[In the following essay, Croft perceives Geoffry Hamlyn as a study of English outsiders in Australia who, rather than adapting to their new environment, exert their own culture upon it.]

When Henry Kingsley wrote Geoffry Hamlyn¹ he expressed in it a view of Australian society which was still valid until the Second World War. That view was of a society divided culturally between those who followed in speech, behaviour, and ideology the values of traditional English society, and those who had adopted the differing manners of indigenous white society. Such a division was not wholly the product of the expatriate and the native-born as there were many native-born who followed the English models and probably a number of expatriates of whom the converse was true. I think it is obvious that the traditional arbitrary division of white Australian society into currency and sterling has little relation to this behavioural division in Australian society, so I would like to characterize the group of people who unquestioningly adopted English values as Creoles though in doing so I realize I am putting a new meaning on the word.²

The necessary requisite for a Creole society is a recognizable inferior level of society, preferably one which can carry out the labour on which the aristocratic structure of Creoledom is based. In Australia this base was originally provided by the convict, just as the plantation cultures of the American south, the Caribbean, and the Ile de France depended on the use of an African slave caste.³ I would like to suggest that Henry Kingsley's view of Australia in Geoffry Hamlyn is in fact a longing for a plantation culture and a reflection of the division of Australia into two cultural groups: Creole and non-Creole. One of the outstanding features of Geoffry Hamlyn is that a study of the attitudes of the major characters reveals very clearly the prejudices of the Creole caste in Australia.

We know from John Barnes' careful study of Kingsley's biography⁴ that Henry was a failure as a writer, as a person, and, more importantly as far as Geoffry Hamlyn is concerned, as a Gold Rush adventurer. It is significant that although the Australian events of the novel cover the period 1820-58, Kingsley had personal experience of only the last five years. His impressions of pre-Gold Rush Australia must have been second-hand and coloured by his own failure and his total acceptance of the myths and beliefs of Englishmen at the height of their imperial power.⁵ It is important then, to keep in mind the biographical fact that Geoffry Hamlyn was a novel written for money and status as well as being a fantasy of what the author wanted Australia to be.

Kingsley's view of Australia during the early pastoral expansion is somewhat akin to the American experience: here is a new creation, an Edenic or Arcadian solitude waiting for the wandering tribes to settle and cultivate their gardens.⁶ The physical environment is quite distinct from that of Europe even if the human environment is the same:

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 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 an 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 broader valley, through which we can dimly see a full-fed river winding along in gleaming reaches, through level meadow land, interspersed with clumps of timber.

We are in Australia. Three hundred and fifty miles south of Sydney, on the great watershed which divides the Belloury from the Maryburnong, since better known as the Snowy River of Gippsland.

(p. 149)

But in contrast with the Americans there is no feeling of challenge to the individual man, instead there is a belief that this new environment has been God-given for exploitation by the Empire. In an American expression of this theme the individual would have created in response to the new environment a new identity like Fenimore Cooper's ‘Leatherstocking’, but the great disappointment in Geoffry Hamlyn is that the characters do not compromise any part of their Englishness in order to respond to their new country; instead they and their Australian-born children cling tenaciously to their European identity. Kingsley's Creoles have no wish to build a new society in Australia; it benefits them more to recreate the old in the new. In some ways this is representative of the nineteenth-century belief in the new-found power of man over his environment. It was still possible to believe in the civilizing power of European man and his institutions; it was possible to agree with Tom Troubridge and think it a definite good that ‘“We'll make a new Drumston in the wilderness”’ (p. 152). In the novel we have a clear presentation of the rôle which Englishmen like Kingsley would like to see themselves playing: to have a manifest destiny of occupying and colonizing the empty, and not so empty spaces of the world and spreading the particular light and civilization of honest fearless English justice. In Kingsley's eyes British colonization was of the same significance as the tribal movement of the Israelites:

… so we sat and watched them debouche from the forest into the broad river meadows in the gathering gloom: saw the scene so venerable and ancient, so seldom seen in the Old World—the patriarchs moving into the desert with all their wealth, to find a new pasture ground. A simple primitive action, the first and simplest act of colonisation, yet producing such great results on the history of the world as did the parting of Lot and Abraham in times gone by.

(p. 151)

Social stratification immediately occurs once the patriarchs and their followers are settled, for after all this is a copy of the old Drumston with its feudal traditions. There is constant reference to the essential difference between the Creole group and the non-Creole. The children, for example, must be educated in the traditional way and kept apart from the lower caste of convicts on which the manorial copy of English life depends:

Both Major Buckley and Captain Brentwood made it a law of the Medes and Persians that neither of their sons should hold any conversation with the convict servants, save in the presence of competent authorities. …

(p. 197)

Contamination and moral decay occur if this is allowed to happen. Young George Hawker's association with Jackson (‘a rather small, wiry, active man … a native, colonially convicted, very clever among horses’)⁷ leads inevitably to the moral degeneration of a ‘most disreputable connexion with a Highland girl’ at the age of seventeen—truly the heritage of his convict father coming out in him.

If convicts are dangerous because of their proved depravity, the free-man is to be treated with caution because of his unwillingness to participate in the Creole re-creation of English society. Buckley and Brentwood:

… as soon as increased emigration enabled them, removed their old household servants and replaced them by free men, newly arrived: a lazy independent class, certainly, with exaggerated notions of their own importance in this new phase of their life, but without the worse vices of the convicts.

(p. 197)

Perhaps the free-man may not be as vicious as the convict but he is still to be treated with suspicion. His independent bearing and democratic spirit are hindrances to the easy running of the manorial sheep-station. It is here, I suspect, that Henry parts company with his brother Charles. Where Charles pressed the rights of the working man for freedom, self-respect and the chance to make something for himself if given the chance, Henry saw only the evil results of this. The disenchantment expressed by Parson Maberly, himself an ex-worker in the slums of London like Charles, is perhaps an indication that English society at this time was not ready to accept the practical results of their idealism:

“Of course! of course!” said Frank. “I did not mean quite all I said; but I am angry and disappointed. I pictured to myself the labourer, English, Scotch, or Irish—a man whom I know, and have lived with and worked for some years, emigrating, and, after a few years of honest toil, which, compared to his old hard drudgery, was child's play, saving money enough to buy a farm. I pictured to myself this man accumulating wealth, happy, honest, godly, bringing up a family of brave boys and good girls, in a country where, theoretically, the temptations to crime are all but removed: the labourer has got his farm, and is prospering, after a sort. He has this is what I imagined. I come out here, and what do I find? My friend turned to be a drunken, godless, impudent fellow, and his wife little better than himself; his daughters dowdy hussies; his sons lanky, lean, pasty-faced, blaspheming blackguards, drinking rum before breakfast, and living by cheating one another out of horses. Can you deny this picture?”

(p. 227)

The major can think of a few exceptional cases but ‘… it is fearfully true in as many more. There is no social influence in the settled districts; there are too many men without masters’ (p. 228). This said in the middle of a penal colony! Thus independence and joy in life are evil aspects of the free-man; it is both an offence against the Puritan tradition and a threat to the belief in the natural right of the English Gentleman to rule. With such a rigid view of the division of Australian life it is not surprising that Kingsley sees the Creole and non-Creole as not only differing in cultural traits but in body-type as well:

One remarks now, as the two stand together, that Sam, though but nineteen, is very nearly as tall as his father, and promises to be as broad across the shoulders, some day, being an exception to colonially-bred men in general, who are long and narrow.

(p. 216)⁸

And again the physical type of the non-Creole distinguishes him as a menial, ‘a lad’,⁹ a word which seems to carry all the connotations of the American and South African ‘boy’:

… as the three were sitting together, one of those long-legged, slab-sided, lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree-hatted lads, of whom Captain Brentwood kept always, say half a dozen, and the Major four or five (I should fancy, no relation to one another, and yet so exactly alike, that Captain Brentwood never called them by their right names by any chance); lads who were employed about the stable and the paddock, always in some way with horses; one of those representatives of the rising Australian generation. …

The lad—I always call that sort of individual a lad; there is no other word for them, though they are of all ages, from sixteen to twenty. …

(pp. 317-8)

These comments by Hamlyn characterize the Creole view of the indigenous white as a slave caste like Africans, anonymous as individuals but immediately recognizable as a group.

The characters of Geoffry Hamlyn are aliens; even those who have never been in the homeland feel themselves to be evidently distinguished from the general run of a population of blacks, lags, ex-lags, and free-men. To be a Creole is a state of mind in which one believes unquestioningly in the innate superiority of an alien culture. Alice puts it most succinctly in a paean of praise for an England she has never seen:

“A glorious country,” said Alice; “what would I give to see it?—so ancient and venerable, and yet so amazingly young and vigorous. It seems like a waste of experience for a man to stay here tending sheep, when his birthright is that of an Englishman: the right to move among his peers, and find his fit place in the greatest empire in the world. Never had any woman such a noble destiny before her as this young lady who has just ascended the throne.”

(p. 253)

So deep are Creole allegiances to the mother culture that when Sam, Alice, and Jim (the last two are native born) discuss the American War of Independence and imagine the same thing happening here they state without reservation that their loyalties would be to the external cultural power. Even though they admire Washington, Australia is, of course, a different matter:

“I wonder if ever there will be a War of Independence here,” said Alice.

“I know which side I should be on, if there was,” said Sam.

“Which would that be?” asked Jim.

“My dear friend,” said Sam testily, “how can you, an officer's son, ask me, an officer's son, such a question? The King's (I beg pardon, the Queen's) side, of course.”

“And so would I,” said Jim, “if it came to that, you know.”

“You would never have the honour of speaking to your sweet sister again, if you were not,” said Alice.

“But I don't think those Americans were in the wrong; do you, Miss Brentwood?” said Sam.

“Why no; I don't suppose that such a man as General Washington, for instance, would have had much to do with them, if they had been.”

“However,” said Sam, “we are talking of what will never occur here. To begin with, we could never stand alone against a great naval power. They would shut us up here to starve. We have everything to lose, and nothing to gain by a separation. I would hardly like, myself, for the sake of a few extra pounds taxes, to sell my birthright as an Englishman.”

“Conceive,” said Alice, “being in some great European city, and being asked if you were British, having to say, No!”

(p. 261)

The young Creole feels only contempt for the intellect and education of their Australian contemporaries; yet there might be another side to that reaction. Is there also a hint of fear at the independent bearing of the currency youth? (pp. 317-8). It is hardly surprising then when despite the glorious future Doctor Mulhaus prophesies for Australia (pp. 354-5) and the racial future Major Buckley sees (nicely commented on by the Doctor, p. 356), that despite these, Sam has no doubts that he does not belong in Australia and that to stay would be a betrayal of his belief in his own natural aristocracy and the superiority in all counts of the culture of the colonizing power he represents:

“Think of you and I taking the place we are entitled to by birth and education, in the splendid society of that noble island. Don't let me hear all that balderdash about the founding of new empires. Empires take too long in growing for me. What honours, what society, has this little colony to give, compared to those open to a fourth-rate gentleman in England? I want to be a real Englishman, not half a one. I want to throw in my lot heart and hand with the greatest nation in the world. I don't want to be young Sam Buckley of Baroona. I want to be the Buckley of Clere. Is not that a noble ambition?”

(pp. 438-9)

And that perhaps is why the characters of Geoffry Hamlyn never live up to the promise of the ‘new heaven and a new earth’ they entered at the beginning of Chapter XVIII. Instead they all return to their unambiguous status and the settled traditions of their real homes leaving behind their spiritual legatees, those Creoles who, denied the opportunity to return to the Motherland, adopted the habits of mind and behaviour as well as the speech of this ruling caste.

There is little of interest in Kingsley's characters. Not one of them is a private figure. Their morality, their views, their deep beliefs, and their behaviour are all conditioned by the fact that they are heirs of the Empire and public figures. The latter is the most important aspect of their personality for they all believe in duty to the sovereign, manliness, temperance, patriotism, caste, masculine Christianity, and the sanctity of womanhood. If these characters are stereotypes the glimpses of the lower levels of society brooding in their bush huts show a more intriguing individuality, but little time and attention is given to them. We see them as dangerous and degraded men (pp. 234-7) and we can note how in Maberly's sermon the church and state go hand in hand to keep the status quo of transportation. The reaction of the men to the parson's visit is direct and recognizably the result of caste, but Kingsley finds it dangerous and ignorant. His way of resolving the moral dilemma is an appeal to force.

In summary the characters exist in an exotic environment where, despite the traditional difficulties of bush-fire and blacks, hardships are at a minimum. They evince no relationship with the human environment which surrounds them, and their interest in the landscape is that of a passing tourist, for that is in fact what they are. The core of their Englishness is not at all affected by the country. Geoffry Hamlyn is a novel about foreigners and outsiders; powerful foreigners who have the power to judge, legislate, own vast tracts of the country while still remaining aliens. They are a colonial élite, a privileged class whose power rests on that of the homeland, not on power within the country. The general run of the population, the ticket-of-leave men, the blacks, the emancipated, the convicts are powerless, and in many cases exploited and despised as a slave caste. As a study of this particular powerful group of people and their Creole preoccupations and of a reflection of a division in Australian society which existed well into this century, Geoffry Hamlyn is of importance, even if its merit as a novel might be questioned.

Notes

1. All references in this article to The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn are to the Lloyd O'Neil edition (Hawthorn, 1970).

2. For a review of the meaning and development of ‘Creole’ in several languages see Marius F. Valkhoff, Studies in Portuguese and Creole (Johannesburg, 1966), particularly Ch. 1, ‘What is Creole?’, pp. 25-50. Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America, (London, 1967), (Harmondsworth, 1970), Ch. 2, ‘The Select Minority: Arielism and Criollismo, 1900-1918’, gives an introduction to Creolism as a literary phenomenon in Latin America.

   Basically the main differences in meaning are, English: A mulatto; French: a Frenchman (European) born overseas in a French colony; Spanish: an American of Spanish descent, usually living in a rural area; English in West Africa: an indigenous inhabitant of a colony who adopts the cultural values of the colonizing power.

   It should be apparent that my use of the word to describe the Australian division of society combines the French/Spanish meaning with the specialized West African meaning, in that the Australian Creole is a European whose allegiance to English values separates him from the mass of indigenous white society. It follows that the Creole sees himself as the superior of the non-Creole and consequently the distinction between himself and the other is one of caste. For detailed examples of the West African use of ‘Creole’ see Arthur T. Porter, Creoledom (London, 1963, reprinted 1966), particularly Chs. 1 and 3.

3. There are passing references in Geoffry Hamlyn to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; a particularly uneasy reference occurs on p. 435. There Kingsley, jokingly referring to the extremes of Summer which incapacitate the white man, suggests: ‘One thing only was wanted to make it perfect, and that was niggers.’ Here there is a scarcely concealed longing for the luxury of a slave culture in Australia, and this is not surprising when one learns that Charles Kingsley was an ardent supporter of the South during the Civil War; that he and Henry joined the committee for the defence of Governor Eyre (Edward Eyre the explorer) against a charge of murder of six hundred Jamaicans; and that the Kingsley family's fortune had been ruined by the abolition of the slave trade. See R. B. Martin, The Dust of Combat (London, 1959), Ch. XIV, particularly pp. 258-60.

4. John Barnes, ‘“A Young Man Called Kingsley”’, Meanjin, XXX (1971), 72-84.

5. For an unsubtle expression of Henry Kingsley's imperial beliefs see his Tales of Old Travel (London, 1869), particularly the last chapter “The Foundation of an Empire”, the conclusion of which is indicative: ‘Where would the great Australian United Provinces be now, had it not been for the glorious band of adventurers who made her? The object of our race is to civilize the earth, and we have not done very badly with such figures as these before us’ (pp. 367-8).

6. Coral Lansbury has pointed out that this was a common view of Australia at the time (Arcady in Australia, Melbourne, 1970), but what stands out in Kingsley's treatment of the theme is the precise description, which although over-written is not wilfully inaccurate like some of the early pictorial representations of Australia (see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850, (Oxford, 1960), Chs. 8 and 9.

7. p. 200. It is worth noting the sentence which follows: ‘This man, by his various accomplishments and great tact had won a high place in Tom Troubridge's estimation, and was put in a place of trust among the horses. …’ In Uncle Tom's Cabin honest slaves are also trusted with horses (see Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, New York, 1938, p. 4).

8. It is interesting to compare this passage with the opening paragraph of Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms; there the colonial body-type is something to be admired.

9. The N.E.D. entry under ‘lad’ lists as sense one: ‘a serving-man, attendant; a man of low birth and position; a varlet’. The dictionary claims this sense is obsolete and existed mainly between 1300 and 1550. The English Dialect Dictionary lists as sense six of ‘lad’ ‘a manservant, menial, a farm-servant’; a meaning which was current well into the nineteenth century.