict society, (if he in fact wrote the poem before alluded to) when he said:

There, courting-swains their passion prove
By knocking down the girls they love.
There, every servant gets his place
By character of foul disgrace.
There, vice is virtue—virtue, vice,
And all that's vile is voted nice.

We find Hume Nisbet giving it a sociological application too, at the end of the period under review:

Australia is a land of surprises; sometimes pleasant, more often otherwise. It is also the home of contradictions, inconsistencies and oppositions to what are regarded as natural laws in other parts of the globe. The people are never happy unless they are disputing and contradicting everything that is told them. Where the stranger expects a welcome he gets snubbed and vice versa. Its swans are black, its moles lay eggs, and its owls hoot during the day: even its bees are out of all character, for they are stingless.⁷

Field and Nisbet perhaps represent the extremes of this viewpoint, but this kind of attitude characterized the period, and it went on well into the twentieth century. Mrs Praed published up till 1916, Mrs Cross to 1914, Farjeon to 1906, Browne and Nisbet to 1905, but the spirit of the nineties had long since swamped this kind of outlook as far as Australians were concerned; and though these writers overlap into the twentieth century they belong in spirit to the period before 1889.

The literature of the nineties and beyond did not break free from this outlook entirely, but it did at least express a reaction to the Australian environment that was more realistic. Lawson's mateship is an attempt to grapple with the harsh, unrelenting loneliness and torment of the bush; but this is the same approach as characterized the earlier period, purged of its romantic (and even sometimes, fantastic) element. The bush is always the enemy, at first arousing disgust and resentment, but now, since efforts had to be made to contend with it, it called forth ruggedness, determination, grim humour, cynicism, struggles, bitterness, compassion for one's fellows; and men were only occasionally victorious. The bush was fascinating but cruel; it won men's souls, enslaved them, demanded a lifetime of devotion and work, but frequently rewarded its votaries with defeat or death. The romantic reaction to such an environment was to idealize, to manufacture specious optimism, to show men triumphing facilely over massive difficulties as the Buckleys and their friends in Geoffry Hamlyn, or escaping from it, as Mrs Praed's heroines frequently do. Mrs Praed, however, does recognize the cruelty of bush life, and portrays the tragedy of it. Mrs Tregaskiss, for example, is tempted to flee from an exacting life in the outback as well as from an unhappy marriage, but is dissuaded when her young daughter is lost and dies in the bush. Mrs Praed had escaped from Australia herself, and many of her characters escape in the same way; but at times in her novels she escapes into fantasy (Fugitive Anne, 1902) or into mysticism (in her occult novels). At other times she submits to the reality of the Australian environment (as she does in Mrs Tregaskiss, 1895), and some of her characters even reverse the process of escape by coming (or returning) to Australia to find the happiness they could not grasp in England. Lady Bridget returns to the Never Never (Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land, 1915) from England and lives on happily with her husband after an estrangement, while their fortunes are saved by the breaking of a drought. The frequency with which the story of a lost child occurs in the fiction of the earlier period, and the different modes of treatment of this theme, offer an illustration of the developing attitude to the bush. Kingsley (in Geoffry Hamlyn) uses this theme as simply another exciting adventure; Mrs Evans (Maude Jeanne Franc: Golden Gifts, 1869) points a moral from it, attempting to show that God does not punish good people; Farjeon (Shadows on the Snow, 1865) uses it merely as another contrived episode; Clarke (in ‘Pretty Dick’, a short story) merely makes a sentimental tale of it; while Mrs Praed and Furphy (writing roughly at the same period) relate it realistically. It is this surrender to truth that one sees slowly emerging in Australian fiction. It is not always a bitter surrender, as with Lawson, but it is an honest one. The early novelists, except for de Boos, were truthful in their representation of Australia only up to a point consistent with the accepted standard in this regard in current English literature; but on the whole they tipped the scale more on the romantic side than their English contemporaries did. Kingsley painted a rosy picture, Farjeon and Browne a sentimental one; Mrs Praed tried to come to grips with the Australian background, but had only occasional flashes of success in reproducing it realistically, while the other two women were writing domestic novels that could, in essentials at least, have been set anywhere. The novelists of the convict system certainly came to grips with the cruelties of the system; but Caroline Leakey (The Broad Arrow, 1859) overdoes the pathos; G. M. Sterne (A Strong Will and a Fair Tide, 1860) moralizes; O'Reilly, as well as his hero (Moondyne, in his novel of the same name), escapes; while Clarke becomes smothered in the unremitting horrors and pain. Yet, however one views it, and at all periods of time, the essence of Australian fiction is the struggle of man against a new, strange, cruel environment, at the same time repelling and fascinating, frequently engulfing the settlers who wrestled with it, but always demanding the ultimate in physical and spiritual courage. The early novelists tended to falsify this struggle by surrounding it with an aura of romance; but the characteristic Australian response was already forming—that of submission to a grim reality. This surrender is, however, not always a defeat, bitter and hopeless; but is more typically a resignation to accept the inevitable which, in the proper spirit, can be accepted with faith and even thankfulness. Tragedies occur, as they must in such a harsh environment, but the spirit of mateship, co-operation, determination, democracy, rises above the defeat. The laws of the bush are immutable, irresistible, but there are opportunities that can be seized to mould and to bend life's strands to good and noble ends, provided the inevitable is accepted. Not always is wrong punished and virtue rewarded. The rain falls on the just and the unjust; to accept this principle is to accept realism. This is the kind of realism to which the Australian novel tends; and de Boos had already, within the limits of his capabilities, attained it.

Historically, the period between the gold rushes of the fifties and the nationalism of the nineties was a unified one. The conflict between convicts and free men had subsided and self-government had been achieved in the fifties. Transportation, except in Western Australia, had ceased by 1853. Social and political freedom had been won, though the fight for land for the people was still going on, and there was a sharp dichotomy between the squatter on one hand, and the selector, bullock driver and shearer on the other. Most of the novelists of the period ignored this social struggle, or where they noticed it at all, like Browne, in his squatting novels, and Mrs Praed, came down on the side of the squatters, as the true heirs of English culture. Farjeon's sympathies are with the working class, especially the battlers,⁸ but Francis Adams, not so much in his novels as in his poetry and journalism, is the only one who takes up a partisan view in support of the ordinary man, but his revolutionary views put him out of harmony with what finally emerged in the Australian Labour Movement, though at this period and even up to the 1920's and 30's there was a strong revolutionary undercurrent (see for instance D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, 1923). Though the convict system was finished, Caroline Leakey, G. M. Sterne, Marcus Clarke, James Bonwick, T. A. Browne, J. B. O'Reilly, Mrs Praed and Francis Adams all looked back to the convict era for inspiration for at least one novel each. De Boos also found his inspiration in an earlier period of Australian history, though the conflict between settlers and aborigines was still going on. The struggle to develop the country and its industries was now gaining pace, and many writers record aspects of the pastoral industry, but all ignore such things as the invention of the stripper, the stump-jump plough and the shearing machine, the use of artesian water, the expansion of the railways, or the beginnings of the frozen meat industry, though J. R. Houlding, an old sailor, describes life on steamships as well as sailing ships. The subject matter was limited by writers' outlooks. The political awareness of the ordinary people, awakened during the gold rushes, and now finding expression in trade unions and Labour Leagues, is largely disapproved, particularly by Kingsley, Browne, Mrs Praed and Mrs Cross; but the adventurous spirit of the gold-diggers, which was becoming the dominant characteristic of the Australian people, is given ample recognition in the novels of Farjeon and Browne, in particular. The consolidation of democracy by such people was inevitable and irresistible, despite the strictures of Browne and Mrs Praed.

Improved communications, especially the steamship which began an Australian run in 1852, gave Australia a closer link with overseas countries, and our writers could not but be influenced by world trends; some of our writers (Kingsley, Mrs Praed and Mme Couvreur) were returning to rejoin the mainstream of European culture, and O'Reilly became a journalistic giant in the United States, while Adams came to us fresh from experiences not only in England but also in the Middle East and Japan; and a literary figure from Europe, Anthony Trollope, gave us the benefit of a visit, some gentle advice and some severe criticism, as well as representing Australian life in two novels. A constant stream of immigrants kept arriving even after the first flood of the gold rushes subsided; and Houlding, Browne and others make the new chum the butt of their jokes, while at the same time offering friendly advice to assist the immigrant. Australianism was fostered in literature to some extent by local newspapers who paid for the serializing of novels. The Australian Journal and the Australasian were the chief benefactors. The Australian Journal published Fifty Years Ago serially after Gordon and Gotch had first released it in a series of paper-covered booklets. The Australian Journal also commissioned His Natural Life. The Australasian published seven of Mrs Cross's novels, including her best, A Marked Man. Long Odds was serialized in the Colonial Monthly, but Clarke was both author and proprietor. Robbery Under Arms appeared as a serial in the Sydney Mail and Nevermore in the Centennial Magazine. The Melbourne Public Library, by its appointment of Clarke as Secretary to the Trustees, showed a recognition by Officialdom of the need to foster Australian literature; and Clarke himself was the instigator of two clubs, the Yorick Club and the Native Companions' Club (sometimes called the Cave of Adullam) where writers could gain from the cut and thrust of intellectual intercourse. Literature was beginning to assert its place in the Australian scene: though many writers were penurious, notably Clarke, there were some who did well financially, especially Browne; and all asserted their right to a superior social position, those who returned to Europe—Kingsley, Mrs Praed, Mme Couvreur—being given this recognition unquestionably. Nevertheless, few could live solely on their literary earnings, and all depended to a large extent on the English market. Most Australian books except those mentioned as being serialized in Australian newspapers, saw the light of day by being published in London, de Boos again being the only true Australian in this regard. Yet Australians gave little support to their own literature, believing that no good thing culturally could come out of Australia, except for occasional popular works like His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms; but even these had to find English publishers in book form. Paradoxically, it was this very feeling of Australian cultural inferiority that fed the flames of the anti-English sentiment.

Notes

1. This is a little known novel published in 1866-7 by Gordon and Gotch, Sydney, in fourteen paper-covered booklets, and then as one volume in 1867. It was published serially in the Australian Journal from April 1869 to February 1870. A revised, abridged edition was published by the NSW Bookstall in 1906, under the title of Settler and Savage. It is a melodramatic tale of a white settler's revenge against three blacks who massacred his family. It is set in the Hunter Valley, N.S.W., around about 1810. It is written in highly inflated style with stilted dialogue in the manner of nineteenth century stage melodrama, but it is not merely melodramatic—it has much more to recommend it to a student of Australian literature and the Australian character. Interested readers should see my article, ‘Fifty Years Ago—An Overlooked Novel’ in Southerly, 1957, No. 1, pp. 41-4.

2. Geoffry Hamlyn (London, 1935), pp. 354-5.

3. Barron Field (ed.), Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales (London, 1825).

4. It's Never Too Late To Mend (London, 1856) p. 516.

5. Bentley's Miscellany, Vol. 19 (London 1846), p. 519.

6. Thirty Years Ago in Australia (London, 1931), p. 1.

7. The Swampers (London, 1897), p. 206.

8. See especially: Shadows on the Snow (London, 1865), Grif (London, 1869) and The Sacred Nugget (London, 1885).