[In the following essay, Wilkes observes that the enduring quality of Geoffry Hamlyn lies in Kingsley's mythic treatment of the Australian landscape in the novel.]

Of all the Australian novels that have achieved a reputation, Henry Kingsley's The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn is among the least demanding. “He has his brother's power of describing”, Alexander Macmillan wrote in 1858, giving his impressions of the manuscript, “but he does not write in the same style at all; it is wonderfully quiet and yet powerful—a kind of lazy strength which is very charming; some of the characters too are drawn with a masterly hand”.¹ This impression of leisureliness is still the dominant one given by the book. Published in 1859, it went into a second edition within a year, and was later described by Marcus Clarke as “the best Australian novel that has been, and probably will be written”, and by Rolf Boldrewood as “that immortal work, the best Australian novel and for long the only one”.²Geoffry Hamlyn duly took its place in both World's Classics and Everyman's Library, and has remained steadily in print for over a hundred years.

The latter part of this period has seen a divergence between the opinions of readers and critics of the book. With readers it has enjoyed a continuing vogue, but no critic has been found to endorse the judgements of Clarke and Boldrewood. Some responsibility for this lies with Joseph Furphy, whose hostile view of Kingsley became more influential as Such is Life advanced in critical esteem. What is more interesting is that critics favourably disposed to Geoffry Hamlyn have been at a loss to know what to say about it. It is usual to praise Kingsley's minor characters, to remark his fitful skill in narrative and pay tribute to his descriptive powers, and perhaps commend the book as an “exhilarating and original romance”.³ The novel itself persists from edition to edition; while the various critical comments have their validity, they do not really explain why.

We may work towards an answer by first considering the antipathy to Geoffry Hamlyn conveyed in Furphy's Such is Life. Furphy makes clear what the novel is not. Lacking the “temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian” that he claimed for his own work, it presented a conception of Australian life that moved him to protest and parody. Furphy prolongs the history of the Buckley family into Such is Life, describing how “Hungry Buckley of Baroona—a gentleman addicted to high living and extremely plain thinking—had been snuffed-out by apoplexy … some time in the early 'sixties, after seeing Baroona pass, by foreclosure, to the hands of a brainy and nosey financier”.⁴ His son, after being “something indefinite in a bank”, was reduced to blacksmith work; his daughter, after burying three husbands, became “gentlewoman” housekeeper at a station property—the Maud Beaudesart of Runnymede. Such is Life is full of the contempt for the “gentleman” of colonial fiction, who from riding at hounds in England is assumed to have an easy mastery of bush horsemanship, and for squatters of “the Geoffry Hamlyn class”, those “slender-witted, virgin-souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley's exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle”.⁵

Furphy's criticism, in essence, is that Geoffry Hamlyn presents a generally misleading version of Australian life, and one specifically distorted in exhibiting the English gentry—incompetent bushmen—in command of the colonial terrain. Some condescension to genuine Australians is implicit. This is of course the typical reproach made of writing of the Anglo-Australian period by critics regarding it from the vantage-point of the 1890s or later. The view is still commonly held that novels such as Geoffry Hamlyn were influential in “postponing the recognition in literature of the realities of the Australian experience until the generation to which Lawson and Furphy belonged”.⁶ Such strictures depend in turn on assumptions about the nature of the “real Australia”—assumptions which are generally silent, so that they may control the discussion without themselves becoming available for scrutiny. To equate the “real Australia” with the experiences of the 1890s is merely to identify the stereotype one prefers: otherwise argument should be offered to show why life in Australia in the feudal conditions before the gold rush was somehow less “real” or less “Australian”, for its period, than the conditions that followed.

The singularity of Geoffry Hamlyn begins to emerge once it is set against Kingsley's other Australian writings. Complaining of Kingsley's failure to “tell the truth” of his Australian experiences in Geoffry Hamlyn, Dr Coral Lansbury has pointed out that had he done so, he “would have been forced to speak of a young man's hopes of wealth that would rival his brother's fame, of the grinding toil on the goldfields with hope withering and the aching longing for England to which he had planned to return”.⁷ Yet these are exactly the hardships and disappointments which Kingsley did describe in the Omeo disaster in the Hillyars and the Burtons (1865)—Erne Hillyar first blinded with sandy blight, then going mad, and presumed dead after Tom Williams has gone ahead to find water. “Dead he was not, though … He had only succeeded in destroying his constitution” (iii. 250). Gerty Hillyar, in the same novel, would be almost sufficiently Australian in her sympathies to satisfy Furphy himself. She is taken to England by her husband, and lands at Dover:

… they stood on the slippery, slimy boards of the pier at Dover, on the dull English winter day; and she looked round at the chalk cliffs, whose crests were shrouded in mist, and at the muddy street, and the dark coloured houses, and she said, “Oh, dear, dear me. Is this, this England, George? What a nasty, cold, ugly, dirty place it is”.

(i. 263)

On further acquaintance, Gerty “couldn't possibly conceive why the people of England didn't all go and live in Australia”. It wouldn't do to leave the Queen behind, but then “she might get to think better of it as soon as she saw how much superior Australia was to England” (ii. 22). This anticipates the comment of one of my colleagues visiting England for the first time in the 1960s: “They made their mistake 150 years ago. They should have left the convicts there, and moved out themselves”.

If these sentiments are not found in Geoffry Hamlyn, it cannot be because Kingsley was incapable of expressing them, or because his view of Australia did not include them. Something more of his experiences of Australia is declared in the article “Travelling in Victoria” published in Macmillan's Magazine in January 1861. It begins with an account of Melbourne as a centre of “feverish energy”, where, Kingsley observes, “I have seen people landing in 1857 with bowie-knives in their belts, and much astonished, instead of finding bushrangers, at being put into a comfortably padded railway carriage, and whisked up, if it so pleased them, to a first-rate hotel”. The article is a bustling narrative of a trip from Melbourne by steamer to Williamstown, from there by train to Geelong, then by coach (“one continual bump, thump, crash”) with a plank road part of the way, to an overnight stay in Ballarat; thence to the diggings at Ararat (“a great dusty main street of canvas stores, hotels, bagatelle-rooms, and bowling alleys”), and finally by horse to a station in the Wimmera.

One ground of contrast with Geoffry Hamlyn is immediately apparent. Too few critics have recognized that the novel is not contemporary with the events it describes; it is set largely in the 1820s and 1830s, while Kingsley did not arrive in Australia until 1853. The starting-point for criticism of Geoffry Hamlyn must be that it is an historical novel, an attempt to reconstruct a period a generation earlier, when the hectic scenes described by Kingsley in “Travelling in Victoria” were all in the future. It is essentially a novel of Australia “before the gold”, to use the phrase that has for Boldrewood so nostalgic a ring.

The social order represented is therefore very different from that in The Hillyars and the Burtons, Kingsley's novel of the digdings. Major Buckley is a veteran of the Peninsula Wars and of Waterloo, who has disposed of Clere, the impoverished family seat, for £12,000 in order to take his family to Australia. Captain Brentwood, with whose family the fortunes of the Buckleys become entwined, is also a retired military officer; Stockbridge and Hamlyn are “squires”. In England their associates are rarely below the social level of Mary Thornton, the vicar's daughter; George Hawker, the son of a farmer, is of a slightly lower station, as in the colony is Mrs Mayford, for the vulgarity of her manners. It must be clear that whatever Kingsley's other novels may be, Geoffry Hamlyn is a novel about the gentry, about those who by birth and training constituted a ruling class in Australia “before the gold”. Besides learning to ride and shoot, young Sam Buckley is taught Euclid and Latin grammar, and is instructed in swordplay by his father and in fencing by Dr Mulhaus. When he rides up to Garoopna or Baroona, there is a groom to take his horse; and if he is a favourite with the servants, they still address him as “sir”. These activities are close to those recorded by the thirteen-year-old George Gordon McCrae in his diary in the 1840s (learning Latin syntax, listing the plants in the garden, tracking kangaroos and going duck-shooting), just as Alice Brentwood's activities may be matched by Annabella Boswell at Port Macquarie at the same time (gathering flowers for the epergne, reading the Waverley novels, painting wildflowers and dancing a Sir Roger de Coverley).⁸ Whether G. G. McCrae and Annabella Boswell should therefore be accused of un-Australian activities is an open question. But it is obvious that the focus of Kingsley's novel is a particular social class, and that other orders—like the Hawbucks, or the convict servants—come into it only at those points where their fortunes impinge on those of the Buckleys and Brentwoods.

This focus is preserved by a method to which readers of Such is Life should be alert, even if it were not advertised in the title of the book. This is the entrusting of the narrative to Geoffry Hamlyn himself, one of the gentry, who tells the story from his own point of view. An apologetic and sometimes fumbling narrator, he nevertheless deals very summarily with such matters as the size of the runs taken up and the number of sheep and cattle grazed upon them, declaring “I am writing a history of the people themselves, not of their property”.⁹ More subtly, the narrative comes to reflect his values and the outlook of his class. The much-quoted episode in which the “currency lad” comes into the drawing-room at Baroona with a note to Jim Brentwood, and is fascinated by the pressepapier on the table, could be taken as evidence of condescension on Kingsley's part, except that it is not Kingsley who describes it with such amused tolerance, but Hamlyn. Kingsley's view of “the rising Australian generation” (p. 317) is given more directly in “Travelling in Victoria”, in his account of the “two lanky, brown-faced, good-looking youths” on the railway platform at Williamstown, a contrast in their serenity to the busy lawyer fuming up and down, expostulating at the delay. His own view of the squatters, similarly, includes references in The Hillyars and the Burtons (iii. 265) to “a miserable and effete Squattocracy (with their wretched aping of the still more miserable and effete aristocracy of the old world)”, and his comment in a letter to Macmillan in 1865, at the time of the Eyre controversy, on “those short-sighted idiots, who have made fortunes on soil drenched with the blood of the natives, and have come home here and turned saint”.¹⁰ For the moment, however, it is Hamlyn's perspective which must prevail, as the pastoral Australia before the gold discoveries is rendered as it appears to English eyes.

The image given of Australia itself is necessarily very different from that made habitual by writers of the 1890s school. The typical Kingsley landscape is a wooded scene with a gleaming watercourse, sweeping up to mountains with volcanic outcrops, with a snow-fed river glimpsed in the distance. In the first edition of Geoffry Hamlyn, in three volumes, after a first volume devoted to the experiences of the Buckleys and Thorntons in England, the second volume had opened with a description of the new land in the south:

A new heaven and a new earth! Tier beyond tier, height above height, the great wooded ranges go rolling away westward, till on the lofty skyline they are crowned with a gleam of everlasting snow. To the eastward they sink down, breaking into isolated forest-fringed peaks, and rock-crowned eminences, till with rapidly straightening lines they fade into the broad grey plains, beyond which the Southern Ocean is visible by the white sea-haze upon the sky.

All creation is new and strange. The trees, surpassing in size the largest English oaks, are of a species we have never seen before. The graceful shrubs, the bright-coloured flowers, ay, the very grass itself, are of a species unknown in Europe; while flaming lories and brilliant parroquets fly whistling, not unmusically, through the gloomy forest, and overhead in the higher fields of air, still lit up by the last rays of the sun, countless cockatoos wheel and scream in noisy joy, as we may see the gulls do about the English headland.

To the northward a great glen, sinking suddenly from the saddle on which we stand, stretches away in long vista, until it joins a broaded valley, through which we can see dimly a full-fed river winding along in gleaming reaches, through level meadowland, interspersed with clumps of timber.

(p. 148)

This is represented as a scene visible from a watershed of the Snowy River in Gippsland, 350 miles south of Sydney, and the setting of the narrative takes in features of Gippsland and Monaro, and of the western district of Victoria. The geography is deliberately imprecise, so that Garoopna is located thirty miles from Cape Chatham (Green Cape) on the east coast of N.S.W., and at the same time is within riding distance of Tuckerimbid (Mount Cole) in Victoria. Yet one must be wary of regarding the passages of natural description in Geoffry Hamlyn as unrealistic. Kingsley painted watercolours of Australian landscapes which indicate his attachment to the Australian scene.¹¹ Like Kendall in his poems of the cedar forests of the coastal fringe, Kingsley is describing an Australia that has for the most part vanished, and the best standards of comparison are contemporary accounts of the same terrain, such as the view Sir Thomas Mitchell encountered on 23 September 1836 when he discovered Mount Cole:

My first view over this eastern country was extensive, and when I at length descended to a projecting rock, I found the prospect extremely promising, the land being variegated with open plains and strips of forest, and studded with smooth green hills, of the most beautiful forms. In the extreme distance, a range, much resembling that on which I stood, declined at its southern extremity, in the same manner that this did, and thus left me a passage precisely in the most direct line of route homewards. The carts had still, however, to cross the range at which we had arrived, and which as I perceived here, not only extended southward, but also broke into bold ravines on the eastern side, being connected with some noble hills, or rather mountains, all grassy to their summits, thinly wooded, and consisting wholly of granite. They resembled very much some hills of the lower Pyrenees, in Spain, only that they were more grassy and less acclivitous, and I named this hill Mount Cole. To the southward, the sea-haze dimmed the horizon …¹²

The sense of “a new heaven and a new earth” in Kingsley corresponds to Mitchell's response to the “pristine beauty” of the view from Mount Greenock, and to his feelings on “travelling through this Eden” (ii. 276). Again, the more precipitous mountain scenery described in Geoffry Hamlyn was observed by Alfred Howitt in his explorations of the Dividing Range, and recorded in these terms:

imagine yourself … about twelve hundred feet above the rivers … down below you is the Wonnangatta coming out of a basin of dark coloured hills … Down in the valley you see glimpses of a river … large flats scattered with trees … beyond the green valley and beyond … rise mountains and snowy plains … With the strata of slate looking bare and brown in its precipices, you look between the jutting ends of two tablelands which drop from a level edge in precipices of hundreds of feet—up a wide misty gorge with the dim outline of mountains and plains beyond.¹³

On a later trip from Bairnsdale to Tubbut, Howitt described the approach to the Snowy:

The scenery is wonderfully wild … six miles down a winding razorbacked spur with a grand view for miles up and down the river, the brown hills changing to indigo blue on the horizon … where is the Tinga Ringa Mountain such as is described in Geoffry Hamlyn.

(pp. 174-5)

Howitt's apparent identification of Mount Tingi Ringi from a description in Kingsley indicates how specific are certain features of the topography of the novel, allowing that the setting as a whole is a composite. In chapter XXIV for example, the trip through the Murray Gates, skirting Croker's Range, to the lowest stations on the Macquarie, is readily traceable on a map. The botanical descriptions are so detailed on occasion that the observations Kingsley made over a century ago furnished the substance of an article in The Victorian Naturalist in January 1958.

What version does Geoffry Hamlyn really offer of “the realities of the Australian experience”? It represents the world of the pastoral gentry with some fidelity, and yet “distances” it romantically in the process: it describes the flora and the topography with some verisimilitude, and yet does not seem to insist on this, as though seeking an effect beyond it. Geoffry Hamlyn has projected the Australia “before the gold” more successfully than any other novel of the colonial period, but it also does something more. Its special achievement is to have given the story of the Buckleys and the Brentwoods, with the setting in which it occurs, almost the status of a myth. This more than anything else accounts for the book's survival. The essential feature of the myth is that a band of people (who shall preferably be noble and innocent, though including one or two darker personalities to complicate the story) leaves a settled and civilized existence to encounter adventure and hardship in some more primitive region. This wilderness will be a testing ground—like the American woods in Fenimore Cooper, or the islands of Patusan and Samburan in Conrad—and (provided the novelist wishes to give a ritual assurance of the triumph of good over evil) they will emerge from it with their characters formed and their prosperity assured, to resume life in the society from which they came. The myth is basically a romantic one, so that Leslie Fiedler would no doubt recognize in Mary Hawker and Alice Brentwood the archetypes of “the passionate brunette and the sinless blonde”,¹⁴ and it is also basically optimistic, although allowing for such dark elements as the parentage of George Hawker and the plotting and counter-plotting of William Lee and “Captain Touan”.

Critics have rightly pointed to the simplicity of the moral vision of the novel, and to the simplicity of the consciousness of the characters. The concept of “muscular Christianity”¹⁵ in the novels of Kingsley's brother Charles may have some influence on Geoffry Hamlyn, especially in the portrait of Frank Maberly, whose appearance in the 1859 text was heralded by the chapter heading (later discarded) “In Which a Very Muscular Christian Indeed, Comes on the Stage”. Even this ideal is a little too complex for Sam Buckley, who is called upon only to be upright and straightforward, skilled in the manly arts, honestly perplexed when he falls in love, and courageous in an emergency. His character is to be confirmed by the events of the story, showing how the training his father has brought from the battlefields of Europe can be vindicated in the new environment. On the other hand Charles Hawker, with gipsy blood in his veins, finds retribution for his crimes, though not without inflicting some suffering on the innocent. The loss of some of the characters, even worthy ones like Stockbridge and Cecil Mayford, nevertheless contributes to the resolution. Frederick Sinnett's comment of 1856 on The Emigrant Family, although intended as ironic, applies to Geoffry Hamlyn and underlines the pattern of the “myth”:

It is perfectly delightful to find that, in so small a circle, not merely has the adjustment in the number of the sexes been so complete, but that the matrimonial requirements as to age, disposition, &c., of every body are all supplied to a nicety, and nothing over.¹⁶

The clearest index to the “mythic” quality of the book is in its treatment of the Australian landscape, on which the debate over “realism” has often fixed. There is no doubt that the setting of Geoffry Hamlyn is a composite of Australian scenes, some of which may be identified: Sir Keith Hancock has pointed to the Deddick river at Tubbut as the likely site of the homestead of Baroona.¹⁷ Kingsley left watercolours of Australian scenes, and within the novel described some locations with a painterly eye, longing for the brush of Etty or Cattermole. What has not been discerned is that his descriptions belong to the romantic tradition of “typical landscape”, seen in parallel in Australian painting in the work of John Glover, Louis Buvelot, Nicholas Chevalier and Eugen von Guerard (the last accompanied Alfred Howitt on two of his journeys of exploration). In Chevalier's “The Buffalo Ranges”, for example, the components of the canvas portray not just an individual scene, but a representative one, illustrating the characteristic features of the region and the mode of life carried on there. Kingsley's description of “a new heaven and a new earth” cited above is likewise a “typical” landscape. To the west the wooded ranges roll to a line of snow-capped mountains, and to the east they sink into the plains, where a white haze on the horizon indicates the Southern Ocean beyond. The last rays of the sun light the gloomy forest as the brightly coloured parroquets wheel and scream. To the north lies the vista, through a glen and a valley, of a gleaming river winding through the level meadow land, with clumps of timber interspersed. Two horsemen are stationary on the ridge, surveying the scene. The elements of such a description belong to a configuration different from that which the critic is apt to seek, and which he is apt to complain of not finding. It is “mythic” not only in seeking to capture the Edenic sense that Mitchell and others perceived, but also in seeking to abstract the essential quality of what is described, to disclose the pattern to which the particulars contribute.

This is the mode of operation of the novel as a whole. It disentangles Geoffry Hamlyn from all the clutter of the Australian “emigrant novel”, setting it apart from the propagandist efforts of Samuel Sidney and the Dickens of Household Words. Dr Lansbury is mistaken in placing Kingsley in this context; indeed the special character of Geoffry Hamlyn is declared by contrast. Not only is Kingsley unconcerned with the artisan class on which Sidney placed such emphasis, but his novel relies not at all on the kind of “information” offered by Sidney or, earlier, by such a novel as Rowcroft's Tales of the Colonies—the procedure for obtaining land grants, the capital outlay required, the equipment to bring, advice on building a pisé hut. The stock elements on which Kingsley relies would be more accurately described as “folk” elements: the search for a child lost in the bush, a foray against hostile blacks, drafting and branding cattle, a final reckoning with the bushrangers. There is an inset narrative of the legend of Bogong Jack, besides an account of Moody the Cannibal and of the shipwrecks on the southern coast of N.S.W.: Kingsley is guided by the instincts of the myth-maker, like the frontier novelists of the United States.

It is the total pattern that is significant, prevailing over the sometimes defective materials that have gone into its making. The action traces a movement from an established to a primitive environment, so that the adventurers are tested and renewed in the wilderness. Steadfast and athletic, they are required mainly to exhibit a code of conduct, and they do so against a background that at once satisfies a requirement of verisimilitude, and is so “distanced” as to be representative of a whole epoch that has passed. Kingsley found in Geoffry Hamlyn a framework that especially suited his talents, and that at the same time was adjusted to his limitations. It allowed him to indulge a naive attachment to the heroic, keeping it so based in the simple humanity of his characters that it lends a freshness and buoyancy to the book; it gave episodes that read like clichés in other colonial fiction a kind of “folk” significance in the pattern in which they appear; it enabled him to present a picture of Australia which reviewers praised for its authenticity,¹⁸ but in which the realistic details are shaped to a more idealized effect. Kingsley is not a novelist of exceptional powers, but as a myth-maker his instincts are generally sure, overcoming local failures in the execution. A contemporary of Furphy's and one of the earliest of the Bulletin balladists, John Farrell, could respond to the mythic and heroic qualities of the novel in his ballad “Widderin”, first published in The Antipodean in 1894. Readers of Geoffry Hamlyn have continued to respond to it; critics have been slow to recognize the exact mode with which they are dealing.

Notes

1. Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. George A. Macmillan (Glasgow, 1908), p. 6.

2. See Marcus Clarke's preface to Long Odds (1869), and Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories, ed. C. E. Sayers (1969), p. 149.

3. William H. Schuerle, The Neglected Brother: a Study of Henry Kingsley (1971), p. 29.

4. Such is Life, 1903 (repr. 1945), p. 260.

5. Ibid., pp. 204, 205.

6. Brian Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature: Seven essays on Australian novels (1971), p. 2, representing the view of Dr Coral Lansbury in Arcady in Australia (1970).

7. Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth Century English Literature (1970), p. 119.

8. See Georgiana's Journal, ed. Hugh McCrae (second edition, 1966), pp. 232-246; Annabella Boswell's Journal, ed. Morton Herman (1965), pp. 37, 72, 77.

9. The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (repr. Everyman's Library, 1924), p. 164. All subsequent page-references are to this edition.

10. S. M. Ellis, Henry Kingsley 1830-1876 (1931), p. 142. It may also be necessary to allow for a change in Kingsley's opinions over a period of time.

11. Described by Rosilyn Baxter in “Henry Kingsley and the Australian Landscape”, Australian Literary Studies, IV (1969-70), 395-398. For discussion of the setting of Geoffry Hamlyn, see Australian Literary Studies, III (1967-68), 271-189; IV (1969-70), 79-80.

12. Three Expeditions into … Eastern Australia (second edition, 1839), ii. 274.

13. Letter of 24 December 1860, cited in Mary Howitt Walker, Come Wind, Come Weather: A Biography of Alfred Howitt (1971), pp. 114-115.

14. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Paladin edition, 1970), p. 188.

15. See Henry James, “The Noble School of Fiction”, in Notes and Reviews (1921).

16. Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, ed. C. H. Hadgraft (1966), p. 43.

17. W. K. Hancock, Discovering Monaro (1972), pp. 31-33, 38.

18. See L. T. Hergenhan, “Geoffry Hamlyn Through Contemporary Eyes”, Australian Literary Studies, II (1965-6), 289-295.