[In the following excerpt, Jones and Jones survey convict, settler, and Anglo-Australian fiction prior to 1890.]

SETTLERS, CONVICTS, AND EARLY NARRATIVE

In the spring of 1788, the First Fleet of eleven nondescript vessels set sail for New Holland, carrying just under fifteen hundred convicts and their military guards to exactly where, and what, they weren't at all certain. Not many years before this event, it could be said, the English novel had embarked on a voyage equally unforeseeable. To be sure, it had not committed any crimes but was thought nevertheless to be socially reprehensible. It would remain under suspicion for another half century or more, by which time it would long since have justified itself before all but the most puritanical of juries. Instead of a few names to show—Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Smollett, Radcliffe, Sterne (you could count very nearly all the English novelists on the fingers of your two hands in 1788, which was the way most people at that time still did count, and they were unable to read or write at all)—by the time of Victoria's accession in 1837 Britain had welcomed such figures as Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. Even in America, there were storytellers like Irving and Cooper, though few enough as yet in Australia for reasons that will become clear.

Who, after all, cared very much about society's misfits once they had been transported to the other side of the earth? Even when, after the better part of a generation, immigration and settlement appeared possible, and at length desirable, the home audience wanted and needed factual descriptions, not fanciful pictures, of the places they thought of going to: Canada, the new United States, or reluctantly enough because of the distance, expense, and irreversibility of such a commitment, Australia. Recalling the dismal pictures of prerevolutionary America suggested in Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village”—

… To distant climes, a dreary scene,
Where half the convex world intrudes between,
Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go, …
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,
And fiercely shed intolerable day;
Those matted woods where birds forget to sing,
But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling,
Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,
Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;
Where at each step the stranger fears to wake
The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,
And savage men, more murderous still than they;
While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,
Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies.(1)

—could Australia as an alternative appear much more attractive?

To leap ahead for just a moment, we can observe that even a hundred years later than the Age of Scott, following in the wake of a quickening of talent in the 1890s and for a brief time afterward, Australian fiction was not in a very flourishing state. The critic-historian Geoffrey Serle, referring to the paucity of serious writing up to and onward through World War I and into the 1920s (after which there occurred a sudden renascence) reports:

Critics would have to agree that relatively half a dozen times as many good novels were written between 1925 and 1940 as between 1900 and 1925. (My own rough count of worthwhile novels in the two periods is fifty-six to thirteen.)²

Today there is no lack of similar quickening on an ever-enlarging scale. Australian writers of fiction range all the way from a “battler” like Kosti Simons, 28-year-old author of Not with a Kiss (1962) who “had the courage to publish and distribute it himself, even to selling copies in person from a booth in a Sydney arcade”³ on up to the winner of a Nobel Prize.

For the better part of a century, in consequence, what we find in the earliest stirrings of Australian fiction, or British fiction in Australia, carries the stamp of utility along with any artfulness with which it may be presented. And British fiction at home, in the latter eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, as we have seen, was a slender reed in itself. Any novel lay under suspicion of being frivolous or else positively corruptive of morals; if fiction indeed was any good at all (as many still doubted), what was it good for? Fictionalized descriptions of a new country could plead utility for themselves (perhaps more convincingly than could delineations of society in the motherland), purporting to answer the natural question, “What's it like out (or over, or down) there?”

Biologically, anthropologically, climatically, the new land of “New Holland” or “New South Wales” was as un-European as any that might be imagined. Into this environment came the First Fleet, which—in functional knowledge of how to cope with what it might find—was as innocent as Adam in Eden, whatever else its shortcomings might have been. But an Australian society at length developed out of the mere fact of European habitation in significant numbers, no matter the original purpose. For a long time it remained economically precarious and stratified along sharp lines between convicts, free settlers, and ex-convicts or “emancipists,” along with a special class of military and civil officers and men, many with families, who arrived and departed with some regularity, whereas most of the others stayed. Fiction in its earliest forms shows these divisions, as revealed for example in the title of Alexander Harris's Settlers and Convicts (1847). Let us here reverse the order of the title (which in Harris's mind would have seemed only natural and proper) and take early convict fiction first.

CONVICT FICTION BEFORE MARCUS CLARKE

Appropriately, the first convict novel (as well as the first novel of any category) to appear in Australia was by a convict, a journalist named Henry Savery transported in 1825 for forgery to Van Diemen's Land (after 1855, officially Tasmania). His book, Quintus Servinton, subtitled “A tale, founded upon incidents of real occurrence,” appeared at Hobart during 1830-31, in three volumes. The first two-thirds or more takes place in England, from where Quintus, also convicted of forgery and having a death sentence commuted to transportation (rather a common occurrence), is sent to New South Wales. There he undergoes numerous privations and personal slights that at one point drive him to attempt suicide.

It was not long after convicts began arriving that the bushranger made his appearance—the escaped convict who, as his name suggests, took to the bush and survived as best he could. Sometimes he associated himself with aboriginals; at other times he might be captured by them and either killed or enslaved. With so limited a society to prey upon, the earliest bushrangers were not very effective as criminals and certainly not very romantic figures; glorification was to be a later development. Revenge against their captors was often bloody, however, and some of the escape narratives contain episodes as lurid as anything from North American records of Indian captivity or flight from black slavery.

Ralph Rashleigh (1844-45) was likewise the production of a convict, James Tucker, transported in 1827 for blackmail. The hero, to begin with, is much less a man put-upon than Savery imagined his hero to be: he is a thief and a trickster, sent out for life. Rashleigh's sufferings in prison or as an assigned laborer intermingle with episodic escapes during which he consorts with bushrangers (fugitives like himself) and aborigines. At length he is pardoned for heroism in rescuing a white woman from the aborigines (a theme that, interestingly enough, appears in a recent novel by Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves, 1976) and becomes thereafter “respected as a man of singular integrity.”

Bushrangers and their victims occupy the full stage in Charles Rowcroft's The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land (1846). In this thriller a ship is pirated by escaped convicts who take the captain's daughter as hostage. The leader of the band is the convict Mark Brandon, capable but quite unscrupulous, who must be hunted down in Cooperesque pursuit before the heroine (Helen) can be delivered from him (and by that time, from a tribe of aborigines as well). Whatever the characterization may have lacked, the story line—and to a degree the setting—did hold interest. “It is worthwhile remarking,” says Cecil Hadgraft, “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.”⁴ Novels written by convicts themselves include one published in the United States in 1879, Moondyne, by John Boyle O'Reilly. Its author, a political prisoner sent to West Australia in 1868 (the last year any convicts arrived from Britain anywhere in Australia) escaped from the timberworkings in southwestern Australia below Perth and, with the help of an American whaler and other ships, made his way to Boston, where he became a well-known poet, editor, and pro-Irish partisan.

Up to this point we have seen that males not only wrote the fiction but were the chief actors in it; that the function of women characters, more often than not, was to be captured and, after suitable hardships, successfully rescued. In the work of John Lang, the first native-born Australian novelist, the woman—suffering though she still may be—takes a somewhat more active role. In The Convict's Wife (alternatively titled Assigned to His Wife; or, the Adventures of George Flowers, the Celebrated Detective Officer) of 1855, the heroine Emily follows her husband, Captain Harcourt, a convicted forger, to Australia. The captain, she learns, has deserted his assigned master, but through the good offices of Flowers, an ex-convict turned detective, he is reassigned to his wife. Incorrigible, Harcourt is finally killed in a fight with Flowers' forces, and we learn at the close that Flowers is Emily's long-lost half brother.

The woman as convict herself (equal opportunity apparently—but not actually—having been achieved) appears in the final story of the group, The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859), by the woman as novelist herself, Caroline W. Leakey. Maida, having been seduced by a charmer named Norwell (like Harcourt, a captain), is doubly betrayed in that she murders her baby and is involved in a forgery as well as associated with the machinations of Norwell. She is transported to Tasmania, where at length Norwell also appears, but he is able to see Maida only in her coffin. This experience is too much, even for so hardened a villain (now repentant, it must be added), and he sinks into madness. As in all these and countless other cautionary tales (and coeval ballads and melodramas), crime rewards the author by allowing him or her to point the moral that it never pays. At the same time, as Brian Elliott reminds us,

Caroline Leakey made a stoic heroine of Maida Gwynnham; in spite of her lapse she retains a proud spirit, a spiritual virginity to the end. Like Clarissa Harlowe, she dies in the grand manner, literally of tuberculosis but spiritually of sheer pride and injured innocence; her death is a purification.⁵

This, however, is as far as the author could go, and that is far short of what was needful. Caroline Leakey's work exemplifies, John Barnes concludes,

… a recurring feature of Australian fiction, particularly fiction written by women during the nineteenth century: the defeat of intelligence by a sentimental notion of fiction. She is an intelligent and thoughtful interpreter of colonial society, but when she consciously sets about writing fiction—creating characters and developing situations—she falsifies, and shamelessly plays upon the emotions of her readers.⁶

SETTLERS' NOVELS TO 1860

Less sensational than the convict novels with which it was contemporary, fiction treating early Australian settlement undertook to be useful as well as entertaining. This was a more difficult task, inasmuch as willing suspension of disbelief was easily granted stories about convicts, of whom nearly anything could be believed and whose repetitious lives in confinement were a natural foil to the liberated sensations of escape into bushranging or piracy. The “system” was quickly understandable, or at least thought to be so. These stories had also the advantages of immediacy and decisiveness: something could be done quickly and finally. Daily life in the settlements, on the other hand, did not proceed at nearly so brisk a rate, partly because it was presumed to be lived for the future as well as for the present. It is hardly surprising, then, to find some of the early chroniclers of pioneering being attracted to sensationalism as a means of gingering up their narratives.

Charles Rowcroft was one such divided author, whose bushranger story we have already encountered. His Tales of the Colonies (1843) uses a splenetic but finally loyal-to-Van-Diemen's-Land character nicknamed Crab to supply the driving force in what might otherwise have been only an immigration tract. “The statistical parts of the book are excrescences,” says H. M. Green,

but they help to give the story its queer, attractive, miscellaneous flavour, and the very lack of arrangement in the miscellany makes it resemble a cross-section of life, though it is life as viewed by a humorist who has no use for the intensities. It is, as Rowcroft intended it to be, a happy life, though it contains plenty of effort and hardship and some disasters, and it would be hard to imagine a stronger enticement to the type of possible immigrant at which it was aimed.⁷

Mary Theresa (Johnson) Vidal, a clergyman's wife who lived in Australia from 1840 to 1845, published three novels after her return to England: Tales for the Bush (1845), Cabramatta (1849), and Bengala (1860). The first two are of the “beware of sin” variety, providing admonitory examples which must be known about to be avoided. The third is somewhat more socially descriptive, having been based on the relationships among the quasi gentry in the district served by her husband. No very vigorous claim has been made for the merits of her work.

The writer who offers the most typical promotion-type novels is Alexander Harris, author of Settlers and Convicts (1847) and The Emigrant Family (1849), both accessible in modern reprints. In the first of these, he brings a young man to New South Wales at about age twenty and keeps him there some fifteen years (1825-40) during which time he is able to establish himself as a comfortable, even rather well-to-do pastoralist with a growing family. More of lasting interest, the novel reports in considerable detail the routine life of the period as well as the various types of people encountered. The Emigrant Family is a more conscious example of guidebook fiction, though not without the machinery of a conventional novel. Of its comparative merits, Hadgraft writes:

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 unattractive 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.⁸

Harris's works have been valued by social historians for fidelity to everyday life, but they are clearly not books to be read for depth of characterization or subtlety of plot. The Emigrant Family, says W. S. Ramson,

… is individual, owing little to earlier novels and too little known itself to have influenced later. Its peculiar strength derives from the way in which Harris's “Australian experience” informed his vision of colonial society and gave it a universal application; humble as the novel is in origin, and imperfect in execution, this vision remains of no little interest.⁹

PRE-FEDERATION FICTION

Do not go to the ordinary novel for your ideas on the subject of Australia. Even David Copperfield is misleading. Now-a-days Mr. Micawber would be more likely to get into the Insolvency Court than the Commission of Peace.

—Edward Kinglake (Useful Hints to Those Intending to Settle in Australia, 1891)

Early Australian fiction relates closely to the literary modes and expectations of the British eighteenth century: what induced men and women in that age to write? For one thing, close association with one another, of the kind that invited recording of opinion and emotional response to events and people. For another, an audience that natural growth, along with mercantile prosperity, had enlarged and broadened. Few may have cared very deeply about society's misfits after they had been safely transported to the other side of the earth, but there was still a lingering curiosity to be satisfied. This could be built upon, as writers all the way back to Daniel Defoe and John Gay realized; the affairs of criminals command a perennial fascination.

Probably the one most powerful stimulus to something more than piecemeal reporting, however, was the discovery of gold both in Victoria and New South Wales. After 1850, it was only a question of time, and a brief time at that, before Australia would become a separate nation. By the 1890s, the sentiment for independence was common in literary as well as political works. “There is, in truth,” said an anonymous writer in The Australasian Critic of November 1, 1890,

… so wide and healthful an eclecticism of style among our rising writers that it seems useless to search for any common feature which may be taken as promise of a future national school. But in regard to subject matter, however wide their range may be, and however various their methods of treatment, they all are marked by a restless, and sometimes unnecessary, patriotism.¹⁰

TOWARD PROFESSIONALISM: EARLY ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN NOVELISTS

In the middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the pioneer-turned-writer persisted, but the demand for Australian fiction was already coming to be supplied (and in part created as well) by men who made their living by the pen and were identifiable first of all as writers. All of them were English, at least to begin with, and two of them—Henry Kingsley and Anthony Trollope, highly esteemed novelists in Britain—were brief visitors only. Marcus Clarke and Rolf Bolderwood (T. A. Browne), on the other hand, were migrants arriving in childhood or early young manhood and remaining to establish literary careers. The first of this group, Henry Kingsley, is known to Australians for his novel Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859). Kingsley spent five years in Australia during the 1850s but chose to set his novel earlier, in the 1830s, for socially strategic purposes. Other English novelists, using the Australian setting, like Charles Reade whose It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), were able—if they worked at it—to derive their facts from a growing mass of travel literature, sharply augmented by the gold rushes of the 1850s. Reade wrote to William Howitt, speaking of preparing to write It Is Never Too Late to Mend, “To avoid describing Hyde Park and calling it Australia, I read some thirty books about that country; but yours was infinitely the best.”¹¹ Charles Dickens, not unsimilarly, having originally formed an opinion of Australia as no more than a prison, changed his ideas through contacts with Samuel Sidney (an English writer on Australia) and Caroline Chisholm. Thus, in sending the Micawbers of David Copperfield (1850) to Australia, he was consigning them to a “lesser world,” not the ends of the earth.

The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, which takes its title from the narrator, not from a hero, transplants (transports is a forbidden term in this particular context!) an entire set of upper-class English families—the Buckleys, Brentwoods, and Thorntons—to Victoria and establishes them in squatterdom¹² without very much exposition. (Kingsley explains that his interests are social rather than environmental, but the background does make some demands, which are met.) Class distinctions are obvious, and noblesse oblige ensures both that English social institutions are maintained, even in the bush, and that the challenge of the bushrangers is sternly faced, captives (women and others) being released and order restored. Kingsley's craftsmanship is more than adequate to the production of a still-readable novel; and it is instructive to observe in it the aristocratic ideals that for one reason or another—chiefly the gold rushes, which Kingsley observed while resident in Australia but chose not to write about—did not thrive on Australian soil.

Violence, which the gold rushes undoubtedly helped produce (though the mining camps themselves were generally not socially anarchic), figures in the work of Kingsley and of the next two writers, Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood. Clarke arrived in Melbourne at age seventeen and became a journalist there, showing abundant and versatile talent as well as great promise, but died at thirty-five. [For the Term of] His Natural Life (serialized 1870-71, published 1874, republished many times later—bibliographically complicated by changes in title and ending) is the convict novel par excellence. It recounts the sufferings of Richard Devine, who is mistakenly convicted of a crime (murder or robbery—the versions differ) and who as Rufus Dawes is transported for life in 1827, undergoing all the worst indignities and brutalities of convict life. Romance is present as well, however, and in the end (the first ending, that is) Dawes/Devine is vindicated. But Clarke seems to have wondered whether genuine rescue from so thoroughgoing a hell is really possible, and the second reading is tragic. Tragic also is the career of the Reverend James North, prison chaplain, whose ambivalent feelings and escapes into alcoholism are revealed through a diary. Dawes's persecutor, Lieutenant Frere, is the embodiment of everything monstrous in the convict system, believable chiefly in the sense that Victorian villains were at least meant to be believed in. The total monstrousness of the system itself is described in these terms as Dawes arrives in Van Diemen's Land:

We have already a notion of what life on a convict ship means; and we have seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had passed before he set foot on the barren shore of Hell's Gates. But to appreciate in its intensity the agony he had suffered since that time, we must multiply the infamy of the 'tween decks of the Malabar an hundred fold. In that prison was at least some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were not utterly lost to shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamous the companionship, terrible the memory of past happiness—there was yet ignorance of the future, there was yet hope. But at Macquarie Harbour was poured out the very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst had come, and the worst must for ever remain. The pit of torment was so deep that one could not even see Heaven. There was no hope there so long as life remained. Death alone kept the keys of that island prison.

Is it possible to imagine, even for a moment, what an innocent man, gifted with ambition, endowed with power to love and to respect, must have suffered during one week of such punishment? We ordinary men, leading ordinary lives—walking, riding, laughing, marrying and giving in marriage—can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideas we may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evil company inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained and degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to our daily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whom all that savours of decency and manliness is held in an open scorn, we should die, perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know, how unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beings as those who dragged the tree trunks to the banks of the Gordon, and toiled, blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandpit of Sarah Island. No human creature could describe to what depth of personal abasement and self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him. Even if he had the power to write, he dared not.¹³

Clarke wrote stories, narrative sketches, criticism, and indeed ranged through all the literary genres, but his reputation rests mainly on his one prodigious novel which has been read as a primary indictment of British official cruelty for over a hundred years.

Anthony Trollope, whose travel works make lively reading along with his novels, visited Australia at the time Clarke's novel was appearing in the Australian Journal. The fact that he had arranged a formal contract with his publishers to write on Australia and New Zealand is a measure of the interest being taken by then in “Our Antipodes,” as these colonies were sometimes called; and the books he produced no doubt helped increase this interest, for he liked much of what he saw. A son, Frederick, had gone out to New South Wales in 1863, forming another link, and Trollope made a second visit in 1875. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Bush Life, first published in the London Graphic (1873) as a Christmas story, is a novelette in which a station hand dismissed by the young squatter Harry Heathcote plots with an ex-convict neighbor to burn Harry's property. This they attempt on Christmas Day (a very hot, dry time of year in the southern hemisphere) but are unsuccessful: a free-selector (homesteader) neighbor, Giles Medlicot, helps Harry put out the fire and at the ensuing Christmas dinner is rewarded by being accepted as suitor by Harry's sister-in-law, Kate. In summary, says Coral Lansbury,

It was a slight story, carried by little more than the pace of its narrative. The characters were pasteboard, the incidents stereotypes of Australian fiction. But as a Christmas ornament it served well enough and was less contrived and mawkish than the contemporary blight of Christmas novelettes.¹⁴

John Caldigate (1879) is a fortune-from-Australian-gold story embroidered with complications resulting from an Australian mistress who shows up in England to cast a shadow over John's marriage there.

The egalitarian nature of Australian society affronted Trollope personally, [says Dr. Lansbury] but he saw its advantages for black sheep of good families who would soon take on the uniform grey of an Australian flock. Despite the experiences of his own son [who lost money both for his father and himself as a grazier], Trollope believed that it was a country where a man could restore his fortune and return eventually to England.¹⁵

Last in the quartet of Anglo-Australians is Rolf Boldrewood, whose transit to Australia occurred when he was so very young that he has a claim to have been the most nearly native of the group. He can be said, also, to have lived his novels more completely than they, having been a squatter, goldfields official, and police inspector. He began publishing at about age fifty, and during the final forty years of a very long life, he remained a prolific writer with his best work appearing in the 1880s and 1890s: Robbery under Arms (serialized 1882-83, published in book form 1888) and The Miner's Right (1890).

Robbery under Arms, exactly contemporary with Huckleberry Finn, missed being an Australian counterpart to Mark Twain's masterpiece by not too wide a margin. It begins in an engaging colloquial style, first person, and contains adventures enough: midnight chases through bush and mountains on horseback, cattle stealing, coach robbing (including seizures of gold), race meetings, even a short spell of obtaining gold the hard way by mining it, and so forth. Unfortunately, however, Boldrewood's energy or his perception flagged, and the narrator, Dick Marston, is inconsistent enough in style to mar the total effect. Two examples, one from the opening chapter and another from Chapter 50, near the end, will show the difference:

It's more than hard to die in this settled, infernal, fixed sort of way, like a bullock in the killing-yard, all ready to be “pithed.” I used to pity them when I was a boy, walking round the yard, pushing their noses through the rails, trying for a likely place to jump, stamping and pawing and roaring and knocking their heads against the heavy close rails, with misery and rage in their eyes till their time was up. Nobody told them beforehand, though.¹⁶

It all passed like a dream. The court was crowded till there wasn't standing room, every one wanting to get a look at Dick Marston, the famous bush-ranger. The evidence didn't take so very long. I was proved to have been seen with the rest the day the escort was robbed; the time the four troopers were shot. I was suspected of being concerned in Hagan's party's death, and half-a-dozen other things. Last of all, when Sub-Inspector Goring was killed, and a trooper, besides two others badly wounded.¹⁷

It could be said, on the other hand, that no such inconsistency interrupts the career and deportment of Captain Starlight, gentleman bushranger and the ideal outlaw which some Australians still mistakenly appear to believe Ned Kelly was. Foreseeing that capture and trial inevitably must tarnish so bright an image, Boldrewood had the sound judgment to let him die with his boots on, mourned by his mates if not by all his victims. Dick Marston, the survivor of two brothers gradually drawn into Starlight's golden web, provides the requisite amount of penitence and the resolution to serve out his sentence (commuted from hanging) and then go straight—straight into the arms of Gracie, the sweetheart who has dutifully waited for him.

At one point in Robbery under Arms, Dick Marston, recounting some feat of extraordinary horsemanship, is made to exclaim, “My word, Australia is a horsey country and no mistake!” This amounts to a tacit admission that the early-modern Australian novel, and indeed some representatives of the near-contemporary as well, did rely pretty heavily upon the convention that later, in film, was to be the stock-in-trade of the American western. This, and some other developing stereotypes, did not go unnoticed, as we can see from a quatrain contributed to A. G. Stephens's magazine the Bookfellow at the turn of the century by a versifier signing himself “R. H. C.”:

Whaler,(18) damper, swag and nosebag, johnny-cakes and billy-tea,
Murrumburrah, Meremendicookwoke, Yoularbudgeree,
Cattle-duffers, bold bushrangers, diggers, drovers, bush race-courses,
And on all the other pages, horses, horses, horses horses.(19)

The Miner's Right, told also in the first person (by a young Englishman, Hereward Pole), takes the narrator to the goldfields to win his fortune and thus qualify for the hand of Ruth, daughter of Squire Allerton of Allerton Court, “a grand old Elizabethan pile” in southeastern England. There are exciting episodes, as in Robbery under Arms: a court trial, false accusations to impede the path of true love, and of special interest, a great deal about the day-to-day practicalities of gold mining. Hereward does well, and all ends well, as one comes to expect long before the end.

Whatever the nineteenth-century Australian novel may have lacked, it was not variety of style. Consider, for example, these two passages from The Miner's Right:

“That's Harry Pole, of No. 4. Liberator, and the best claim on Greenstone atop of it,” said an old Yatala shepherd, charmed to have the opportunity of explanation. “Richest claim on the lead, but disputed. Got £20,000 in the bank, and two thousand ounces in that bloomin' escort. Very awkward, ain't it?”

“What's he want to go to town for?” queried a cynical listener. “What 'ud you or I, mate, want to go to town for, supposin't we washed up once a fortnight to that tune? Wants to have his 'air cut Paris-fashion, or to see the theayter, or leave his card on the Governor-General, may be.”²⁰

The sun-god of the south, celestial, effulgent, rose on the most entrancing day that had dawned since first the summer breeze whispered to the ocean 'neath the lone headlands or by the silver sands of Rose Bay; surely on that charmed strand the fays of the southern main first danced to the mystic morn. Clear and bright as the “gold bar of heaven” I watched God's glorious messenger of light and warmth majestically uprise through an azure cloudless sky.²¹

“What's he want to go to England for?” a cynical critic might well have queried. “Wants to have his prose style cut London-fashion, may be.”

Summing up, Alan Brissenden credits Boldrewood with being

… a sympathetic recorder of the pastoral society of the 1850s and 1860s, especially of Western Victoria, and books like The Miner's Right [1890] and Nevermore [1892] are rich in detail of mining life. His romantic novels are examples of current fashion, not noticeably good, and occasionally as in War to the Knife [1899] downright bad. He is best when he writes of historical events and from his own experience, worst when he writes of what he knows only in his imagination. He was primarily a journalist who aimed to please the public because he needed to make money; in this he succeeded, moderately before Macmillan published Robbery under Arms, and then beyond all his hopes and expectations.²²

Notes

1. Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village” (1770), lines 341-58. The “matted woods where birds forget to sing”—apparently Georgia, where in fact the mockingbird performs particularly well—were to appear later in Australia, far down into the next century: a hundred years after Goldsmith, the immigrant poet Adam Lindsay Gordon penned a much-resented libel on Australian nature: “… lands where bright blossoms are scentless, / And songless bright birds.”

   Settlers, Convicts, and Early Narratives

2. Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972 (Melbourne, 1973), p. 119.

3. Australian Book Review, February 1963, p. 70.

4. Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature: A Critical Account to 1955 (London, 1961), p. 12.

5. Brian Elliott, Marcus Clarke (Oxford, 1958), p. 148.

6. John Barnes, “Australian Fiction to 1920,” in The Literature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 161.

7. H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, 2 vols. (Sydney, 1961), 1:89.

8. Hadgraft, Australian Literature, p. 18.

9. W. S. Ramson, ed., The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels (Canberra, 1974), p. 18.

   Pre-Federation Fiction

   Epigraph: From Bill Wannan, Dictionary of Australian Humorous Quotations and Anecdotes (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1974).

10. John Barnes, ed., The Writer in Australia: A Collection of Literary Documents 1855-1964 (Melbourne, 1969), p. 47.

11. John Barnes, Henry Kingsley and Colonial Fiction (Melbourne: Oxford, 1971), p. 37. Henry David Thoreau received his ideas about behavior on the goldfields, castigated in “Life without Principle,” from an American edition of Howitt's Land, Labour and Gold (1855).

12. Squatter, it must be remembered, meant “large landholder”—the proprietor of a sheep run stocking thousands—rather than “small farmer” (later “selector,” the counterpart in some ways of the American homesteader). He squatted in the sense that usually he leased his vast acreage rather than actually owning it, though part of a run might be freehold.

13. The Portable Marcus Clarke, ed. Michael Wilding (St. Lucia, 1976), pp. 106-7.

14. Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), pp. 131-32.

15. Ibid., p. 134.

16. Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under Arms (London: Macmillan's Colonial Library, 1898), p. 2.

17. Ibid., pp. 392-93.

18. Itinerant.

19. A. W. Jose, The Romantic Nineties (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933), p. 10.

20. Rolf Boldrewood, The Miner's Right (London: Macmillan, 1927), p. 160.

21. Ibid., p. 379.

22. Alan Brissenden, Rolf Boldrewood (Melbourne, 1972), pp. 42-43.