SOURCE: Serle, Geoffrey. “Later Colonial c. 1850-1885.” In From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972, pp. 31-51. Melbourne: William Heineman, 1973.

[In the following excerpt, Serle discusses significant Australian poets and novelists of the late colonial period.]

Judith Wright has discerned a duality which is reflected in a large part of Australian literature: firstly, ‘the reality of exile’; secondly, ‘the reality of newness and freedom’. Australia has been both a society of transplanted Europeans and a new country with a novel contribution to make to the world. The conservative has seen it as a country to escape from or at best endure; the radical has seen it as a country of hope, of liberty and a new chance. The one literary tradition began with the ‘violent response of the European consciousness’ to the Australian scene; the cry of the exile, of the second-hand European on alien shores, has continued down to Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Martin Boyd's novels and Patrick White's Voss. The other tradition of radical optimism may be said to begin with Harpur's poetry, flourished in the Bulletin school and continued in such writers as Vance Palmer.¹

Cecil Hadgraft makes the striking statement—for the sake of argument, but asserting it can be broadly maintained—that poets in Australia may be divided chronologically into English poets, Australian poets, and poets.² The derivative note was inevitable for a start; it would be long before the literary English manner of describing Australia gave way to a natural Australian manner. The first natural model was the eighteenth century; the Romantics were slow to make their way, but nearly all the later nineteenth century poets may fairly be described as colonial Romantics. And nearly all their work may be described as a ‘poetry of exiles’; as H. M. Green says, ‘it still hovered between the old and the new worlds, trying to sing of one in terms of the other and finding unnatural what was unexpected’.³ Some of it was nostalgic for Old England, but much of it, while it necessarily followed English models, earnestly strove to describe and interpret the local scene—and often with pride and affection.

It was not literally a poetry of exile if only because the two best colonial poets, Harpur and Kendall, were native-born. Charles Harpur (1813-68), son of a convict schoolmaster, was a clerk, teacher, farmer and goldfields commissioner. He probably had a fair basic education and went on so to educate himself that he eventually published translations of the Iliad. Harpur has been generally accepted as a minor poet, though significant because he made the great effort to see without the inherited spectacles. He owed much to Wordsworth (especially his attitude to Nature), Milton and Shelley. It is commonly said that he failed to break away from the spirit and diction of the English masters he studied, that his verse had some marked qualities but was bookish, antiquated, abstract, artificial. He is also accepted as a man with the noble but crazy ambition to be the first authentic voice of Australia, a national laureate, who lived the life of a poet and hated the petty materialism around him, who with great dedication tried to lay the basis of an Australian poetry and compelled the attention of at least a few to the phenomenon of poetry in a new country. He was also a radical political pamphleteer and activist who dreamed of Australia as a cradle of liberty. ‘Proud, impulsive, and hyper-sensitive,’ writes T. Inglis Moore, ‘he felt deeply the humiliations suffered through being the son of convict parents as well as being native-born at a time when currency lads were scorned by immigrant critics, of struggling as a poverty-stricken farmer, and of meeting either neglect as a poet or the venous hostility of [journalists]’.⁴ Judith Wright has made a case for according him more recognition than he has usually received. Much of his best work has never been published; his attempts to depict the landscape, especially his stress on the light and the solitude, have been under-appreciated; he had a splendid ear and appreciation of language; and he recognized the problems of being an Australian poet, seeing himself as drawing on the English tradition while striving to find an Australian voice. And what was his audience, where was it? Wright sees him as the first and one of the most illuminating examples of the Australian split-consciousness—and as faced with the impossibility of acceptance as an Australian poet in a period when Europe (and therefore Australia) derided the possibility even of an American poet. As he bitterly and ironically wrote:

While others dip their fleecy flocks, and store
Bright gold, I've only so much verse the more. …
A vagrant, and the cause still, all along,
This damned unconquerable love of song.(5)

Henry Kendall (1839-82) admired and respected Harpur as the founder of a tradition. Modern critics are usually hard on Kendall. His talent is admitted, but he is regarded as having seen Australia almost wholly in terms of the English poetry in which he had saturated himself, especially Shelley and Tennyson. His verse is full of Romantic diction—dell, brook, lea, rill, glen, vale and so on. Nevertheless, he tried desperately to assimilate the local scene and wrote some semi-colloquial ballads. His descriptive lyric poetry, ‘channels of coolness’ full of mountains and waterfalls and ‘woodland music’, is a product of coastal New South Wales, though he also wrote much about the hell of the Inland, of which he knew nothing. As H. M. Green says, his Leaves from an Australian Forest (1869) may be claimed as an Australian work as no other had yet been; he did unveil part of the face.⁶ He even won some recognition as a national poet; many people believed he was describing Australia well. He was limited in range, according to Brian Elliott, with

no formed philosophy, no conspicuous intellect, only an abundance of poetic feeling. … He came too late in the colonial period to be able to rest at ease upon inherited tradition, yet as a native poet he was born too early to find support in a cultural system based upon local experience. He was of the generation which failed because it possessed neither a clear inheritance nor an established confidence.⁷

It remains to be said that he was probably the best nineteenth century Australian poet, who earned inclusion in Palgrave's Golden Treasury and The Oxford Book of English Verse.⁸

Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) is a very different type, the poet of action who had been a boxer, mounted trooper, horse-breaker and famous rider. He was indeed a migrant exile and very derivative—especially from Byron, Swinburne, Tennyson and Browning—so much so that there are elements of plagiarism in his work. He has been a worry to the critics, mainly because he was two poets—one serious and one popular. His serious work was little known, met with little response, and is generally held to be mediocre. Yet over the years a few critics have judged ‘The Rhyme of the Joyous Garde’ (about Lancelot), an example of his search for a refuge in medieval idealism, to be very good indeed. His popular verse is just that—pleasant jingling—but significant in that it introduced the bush-ballad, from which so much sprang. And whatever the quality of the verse, Brian Elliott stresses his original use of landscape imagery:

Nothing in all Colonial poetry matches in importance Gordon's signal achievement, the fixation of the Australian image. Emotionally, he simply spoke as he felt: the mood of his best work is conversational; its philosophy stoically grim, but spontaneously articulate; its visionary content based upon a broad impressionism; the keynote brightness and sunlight, starlight, a high luminosity in the air.⁹

The fascinating question is why, after his suicide, he became in a real sense the national poet, almost the mouthpiece of a generation. It seems odd, as so much of his popular verse is so English—even ‘How We Beat the Favourite’ is set in England—seems odd if we forget how many of this generation were English migrants. The extraordinary culmination of his posthumous career was the enshrinement of his bust in Westminster Abbey in 1934 as Australia's National Poet. There are many explanations. His personal story made him a legend, ‘a kind of second-hand Byron’. He was the poet of the horse—and the horse was all-important in nineteenth century Australia. ‘The Sick Stockrider’, though stilted and derivative in some respects, was also highly original. He reached a mass audience through the sporting press in which much of his verse was first published. And his moralizing struck a common chord. Some elements of the bush frame of mind were reflected in platitudinous verses like ‘Life is mostly froth and bubble, / Two things stand like stone, / Kindness in another's trouble, / Courage in your own’, or ‘For good undone and gifts misspent and resolutions vain, / 'Tis somewhat late to trouble. This I know—I should live the same life over, if I had to live again; / And the chances are I go where most men go.’ And he had twenty years start on ‘Banjo’ Paterson, who was a greatly superior popular poet and exponent of the bush ethos. He appealed to the homestead as well as the men's quarters, and he fitted in closely with what the Anglo-Australian thought an Australian poet should be like. He was the popular poet Australia needed at the time.¹⁰

Of the scores of other verse-writers, perhaps only Brunton Stephens deserves mention as a poet. In 1888, cashing in on the centennial and new British interest in the Empire, D. B. W. Sladen published no fewer than three anthologies of Australasian verse, all full of rubbish. One reviewer was Oscar Wilde, who remarked that it was ‘interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree, gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves, and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless raptures of the mopoke’. Wilde found a ‘depressing provinciality of mood and manner’, but warmly praised Kendall and Gordon.¹¹

The few colonial novelists up to the 1850s usually wrote fictionalized autobiography and—Catherine Spence apart, perhaps—were quite lacking in creative imagination. The popular English novelists, Charles Reade and Bulwer Lytton, wrote celebrated novels about Australia without ever having been there, and Dickens introduced Australia several times into his novels. In the 70s Anthony Trollope wrote the lightweight Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and John Caldigate after a visit which also produced his very fine Australia and New Zealand. The three outstanding colonial novelists were Kingsley, Clarke and Boldrewood. The subjects of their three famous books were pastoral life, the convict system and bushranging, which were indeed the staple subject-matter of the great bulk of colonial novels.

Henry Kingsley (1830-76), brother of the clergyman, novelist and reformer, Charles Kingsley, spent five years in Victoria as a gold-digger, mounted policeman and guest of gentlemanly squatters. On his return to England he published in 1859 Geoffry Hamlyn, which he had possibly begun in Australia. It is a romantic adventure story ‘for boys of all ages’, a very readable melodramatic yarn and no more, but full of vigour and zest. There is little attempt at realism or serious observation; the novel was skilfully written for the popular English market to make money he desperately needed, in the conventions set by Reade, Dickens and Lytton. His attitudes are those of the English landed gentry; his characters mostly stem from good county families; his muscular Christian heroes all achieve happiness while the villains die. Young gentlemen go to the colonies to make their fortunes, have exciting adventures and return with their hopes fulfilled; Kingsley himself knew better. Joseph Furphy in Such Is Life could not stomach ‘the slender-witted, virgin-souled overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley's exceedingly trashy and misleading novel’. It is difficult to see how anyone could who demands any reasonable degree of reality in novels. But what Kingsley did do was to display all the properties of the pastoral novel—a bushfire, attack by Aborigines, a fight with bushrangers, a lost child—which ultimately became clichés. He did incidentally include some genuine atmosphere and depicted at least one Dinkum Aussie quite well. Geoffry Hamlyn immediately became and long remained a popular Australian classic and was praised in the highest terms by Clarke and Boldrewood.¹²

Marcus Clarke (1846-81) migrated to Victoria at the age of seventeen and soon became a brilliant journalist. His Natural Life—written by the age of twenty-five, it should be noticed—was published as a serial in 1870-71 in 280,000 words, nearly 900 pages in the recent Penguin edition. He then heavily cut and altered for the book version usually published. It is a powerful exposure of the convict-system, a study in unrelieved brutality, full of suspense and horror, rambling, verbose and melodramatic. But he could write; he was strong on characterization; he had a plot, however improbable; he had compassion and savage awareness. He was a serious writer as none of the other colonial novelists were; this was a major study in injustice and evil. It stood far above anything contemporary, and triumphed over its glaring faults. Clarke had intellect, and something to say. He is one of the many examples in Australian literature of great talent without the opportunity or peace of mind to fully realize that talent—but at least he had sufficient determination to produce one work which borders on greatness.¹³

‘Rolf Boldrewood’ (T. A. Browne, 1826-1915) emigrated as a four-year-old; Australia was always home to him. He was a squatter for twenty-five years through the golden age of pastoralism, then a mining warden and magistrate. The first of his dozen or so novels was published locally in 1878; Robbery Under Arms appeared as a serial in 1882-3 and as a book in 1888; and he wrote on past 1900. But he looked back to the great days of his youth and did not reflect at all the vast changes in life and literature late in the century of which he disapproved. He was a born story-teller who owed a large debt to Sir Walter Scott and the English romantic novel of adventure, but, strong on action, weak on character, he had no depth. Robbery Under Arms, his only important work, is essentially a good thriller, though Hadgraft perhaps depreciates it too much in describing it as ‘the best Australian counterpart of the good American Western’. In his squatting novels (though less so in Robbery Under Arms), Boldrewood writes from the viewpoint of the pastoral aristocracy, as one who defended patriarchal order and detested democracy. And yet, his commonest theme is the successful migrant, he is extremely proud of Australia as the land of opportunity, and implicitly condemns English upper-class values and the injustices of that class-ridden society. Despite his romantic conventions, he is something of a realist and naturalist, with an obtrusive element of guidebook justification of Australia. He wrote both for Australian and English readers, as an Australian patriot. His are the first entirely recognizable native-born Australians in Australian fiction; he uses many colloquialisms and comes close to catching the tone of popular speech (in so far as we can judge what it was then like). Boldrewood's works provide the key-study of the transition between migrant and native writers.¹⁴

Almost the only other notable novelists of the colonial period were three ladies writing very popular Anglo-Australian romances in the 80s and 90s. Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), an Anglican clergyman's wife, wrote nineteen novels, of which The Three Miss Kings is perhaps the best. ‘She was at the same time’, says Green, ‘a conservative and prejudiced aristocrat, a hater of shams and injustice, and a sincere and sympathetic humanitarian’;¹⁵ her poetry also shows her as a bold rebel on some social questions. The prolific Mrs Campbell Praed (1851-1935), who was born in Queensland but left for Europe in 1876, wrote more than forty novels of which nearly half relate to Australia.¹⁶Policy and Passion, on bush life and politics, stands out as the best of her works. ‘Tasma’, Jessie Couvreur (1848-97), also left for Europe as a young woman and subsequently drew on her experiences, notably in Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill, which is witty, excellent in characterization and a classic portrait of the self-made colonial tycoon. All three authors were Anglo-Australians between two worlds, writing for the English market and tending to explain and justify colonials, and also, perhaps, writing mainly for women. All three are more interesting as people and as women than as novelists, for they are infuriating in the contrast between their acute intelligence and intellectual depth, displayed in excellent passages of insight, and their romantic tripy plots. They were bound, however, by the conventions of polite female fiction and were, perhaps, more satirical than we know.

Thus, the literary achievement of the first century amounted to very little, and the 70s and early 80s seems to be a disappointing marking-time period, especially in poetry. The only native-born novelist of the slightest consequence was Mrs Praed, and she was living in Europe. One curious aspect of the novels as a whole is how backward-looking they were, how little they reflected contemporary life, and how little of Australian spirit or idealism they showed, how the Bulletin school was almost totally unanticipated. In particular, it was odd that there had been so little attempt to create fiction from mining life, despite all its excitement and fascinating reversal of accustomed social relationships.

Notes

1. Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Introduction, quotes from pp. xi, xiv

2. Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature, London, 1960, p. 4

3. Green, History of Australian Literature, i, p. 138

4. T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, p. 150

5. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, ch. 1; J. Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur, an Australian, Sydney, 1962

6. Green, History of Australian Literature, i, p. 143

7. Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, pp. 118-19

8. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, ch. 2; Elliott, Landscape; T. T. Reed (ed.), The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall, Adelaide, 1966; A. D. Hope, ‘Henry Kendall: a Dialogue with the Past’, Southerly, 1972, no. 3

9. Elliott, The Literature of Australia, Dutton ed., p. 241

10. Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, ch. 5; Leonie Kramer, ‘The Literary Reputation of Adam Lindsay Gordon’, Aust. Literary Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, June 1963

11. Oscar Wilde, Reviews, London, 1910, pp. 370-71

12. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, pp. 60-62; John Barnes, Henry Kingsley and Colonial Fiction, Melbourne, 1971; Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 118-22

13. Brian Elliott, Marcus Clarke, Oxford, 1958; Stephen Murray-Smith, Introduction to His Natural Life, Penguin, 1970

14. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, pp. 36-7, 62-6; Hadgraft, Australian Literature, pp. 49-52

15. Green, History of Australian Literature, i, p. 246

16. Colin Roderick, In Mortal Bondage. The Strange Life of Rosa Praed, Sydney, 1948

Bibliography

The leading critical works on which much of this book has been based are as follows:

Literature

H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, 2 vols., Sydney, 1961

E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935, 2 vols., Melbourne, 1940. Extended to 1950 and ed. by Frederick T. Macartney, Sydney, 1956

Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), The Literature of Australia, Melbourne, 1964

Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Melbourne, 1965

A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, Melbourne, 1958

Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, Melbourne, 1967

John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia. A Collection of Literary Documents 1856 to 1964, Melbourne, 1969

T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Sydney, 1971

G. A. Wilkes and J. C. Reid, The Literatures of the British Commonwealth. Australia and New Zealand, Pennsylvania, 1970

The files of Meanjin Quarterly, Southerly, Australian Literary Studies, Quadrant, Overland and other periodicals contain many important articles to which it has been impracticable to refer in the following notes.

The Pelican Literature of Australia (ed. Dutton) contains invaluable lists of the leading works by and commentaries on writers to 1964. Hence, in the following notes, I have referred only to works which have been of outstanding assistance to me, full-scale biographies where they exist, and the more important critical work since 1964.

Drama

Leslie Rees, Towards an Australian Drama, Sydney, 1953. (A revised edition is to be published shortly under the title, The Making of Australian Drama.)

General

A. L. McLeod (ed.), The Pattern of Australian Culture, Melbourne and Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, has some useful chapters. The only general historian of Australia who has paid any sustained attention to the development of culture is C. Hartley Grattan in his The Southwest Pacific to 1900 and The Southwest Pacific since 1900, Ann Arbor, 1963. (Grattan is the only important modern foreign observer of Australia.)

For short biographies of nearly everyone mentioned in this book before the 1930s, see Australian Dictionary of Biography (ed. D. Pike) and P. Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography. For writers, see also the works referred to above by Green, Morris Miller and Macartney, and L. J. Blake, Australian Writers, Adelaide, 1968. For artists, see the works referred to above by Bernard Smith, Hughes, Moore and McCulloch.