Australian literature

“ On the main question of a national literature [p 23] it will perhaps be concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in an old one. ”

“ They are gay and debonair, whilst a little inclined to be cynical, irreverent and vainglorious; enduring and brave, even to the point of being somewhat ruthless. The qualities of these new people, the Australians, begin to show in their literature, which is as yet more impressive in quantity than in quality. ”

“ It is strange that a people possessed of literary instincts, and of the literary temper, should be without a literature of their own; but so it is. The shadow of a remembered personality does indeed flit now and then across the brief page of Australian history. There was a writer of verses named Lindsay Gordon, and a novelist of repute named Marcus Clarke. Each of these struck out a path for himself. Each left a record that will not soon be forgotten. But neither was a product of the Southern Hemisphere ”

“ There are at least one hundred minor poets of some skill and originality of thought in Australia (with five million inhabitants) , and nearly that number of prose writers of distinction—all showing to the close observer some signs to distinguish them from writers of the same class in Great Britain and in America. ”

“ AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE As I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to devote a chapter to Australians in literature whom I have known, counting both people from the Old Country who became Australians by residence, and those who were born or educated in Australia, though their writing career has been in England. ”

“ Doubtless, its Australian appeal detracts from its quality considered as universal literature; yet that detraction is balanced by the additional attraction it has for readers here and now. I am not concerned to measure out comparative credit, but only to emphasise the point that we have here something that is worthy our credit.
The opinion offered, the attitude taken, follow after reading some hundreds of representative Western verses. The merit of those verses is to be found in the impression one receives from the whole—an impression gained from many patches of gold that shine in the quartz. ”

“ He has travelled extensively and published much about the countries he has seen, being an extensive contributor to Australian literature. In this connection may be mentioned Australian Lyrics, Poetry of Exiles, A Summer Christmas, Australian Ballads, A Century of Australian Song and Australian Poets. ”

“ Australia has suffered greatly from phrase-makers. There is still much popular belief that our trees are shadeless, our rivers are waterless, our flowers are scentless, our birds are songless. Oddities in our flora and fauna have attracted the notice of superficial observers, and a preference for epigrammatic perfection, rather than for truthful generalization, has produced an abundance of neatly-expressed half-truths, which have been copied into popular literature, and even into school books. ”

“ Covers all aspects of Australian literary culture in about 3,000 entries on authors (including historians, critics, and journalists, but with very selective coverage of contemporary writers) , major works, literary and scholarly journals, awards, societies, movements, publishers, literary characters and types, cultural and scholarly organizations, Australian life and history, places, other literature-related topics, and foreign writers who visited the continent or had an impact on its literature. ”

“ The Academy: “A book of honest, direct, sympathetic, humorous writing about Australia from within is worth a library of travellers’ tales.... The result is a real book—a book in a hundred. His language is terse, supple, and richly idiomatic. He can tell a yarn with the best.”
Literature: “A book which Mrs. Campbell Praed assured me made her feel that all she had written of bush life was pale and ineffective.”
The Spectator: “It is strange that one we would venture to call the greatest Australian writer should be practically unknown in England. Mr. Lawson is a less experienced writer than Mr. ”

“ Booksellers and their London agents, who of course treat all literature from a purely commercial standpoint, are at all events unanimous in discrediting the existence in recent years of any prejudice against colonial fiction of the better class. It is now very seldom sent out in two or three volume form, they say, but neither are the most popular English novels, except occasionally to subscription libraries. For representative Australian work, then, there is a fair field but no favour. ”

“ It is natural that, in the construction of a novel which aims at dramatic point before anything else, the ‘simple Australian,’ as his author is at last constrained to regard him, should seem less useful than the polished and unprincipled man of the world. ”

“ Australia has produced no great poet, nor has any remarkable innovation in verse forms been successfully attempted. But the old forms have been so coloured by the strange conditions of a new country, and so charged with the thoughts and feelings of a vigorous, restless democracy now just out of its adolescence, that they have an interest and a value beyond that of perhaps technically better minor poetry produced under English skies. ”

“ But the Australians "do it more natural:" the stories are not the heritage of a traditional and dead, but the flowers of a living and actual condition of the mind. The stories have not the ingenious dramatic turns of our own Märchen. ”

“ Which, after all, is the better or the worse, illusion or delusion? Is Victoria never going to perceive that logicians and engineers are not the highest product of civilization? Will New South Wales never shake off the British architect, spiritual and material, and begin to evolve an individual life of her own? Is Mr. Marcus Clarke right when he tells us that “in another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. ”

“ Or the good Sydney people would like to decorate their Post-office with emblematic sculpture, and the result is, what has at last become, the mockery of a Continent. And at last, too, the Picture Gallery at Melbourne is coming into disrepute, and some day, perhaps, the Government House will do the same. It would be pleasant, I think, to see it turned into an asylum. No nation that calls itself civilized stands in more need of Culture, of the best that has been thought and known in the world, in each and every branch of it, than Australia does. ”

“ If it could only get away from old-world traditions, if it were willing to stand upon its feet, if it would leave its absurd mannerisms to the people who first invented them, this Australian society, with all its health and youth and unimpaired vitality, with all its magnificent opportunities furnished by variety of scene and splendour of climate, might set an example of living which other countries would have reason to envy, if they had not the power to imitate. ”

“ In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. ”

“ Nothing could be any good that was not imported. The next stage was reached when you began to produce a handful of clever men and women, whose success in science, music, art, and sport laid the foundations of a belief that gradually developed into arrogant big-headedness. If Australia could produce a Brennan, a Melba, a Mackennal, a Trumper, an Arnst, and a Gray, why should there be any limit to the fertility of its genius-breeding soil? ”

“ The field is narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret impressions of [p 31] the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail; who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a ‘rouseabout,’ and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. ”

“ If a writer were always able to put down on canvas his earlier and more enthusiastic impressions, he might draw a pretty picture of the Australian woman. She should be the crown and glory of every Southern landscape; she should have the dawn in her eyes, and the sun upon her hair. In a street along which the heat waves were dancing with a joyous and unrestrained fervour ”

“ For Australia, if the fact were only recognised, is a country in which it is possible to enjoy oneself finely, or to deny oneself greatly, as the mood pleases, independently of the world.
One characteristic of Australian society is its vulgarity ”

“ I’d have good cheerful books of the best and brightest sides of human nature—Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and those men. And I’d have all Australian pictures—showing the brightest and best side of Australian life. And I’d have all Australian songs. I wouldn’t have ‘Swannie Ribber,’ or ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ or ‘Annie Laurie,’ or any of those old songs sung at the Lost Souls’ Hotel—they’re the cause of more heartbreaks and drink and suicide in the bush than anything else. ”

“ Have the grand gifts which the fast-vanishing generation of 'foreigners' will bequeath to their sons dropped from the clear Australian skies? The gifts of art and science, of learning and culture, of commerce and manufactures, of ripening harvests and glittering ores ”

“ Thus, on the evidence of institutions, it is plain that the Australians are (or before the influence of the Europeans became prevalent were) in a state of mind which draws no hard and fast line between man and the things in the world. If, therefore, we find that in Australian myth men, gods, beasts, and things all shift shapes incessantly, and figure in a coroboree dance of confusion, there will be nothing to astonish us in the discovery. ”

“ These are products of generations. In Australia, they are turned out while you wait, with all the uncouthness of their fathers. Australia alone of all the countries in the world has lingual hobnails on its culture. ”

“ But the truth—that Australasia produces at a high rate mental as well as physical energy—could have been proved categorically.
The Australian is not only a pioneer wrestling with the wilderness. He is a creature of restless mental energy, keenly (perhaps with something of a spirit of vanity) eager to keep in the current of world-thought, following closely not only his own politics but also British and international politics; a good patron of the arts; a fertile producer and exporter of poetasters, minor philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists. ”

“ In at least a score of well-known novels there are charming country scenes, true in every particular; but there is a distinct limit to the power of fiction of this kind to interest remote readers, while much repetition of it might well be misleading.
A writer in the Australasian Critic once rightly observed, respecting a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that English readers might ‘fancy from them that big cities are unknown in Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers, stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers ”

“ Let me ask how many boys out of a hundred in Australia, or England either, have ever read Sturt or Mitchell, Eyre, Leichhardt, Grey, or Stuart. It is possible a few may have read Cook's voyages, because they appear more national, but who has read Flinders, King, or Stokes? Is it because these narratives are Australian and true that they are not worthy of attention?
Having well-nigh exhausted the list of the early explorers in Australia, it is necessary now to turn to a more modern school. ”

“ But a large prose work of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand words is, at Australian prices, extremely expensive to produce, and when it is produced, has only a small sale because it does not bear the name of any well-known English publishing house.
So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England.
The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my career as an author, though I have never published anything about Australia, except my own verses, and anthologies of Australian verse, and a life, and an edition of the poems, of Adam Lindsay Gordon. ”

“ It is hardly possible to believe that the English people still prefer to look to Australia only for stories of adventure; but if they do—and as the first to welcome and appreciate colonial writers they are perhaps entitled to exercise a choice—it is well that such stories be written from complete local knowledge, and thus at least correctly describe the broader aspects of the country. ”

“ But it is in character and essence neither American nor English; it is distinctively Australian. We have evolved it, and should take the credit or discredit of it. To be a successful writer of the descriptively humorous kind it is merely necessary to attend to a few simple rules. It is necessary to get together as many adjectives as you can, and always to apply them in a context unlike that to which they have grown accustomed. ”