Novel Politics: Studies in Australian Political Fiction 0522876420, 9780522876420

Citation preview

Novel Politics

Novel Politics Studies in Australian Political Fiction

John Uhr and Shaun Crowe

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2020 Text © John Uhr and Shaun Crowe, 2020 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2020 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Text design and typesetting by J & M Typesetting Cover design by Peter Long Printed in Australia by OPUS Group

9780522876420 (hardback) 9780522875973 (paperback) 9780522875980 (ebook)

Contents Preface Introduction: Politics and the Study of Literature

Part One Chapter 1 Catherine Spence’s Clara Morison Chapter 2 Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion Chapter 3 Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl

Part Two Chapter 4 Tim Winton’s Dirt Music Chapter 5 Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap Chapter 6 Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Taboo Conclusion: Literature and the Study of Politics

Preface

This book arose out of an undergraduate course on ‘Ideas in Australian Politics’, which we recently taught at the Australian National University. As political scientists reviewing Australia’s developing political culture, we found ourselves returning as often to literature and literary criticism as we did to journal articles and book chapters in our narrow discipline. We began to appreciate the scope of this tradition: many of the country’s greatest writers, over decades and centuries, had published insightful accounts of the social and cultural roots of politics in Australia. Some of this work was playful and indirect; some of it was more urgent and explicit. We were attracted to the way the writers tracked competing images of society and culture in Australia—the different patterns of ideas within its political community—and the way these thoughts both inspired and limited politics, at least as formally conceived by political scientists. They allowed us to see the practice of politics in new ways.1 Australia has not always appealed to writers and artists. When D.H. Lawrence published his 1923 novel Kangaroo, his cynicism seemed clear, at least on the surface. The book follows a young British poet, Richard Somers, who visits New South Wales in the years following World War I. The worldly Somers is unimpressed by what he finds. Pondering ‘the youngest country on the globe’, the poet observes ‘the absence of any inner meaning: and at the same time the great sense of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The sense of do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting.’ Somers notes the Australian myth of egalitarianism but finds it undiscerning and frustratingly tolerant of mediocrity. For the young European, Australia feels ‘absolutely and flatly democratic … Demos was here his own master, undisputed.’2 Generations of readers have taken this as a warning about the dreariness of Australian public culture. We suspect, however, that many have misread the book, mistaking the poet’s preference for rule and authority as an expression of Lawrence’s own distaste for Australian democracy. A more recent assessment—although for younger readers, perhaps only slightly so— came from Australia’s first Nobel laureate in literature Patrick White, who considered himself something of a prodigal son, returning from Britain with the hope of ‘helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding’.3 White knew only too well the stultifying flatness described by Somers—‘the ugliness, the bags and iron of Australian life’—but he also felt that Australian society offered ‘avenues for endless exploration’. White was convinced that ‘the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’. But he also knew how uninspiring ‘the Great Australian Emptiness’ could be, where ‘the mind is the least of possessions’ and ‘the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves’. Encouraged by White’s challenge, we began to see more than a few Australian novels escaping from ‘the exaltation of the “average”’, which in his view coloured so much of Australian culture and thought.

In this book we provide a close reading of six distinctly ‘un-average’ Australian novelists, and their books that deal with politics as broadly understood. Three of the books were written by female authors and published in London before Federation: Catherine Spence’s Clara Morison (1854), Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890). The following four were written by a diverse set of contemporary male writers, published in Australia: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008), and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) and Taboo (2017). More than 150 years separate the earliest from the most recent of these novels. It goes without saying that Catherine Spence was reflecting on a different society to Christos Tsiolkas (sexually liberated Greek Marxists did not, generally speaking, arrive until after Spence’s death). But even within generations, literary critics have long appreciated the wide range of possible responses to the idea and experience of living in Australia. One basic cleavage, observed from the earliest period of colonial politics, cut along broadly ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ tendencies. On one side was an inclination to see Australia as depressingly dull, burdened by a ‘sense of exile’ from the bustling and superior heart of European civilisation. If conservatives generally questioned social experiments, the Australian one was no exception. The progressive instinct, on the other hand, tended towards optimism, with its advocates buoyed by a sense of egalitarian possibility, entranced by this world of ‘newness and freedom’. Australian poet Judith Wright called this ‘Australia’s double aspect’, which twisted the inner sense of nationality in contrasting directions.4 Wright sensed that ‘almost every Australian writer’ brought together this contradiction between ‘the transplanted European and his new country’—‘true for all white Australians’—of ‘the European mind in contact with a raw, bleak and alien life and landscape’. One result was that conservative politicians tended to avoid what they saw as an ‘insecurely based Australianism’—just as advocates of ‘a radical and political approach’ leaned towards ‘optimistic reformism’, elevating a kind of ‘equality … that seems nowadays to leave out a good deal’. Compromises arose, forming ‘such real Australianity as we have’.5 As Judith Wright acknowledged, these political narratives were firmly rooted in the European experience of life in Australia (did this ‘new world’ represent an exciting blank slate for humanity, or did it remain threatening and essentially alien to civilisation?). But for Indigenous occupants of the land, Australian stories looked very different. As they knew all too well, the so-called ‘new world’ rested on the bones of a much older one, with its own stories and culture. According to novelist Alexis Wright, storytelling was central to the process of colonisation, with physical dispossession also resulting in a kind of literary dispossession for Aboriginal Australia. Since the arrival of the British, ‘Aboriginal people have not been in charge of the stories other people tell about us … the plot line has always been for one outcome, to erode Aboriginal belief in sovereignty, self-governance and land rights, even when it has gotten to the point where most Aboriginal people have been silenced, or feel too overwhelmed to fight any more’. If cultural narratives helped shape colonisation, the reverse also applied: colonisation helped shape the kind of stories Indigenous people could now tell about their lives and their country:

This results in further loss in our ability to create some of the best stories of this country, as we lean in to do what is expected of us … The further we bend our stories to suit mainstream Australia, resulting in further loss of our cultural norms, the more we hasten our total acculturation into mainstream Australian society.6 For Alexis Wright, this constituted the ‘tricky question’ of modern Aboriginal storytelling— something that all Indigenous writers are forced to grapple with, altogether different to the ‘double aspect’ confronting early European Australians. In teaching our course on ‘Ideas in Australian Politics’, we learned that literature had much to say about the nature of the Australian political community—both as imagined and as carefully documented. We observed many of Australia’s most fascinating political imaginations, even if they often existed a step removed from its more institutional forms. In some cases, writers had dreamed of democratic reforms far ahead of their time; in others, they had withdrawn from the dull pragmatics of formal politics, seeking out the consolations of private life away from compromised civic activities. We decided to gather some of these discoveries and see if we could unearth a story about the place of political novels in Australia. These novels were written with different purposes: either engaging deeply with the practical reality of politics in an emerging democracy, or creatively disengaging from its immediate demands, in search of larger possibilities. A number of political scientists have published very good work on aspects of this topic, but there exists no introductory book stating the case for the value of political novels as important forms of political thought in Australia. Our seven examples of Australian ‘political novels’ join the two ends of Australian literary culture, from pre-Federation to what we might call postmodernism. Each explores the relationship between ‘character’ and ‘community’, with politics usually emerging in the difficult space between the two. The novels generally involve some sort of underlying conflict, either between individuals with different values, or between individuals and collective expectations. Each involves a complex cast of characters, some of whom represent the virtues of social responsibility, while others are more disruptive and socially reckless. These texts work as ‘political novels’ because each writer is daring enough to show us faulty examples of respectable citizens and worthy examples of unconventional misfits, challenging normal boundaries of behaviour. Miles Franklin was right when she wrote of Catherine Spence’s character Clara, who dominates the 1854 novel Clara Morison, that ‘she was a rebel … and would still be one today in Australia’.7 Only rarely do our six novelists focus on characters performing on the parliamentary stage, with Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion from the 1880s being the most interesting exception. More generally, politics appears in the norms and conventions of the polis, as discerned by writers looking deeply into the developing Australian community—into what Miles Franklin called ‘that way of living called Democracy’.8 We are not literary experts, but we know that most of the readers of Australian political novels have not been literary experts. We are political scientists making the case that understanding Australian politics—including critical dissent about what it might be missing —can be aided substantially by the study of novels written with a close eye on political

themes. One advantage of using novels to clarify politics is that literary writers are often more open-minded than contemporary political scientists: presenting politics in its deeper social and human context, beyond the theatre of parliament. Another advantage is that, by using more evocative language, literary writers can transform the humdrum realities of everyday politics, or express the hidden poetry of political reform, which might prompt readers to think about politics along different, more elevated lines. Literature might make politics bigger and more expansive. In our sample of political novels, we aim to ‘bookend’ the long history of Australian literature: with part one covering pre-Federation Australia, through the work of three female authors, and part two examining contemporary politics in the work of three quite different male writers. The comparison is between unfranchised female colonial ‘subjects’, well before the arrival of national citizenship, and three national ‘citizens’, writing about political identity in the contorted era of multiculturalism, globalisation and postcolonialism. The country we now call ‘Australia’ dates from 1901, but the term ‘Australia’ was first suggested by the explorer Matthew Flinders in 1803. In 1817 Governor Macquarie successfully urged the British Government to call the great southern land ‘Australia’—then comprising the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.9 In this sense, ‘Australia’ represents a historic experiment in establishing a political community—originally under tight British military rule, while notably excluding the Indigenous owners of the land, to more recent times when ‘the four surviving groups in Australia’—Indigenous people, Asian people, European people and settler British people—try, in the words of historian Manning Clark, to ‘learn to live together’.10 Given the considerable historical separation between Spence’s 1854 novel Clara Morison and the publication of the last four novels in the twenty-first century, there are many important differences in political understanding between the first and second sets of writers. Yet there are also important differences in political understanding within both sets, which allows us to tease out not simply a binary tale of two moments in Australian literary history, but also a set of valuable examples of literary politics from six of Australia’s most distinctive novelists. This includes female reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of an emerging ‘masculinist’ nationality in early colonial politics—sometimes referred to as ‘Australianity’11 —and three reflections on cultural diversity in Australia’s contemporary political identity, fractured by class, race and ideology. Our aim is to map out a number of leading intellectual exercises in political thought by six notable Australian writers—all of whom continue to offer substantial contributions to political deliberation in Australia. Our theme is that ‘Australia’ is a developing entity, with our six novelists each playing substantial roles in helping readers think through the choices available to citizens in its evolving—and we would like to hope maturing—political community. We see these writers as distinctive Australian public intellectuals whose novels challenge readers to reflect on politics in new and innovative ways—as it is practised and as it might be practised, come the day of reform. None of the novelists is doctrinaire but all are interested in characteristically Australian doctrines, each exploring key questions and central problems arising from Australian ways of practising politics. Their novels are clearly written ‘in the times’ they were published, but we also see these

novelists as ‘ahead of their times’, or at least ‘out of step with their times’, in their determination to stimulate readers to reflect more deeply and widely on the nature of politics in Australia. Manning Clark described Australian literary history in terms of a small number of spirited revolts against a conventional core of ‘British philistinism’, which over time decayed into ‘a morality without a faith—the decades of the creedless puritans’.12 In the same spirit, Judith Wright identified ‘Australia’s cultural landscape’ as dominated by ‘the almost unopposed ascendancy of material and exploitative attitudes’, with ‘an already outmoded utilitarianism of outlook’. At their best, novels can both reflect and challenge the political cultures in which they are set. Our approach in this book builds in many ways on two earlier works, which also examine sets of six Australian authors. The first is the pioneering study of Australian poetry by former ANU literature scholar Tom Inglis Moore, in his 1942 work Six Australian Poets. The second is Brian Kiernan’s 1971 study of six Australian novelists and their distinctive Images of Society and Nature, which broke away from earlier assumptions about Australia’s native literary tradition of social democracy. We will return to Kiernan’s work in our Conclusion, but here confine our comments to Moore’s striking work, which foreshadows in some ways our study of Australian novelists.13 Moore’s approach included a detailed introduction on the evolving character of Australian literary culture—something we do in our own way in the Introduction, which follows. Moore’s book also included an insightful ‘Foreword’ by US historian C. Hartley Grattan, whose interest in the political nature of Australian literature significantly shapes our own approach to the democratic political philosophy we find in Australian political novels.14 Like Moore, who also wrote a later book on Social Patterns in Australian Literature, we are interested in the political arguments used by Australian writers to shape Australian political culture. And like Moore, we want to contribute to contemporary debate over the international interest in the literary culture of Australia.15 Finally, some words of thanks to those who helped us with this book. We have many colleagues and friends to thank for their encouragement and assistance during this project. The School of Politics and International Relations, the Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University helped substantially with our research on unusual literary methodology in the study of politics. Thanks also to Richard McGregor and Louise Stirling for their editorial wisdom and help. We hope we can continue to recover literary pathways in the academic study of politics. Both authors shared responsibility for the Preface, the Introduction and the Conclusion. John Uhr took responsibility for chapters 1–3; Shaun Crowe took responsibility for chapters 4–6. We learnt so much from one another during the writing of this co-authored book.

Notes 1

Some important examples are A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1958; Grahame Johnston (ed.), Australian Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962; Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1965; Clement Semmler and Derek Whitlock (eds), Literary Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1966; John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1956–1964, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969; T.I. Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971; Brian Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature: Seven Essays on Australian Novels, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971;

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

A.D. Hope, Native Companions, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1974; Richard Nile, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002; Nicholas Jose (gen. ed.), Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009; Robert Manne and Chris Feik (eds), The Words that Made Australia: How a Nation Came to Know Itself, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2012. D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, Penguin, 1950, pp. 24, 27, 33. Against conventional misunderstandings that take the character Somers to represent the author Lawrence, see the criticism of Michael Wilding, ‘Kangaroo’, chap. 4 in Political Fictions, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984, pp. 150–91. Patrick White, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris (eds), The Vital Decade, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 156–8. Judith Wright, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Double Aspect’, in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Oxford University Press Melbourne, 1965, pp. xi–xxii. Wright, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvi–xvii. Alexis Wright, ‘What happens when you tell somebody else’s story?’ Meanjin, vol. 75, no. 4, Summer 2016, pp. 58–76, . Miles Franklin, ‘Clara Morison’, in Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison (eds), A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of Miles Franklin, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2001, p. 191. Miles Franklin, ‘Australia the Incredible Feat!’, in Roe and Bettison, A Gregarious Culture, p. 183. Manning Clark, ‘A Comment on Australia Day’ in Speaking out of Turn: Lectures and Speeches 1940–1991, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 41–2. Clark, ‘A Comment on Australia Day’, p. 45; see also the account of ‘the myth-makers’ of Australia in ‘Myths of the Kingdom of Nothingness’, Speaking out of Turn, pp. 118–25. See, for example, James McAuley, ‘The Rhetoric of Australian Poetry’, in Leonie Kramer (ed.), James McAuley, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1988, p. 113. The same theme of ‘Australianity’ appears in McAuley’s ‘Literature and the Arts’, chap. 8 in James Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 122– 33. One source of this term is poet Christopher Brennan’s early criticism of the vulgarity of ‘Australianity’ soon after Federation, quoted in James McAuley, A Map of Australian Verse, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1975, p. 1. Note also the frequent positive references here to the social-democratic literary criticism of John Docker: McAuley, A Map of Australian Verse, e.g. pp. 11–12, 55, 101, 217. Manning Clark, ‘Australia: Whose Country Is It?’, in Speaking out of Turn, p. 143. T. Inglis Moore, Six Australian Poets, Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne, 1942. See also Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature. C. Hartley Grattan, ‘Foreword’, in Moore, Six Australian Poets, pp. 7–9. Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, pp. 315–20.

Introduction: Politics and the Study of Literature

This book examines the work of six Australian writers interested in politics. Each possesses a distinct voice, beginning with different ideals and personal commitments, taking different stylistic guises and forms, and playing with different ideas of what it means to be political. Some take a close interest in parliamentary politics, with all of its ritual and performance, intrigued with the men and women who seek its spotlight. Politics here is understood through the individuals who occupy its centre, with all their talent, ambition and imperfection—and the tragic arc that often accompanies that heady combination. Other books conceive of politics in a wider and less immediate sense, tracing the evolution of social and civic cultures in Australia. These novels take politics seriously because they take the wider political community seriously: as the polis in which people act out public lives, under the constant if often distant shadow of formal politics. Because political conventions set the tone for much of civic life, these novelists illuminate how the political world both limits and facilitates apparently ‘nonpolitical’ relationships, elevating certain ways of being and thinking while at the same time supressing others. These six authors all appreciate that, while often experienced at an aloof distance, what happens in the space identified as ‘political’ is unavoidably intertwined with the personal, reflecting deep cultural sentiments running beneath the surface of Australian life. In Politics and the Novel (1957), Irving Howe made a distinction between what he considered ‘political’ and merely ‘social’ novels. Through a series of author studies, Howe argued that many of the great nineteenth-century novels qualified as ‘political’, insofar as they confronted readers with the consequences of dominant social ideas and interests. This differed from the ‘social’ novel, which tended to ‘take society for granted’—as he suggested was the case with a writer such as Jane Austen.1 According to Howe, these works assumed an essentially static social world, with outlines set and basically unmoving, existing as a frame to adorn the personal and private lives of characters. Political novels, on the other hand, emerge when people no longer take society for granted, but instead see it as field of conflicting ideas or ideologies—including the ideal sort of society that readers should be supporting and promoting. Howe was a politically active literary critic and these novels tended to reflect his fears about the weakened state of modern society, where the forces of individualism had hollowed out liberalism, undercutting its ability to develop new modes of social justice. Howe was a progressive, most engaged when reviewing novels tilting at the conventional morality of what we might call market capitalism—which as a democratic socialist he considered both a debased and debasing form of social organisation. Using the work of George Eliot, Howe argued that the political novelist’s essential task

was ‘to make ideas or ideologies come to life’, giving characters ‘passionate gestures and sacrifices’, and allowing political ideas to ‘become active characters in the novel’. This criterion for evaluating a political novel was based fundamentally on its application of ideas. For Howe, ideas were the features of individual and social personalities which ‘raised enormous charges of emotion’—animating ‘our most feverish commitments’ and ‘our most fearful betrayals’. These social emotions were ‘conditioned’, even ‘controlled’, by ‘the pressures of abstract thought’. When reviewing a political novel, the role of the literary critic was to ask ‘how much of our life does it illuminate? How ample a moral vision does it suggest?’2 Using these prompts, Howe studied the work of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, James, Koestler and Orwell, among others. This book follows in the general footsteps of Howe, examining instances of local literature resembling his definition of the ‘political novel’. The choice of six authors is simple: three examples from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of novel writing in this country; and three from contemporary literature, in a nation largely unrecognisable from colonial Australia. This ‘bookends’ Australian novel-writing, providing two samples of authors tackling the same essential task: using fiction writing, with all its imaginative tools and literary possibilities, to help readers better understand the nature of politics in a distinctive national context. Of course, the Australian national or community setting has itself changed dramatically between these sets of authors, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The book uses the two groups to illustrate these changes, which tell us much about the remarkably stable form of institutional politics in Australia, as well as its remarkably changing substance. There is a second strand of political literary studies, focusing on the activism of political novelists, from which this book diverges. In Australia, this tendency is partly modelled on how Patrick White performed as a later career public intellectual, intervening directly in the heat of contemporary debate (and best illustrated in his collected speeches, Patrick White Speaks).3 This book is more concerned with the literary activism of the political novels themselves—examining the ‘speech’ of authors as written in their published work. This is not to say the six authors have shied from public commentary. Most fit the ‘Patrick White mould’, at least to some degree. The book’s first novelist, Catherine Spence, offered an exemplary case of civic activism: pressing reforms to help the poor, supporting voting reform and proportional representation, and writing colonial Australia’s best (and probably only) civics textbook.4 Each of the contemporary authors, Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott, have merged their literary careers and political ideals at various points, using each to reinforce the other when possible. The two are not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, this study focuses more on the word than the public deed, even if one tends to inform the other in practice. The book’s thesis is that these novelists follow a particular type of political pathway—writing as much as social philosophers as public entertainers. The proof is in the texts, with the book offering a sample of Australian thinkers, both heralded and neglected, who have composed unusual but compelling contributions to political thinking. Thomas Keneally articulated this mission well in The Cut-Rate Kingdom, when he stated that he was not writing a roman-à-clef; instead he was writing to reveal ‘the privacies

… that characterize the Australian soul’.5 Keneally’s ‘privacies’ were those ways of being that escape our notice until we view them through the eyes of the author, who helps us grasp what we might otherwise pass over unthinkingly as Australians. In their own way, all six writers contribute to social and political philosophy, where the style of thinking is reflective rather than programmatic or instrumental. To see these novelists as philosophical is to see them as lovers of a kind of wisdom conveyed by their books. An early colonial example of this kind of political criticism was the work of D.H. Deniehy (1828–1865), who defended the merits of an Australian-born literary tradition in the nineteenth century. Deniehy was in many ways a founding figure of republicanism in Australia: the dreamer of the ‘first Australian utopian dream’, and the scouring opponent of the emerging ‘bunyip aristocracy’ in colonial politics.6 But Deniehy was also a founder of Australian literary criticism, whose advocacy of Charles Harpur’s poetry carried intellectual and political ambition for local writing—calling on readers to reach for ‘larger and more philosophic ground’ when judging Australian literature. As a critic, Deniehy urged locals to cultivate their own ‘genius and purity and moral strength’, and to strive for ‘progress in the higher regions of intellectual culture’ available in poets such as Harpur. This reflected Deniehy’s broader image of literature and politics, which suggested that all great writing drew on a ‘severe philosophic sense’ in order to illustrate ‘the elemental natures of things’—allowing readers to reshape themselves according to the ‘generative imagination’ revealed in the work. The contemporary critic Devlin Glass translated this concept as the importance of ‘statesmanlike vision’, hinting at the kind of philosophy Deniehy thought necessary if Australia was to live up to its republican potential —and the various ‘idealities’ that literature could promote in its service.7

Political themes This book is interested in philosophy and politics, but not in any prescriptive ‘method’ of contemplating their relationship. As John Docker’s instructive Australian intellectual histories suggest, the union between novels and social philosophy depends less on any particular analytical model, and more on the place given to the political in stories told. Writers are ‘novel’ in the creative ways they ‘write up’ politics.8 One way Australian authors have done this is through the manipulation of time in their fiction—a tool not always open to political scientists. Keneally’s The Cut-Rate Kingdom, for instance, is set in the past, with an imaginary prime minister coping with the war effort in 1942; prompting readers to consider why history progressed as it did, with the real possibility that things could have turned out differently. M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, on the other hand, pushes forward into the future. Written by two women under a pen name and initially censored, the book offers a vision of twenty-fourth-century Australia, hinting at the potential for revolution and radical change in the present. While the six novelists in this book mostly set work in their respective presents, their contemplations of the quotidian are no less revelatory. Each author is a gifted witness to how certain social settings encourage some types of human worth, while subtly discouraging others. The result is that novels can uncover the link between inherited or cultivated political worlds—or regimes, as they were once

called—and the humans living in them. The changing nature of Australia’s political regime is well acknowledged, as is its influence over the nation’s writing. Bruce Clunies Ross, for instance, has identified the moving role of ‘Australian culture’ in local novels; Ian Turner told a similar story about the evolving ‘social setting’ and the path of Australian literary history.9 According to Turner, writers responded to these shifting foundations in different ways. While many authors seemed captured by the forces dominating the world in which they found themselves, other writers seemed more independent—and others still tried to reform society towards new and emancipatory ends. The ‘social setting’ was itself a product of history, some of which writers could protect and preserve, some of which they could reject. As Turner made clear, Australian literature emerged through endless debates among writers over the virtues and vices of social life, with some of the most interesting examples coming from writers reconciled to their very limited power as novelists. This was apparent to outsiders too, with visitors such as Francis Adams in the 1880s writing extensively about the distinctive qualities of ‘the Australian’ developing in this colonial setting. As locals could see in their own lives, these qualities were shaped by competing political moralities; a clash of vital importance to the past, present and future of Australia’s national culture. Our two sets of authors reflect on politics in understandably different ways, beginning with the enormous gulf of time separating their lives. All six write about Australia, although the national political community means different things to different authors, even within a single era. The first group comprises three female novelists, each writing while excluded from voting and other civic rights in the years before Federation. They are not officially part of the political process, yet they are obliged to comply with the rules and regulations made by the men who manage it. With the nation only just beginning to emerge as a separate ‘Commonwealth’ in 1901, the type of literary philosophy performed by these writers is very much ‘anticipatory’ in form. Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin write about a form of politics undergoing substantial change in the movement towards Federation, speculating about ‘what might be’ if the Australian political community moved in their preferred direction. The authors inevitably differ in what they disclose about the nature of their own political ideals. Spence takes the most revealing approach with her remarkable A Week in the Future, imagining what the country might look like 100 years hence, in 1988.10 In general, the three early Australian ‘subjects’ write political novels that call into question many of the established conventions of ordinary Australian political practice, thereby helping readers think through the nature of conventional political morality. The set of three contemporary writers all inherited a very different nation to their female predecessors. Australia as experienced by Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott could no longer rest on a series of colonial certainties. Gone was the reassuring centre of British imperial dominance, both geopolitical and cultural; so too the homogenous assumption of White Australia, overturned by successive waves of migration. The hegemony of masculinist identity could no longer continue unquestioned; nor humanity’s position in a fragile and changing environment. Perhaps most significantly, Australia was increasingly alert to the violence of its modern founding, and the enduring and disastrous consequences it

forced on the land’s Indigenous owners. This was a country deeply shaken by generations of activism and disagreement, down all the way to its origin myth, and Winton, Tsiolkas and Scott all write with the implicit knowledge that these topics are up for public debate—and that the outcome of this conversation is both meaningful and serious. While each avoids crude polemic in their writing, the three all bring political commitments to the novels: Winton, as perhaps Australia’s most articulate environmentalist; Tsiolkas, an advocate of both the old and new lefts; and Scott, a Noongar man from Western Australia, attempting to revive his people’s language and culture after almost two centuries of dispossession. Although all are first and foremost novelists, producing works of literature rather than advocacy, their books can only be properly understood in parallel with their most urgent political concerns—not as appendages to their activism, but as integrated parts of the same essential project. One traditional assumption about Australian fiction was that it had little time for politics, being instead preoccupied with its three ‘staple themes’: ‘convictism, pastoral life, and bushranging’.11 If this was ever a fair picture of Australia’s cultural interests, the contemporary era of Tsiolkas, Winton and Scott—of Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan and Alexis Wright—suggests the sentiment is badly outdated. This book’s mission echoes a more optimistic and now largely overlooked project, almost a century old, when Nettie Palmer and Hartley Grattan, a visitor from the United States, began a three-decade collaboration to promote the distinctive qualities of Australian literature to the nation and the world. In many ways, Nettie’s Palmer’s book Modern Australian Literature (1924) marks the beginning of modern literary criticism in Australia.12 Palmer dedicated the work to her husband Vance, who later became a significant political novelist and public intellectual.13 Palmer’s ‘modernity’ begins with the formation of the ‘Commonwealth’ in 1901: a national form awaiting cultural substance. Soon after, Hartley Grattan published his brief but incisive Australian Literature—with a ‘Foreword’ by Nettie Palmer, praising Grattan’s ‘map of our literary Deserta’.14 Grattan had just published an academic article in New York on Australian bush ballads, indicating his unusual interest in the sources of cultural life in Australia.15 In 1929, Palmer observed that the third volume of Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney was about to be published—a work celebrating so many Australian themes, including a heavy subplot of colonial politics. She argued that Grattan had proven himself an extremely valuable recent guest to Australia, producing criticism unlike any written by English critics—including imperial visitors such as Trollope and D.H. Lawrence. Nettie Palmer is a key figure in the history of Australian literary criticism, yet her collaborator enjoys only faint memory in this country.16 But as a rare and committed international observer of Australia, Grattan produced at least two significant books on the subject. Introducing Australia (1942), a work aimed primarily at American readers, examined the nation’s cultural life, including its literature, painting and music. A later edited volume, Australia (1947), built on these arguments, with a chapter by Grattan on ‘the social structure of Australia’ and a chapter by Nettie and Vance Palmer ‘on Australian culture’.17 As the two

Palmers argued, Australia was not simply the one-dimensional, utilitarian continent of stereotype. The early prime minister Alfred Deakin, for instance, ‘was more deeply interested in literature than in politics’; the first chief justice of the High Court, Samuel Griffith, ‘was a notable translator of Dante’; and Henry Bournes Higgins, a prominent judge and founder of Australia’s industrial relations compact—also uncle of Nettie Palmer—‘lectured on Shakespeare and Greek poetry’.18 The main thesis advanced by Grattan was that ‘cultural life’ in Australia was ‘something tacked on, something apart’. He thought that only a few Australian writers, apart from Richardson, had begun to accept responsibility for their role in nation-building.19 Grattan noted that Henry Lawson’s short stories had been ‘alive to the last degree’, but that his real local discovery was Such is Life, the ‘superb book’ by Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy), which he claimed was misunderstood despite its lively depiction of ‘perhaps the last stronghold of egalitarian democracy’. Grattan sensed that this puzzling novel was often misread by Australians, who looked too often to England to learn what sort of civil society Australia could be. He considered Furphy’s novel to be the nation’s ‘great book’—akin to what Melville’s Moby Dick meant to the United States.20 It is not hard to find literary studies of political themes in Australian novels, poetry and drama.21 This is a common preoccupation in academic literary criticism, but also public literary analysis—in journals such as Overland, Quadrant and Meanjin. This commitment to politics and literature is especially strong in Indigenous writing. Indeed, if Howe argued that the political novel assumed an essentially contested social world, then the history of Indigenous Australians was a testament to its most violent edge. Any book examining Australian themes of politics and literature should begin with the foundation of Indigenous story. These span those collected by David Unaipon, evoking ancestral life before the arrival of white settlers, and later narratives challenging the assumed sovereignty of colonial Australia. This book contains many references to white encounters with Indigenous Australia, but features only one extended analysis of an Indigenous author, Kim Scott, speaking in his own name about black–white relations. Other scholars will be better placed to do justice to Indigenous perspectives on politics and literature, drawing on a wealth of experience and writing on the tensions between white and black understandings of politics. Our book’s collection of writers does not pretend to establish a representative sample of Australia’s literary tradition: we acknowledge the rich contributions to literary excellence coming from many Indigenous sources, and we respect the claims made by Indigenous advocates for a fair hearing on their own terms. Scott’s work speaks to central questions in the national literature—questions that any work on Australian writing must grapple with. In his insistent emphasis on cultural sovereignty, Scott traces broader cultural demands made by Indigenous artists. One powerful expression of this was the Barunga Statement of 1988, which called on ‘the Australian Government and people’ to respect Indigenous rights ‘for promotion of our Aboriginal identity, including the cultural, linguistic, religious and historical aspects, including the right to be educated in our own languages, and in our own culture and history’.22

In the same way, we continue to hear Patrick Dodson’s 1993 complaint about political reform that ‘tries to capture the spirit of a modern Australia, but that still denies the spirit of indigenous Australia’; and we continue to learn from Marcia Langton’s complaint about misguided white literature written ‘as if none of the brutality, murder and land clearances occurred’.23 We also pay attention to Mick Dodson’s warning that Australians and their governments are far too slow to see that reconciliation has ‘as much, if not more, to do with spiritual repair as with material programs’, and so requires ‘values that could make an Australian family of all people within this country’.24 Thus, our selective focus on six Australian novelists is balanced by the research of other scholars who can speak with greater legitimacy about Indigenous perspectives on politics in Australia.25 When the perspective changes to non-Indigenous writing, the themes of politics and literature have tended to drift further apart. Yet it is never too far apart. Brigid Rooney’s work on ‘writer-intellectuals’, for instance, closely maps the deep and active tradition of Australian writers engaging in public life as social and political commentators.26 Despite this, it is very unusual to locate a body of research in Australian political science reflecting substantial interest in politics as it is practised in literature.27 There are exceptions to this rule, of course. A number of very senior political scientists, including Donald Horne and Don Aitkin, have published novels. Closer to the academic mainstream, two pioneering works stand out: a 1950s article by Sol Encel, and a later book edited by Geoff Stokes. Encel’s article demonstrated two simple truths: that political novels were alive and well in Australian literary culture; and that few of these ultimately succeeded as works of literature.28 The first novel praised by Encel comes closest to literary excellence: Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881), which is one of the seven novels this book examines in depth. The rest of the dozen or so works noted by Encel exist as largely abandoned artefacts of Australian political history: curios of past passions, far from the centre of current literary criticism. Many years later, Geoff Stokes published an edited collection on Australian Political Ideas (1994) that included chapters on the philosophy of nineteenth-century novelists such as Edward Bellamy and twentieth-century novelists such as Peter Carey.29 Both Encel and Stokes provide compelling archives of experimental studies in politics and Australian literature. The focus on political themes in Australian literature has never quite disappeared. One example is Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character, which formulated a comprehensive theory about Australian cultural practices, including popular literature.30 The great bulk of recent Australian work, however, has generally been historical studies, usually offered by gifted historians such as Geoffrey Serle in his From Deserts the Prophets Come, which traced the history of ‘the creative spirt in Australia’.31 Or twenty years after Serle, by teams of ‘Australian studies’ academics, often progressive historians, as exemplified by Richard Nile’s edited collection Australian Civilisation—formally re-evaluating Peter Coleman’s earlier and rather conservative edited collection Australian Civilization.32 The Coleman book certainly featured chapters by leading political scientists, such as Douglas McCallum (on ‘liberty’), Sol Encel (on ‘power’) and Hugo Wolfsohn (on ‘foreign policy’)—yet it was left to historians and literary figures to write about politics and literature.

The Nile team included a handful of political scientists: James Jupp (‘identity’), Dennis Altman (‘homosexuality’), Sol Encel (‘politicians’), James Walter (‘intellectuals’), and Elaine Thompson (‘cringers’). Only Thompson referred to the fate of literature in her review of conservative tendencies and ‘the cultural cringe’ of national inferiority. Not surprisingly, the field of Australian studies contains many cases of quite detailed commentary on the political ideas at work in local literature.33 A landmark example was in T. Inglis Moore’s examination of ‘radical democracy’ in Social Patterns in Australian Literature.34 More recent literary critics have noted the prominence of political themes in Australian literature, as can be seen in important works from the 1950s and 1960s examining the philosophy (and often theology) of Australian writers.35 The last two or three decades have provided many instances where students of literature examine political themes, as can be seen in John McLaren’s progressive defence of the literary left in Australian since the 1950s;36 Richard Nile’s book on the making of the Australian literary imagination (praising Australian twentieth-century novels for their role in nation-building, identifying novelists as Australia’s most characteristic public intellectuals—shapers of this nation’s distinctive ‘literary democracy’);37 and a more recent collection by Bird, Dixon and Lee, Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950–2000, paying welcome attention to literature and Australia’s political sensibility.38 In political science, the Australian situation differs considerably from the United States, where the American Political Science Association established a research group on ‘politics and literature’ in 1993 (which is now called ‘politics, literature and film’). This interdisciplinary group takes literature seriously as a source of political insight, especially in the case of novelists who investigate unconventional or challenging forms of political thinking—whether progressive or conservative. The situation in Britain is less formally defined, but a legacy of close academic study of the novel can be seen in Ernest Barker’s work on political theory and literature in Political Thought in England.39 G.D.H. Cole, the great English social theorist, wrote Politics and Literature, analysing the ‘literary form and flavour’ of many British political writers.40 More recently, we can note the activity of major establishment political scientists such as the late Bernard Crick, whose Essays on Politics and Literature demonstrate a maturity within the academic discipline unmatched in Australia.41

Previewing the case studies This book examines six authors who, in the words of Serle, act as ‘interpretative artists who begin to state in aesthetic terms what it might mean to be an Australian’.42 Of the first three, Catherine Martin and Catherine Spence were born in Britain before settling in Australia during the period of evolving self-government, between the gold rushes and Federation. The third, Rosa Praed, experienced the reverse journey—born in Queensland, later moving to England, from where she wrote many of her novels about Australian society.43 The three novelists feature prominently in group studies of outstanding colonial women writers.44 Elizabeth Webby’s collection Colonial Voices captures the words of Spence in her later years

as a religious orator and Praed as a short-story writer—but not Catherine Martin.45 Spence and Praed shine in the portrait of pioneering women writers published in Eldershaw’s famous 1938 collection, The Peaceful Army.46 Spence published many of her novels in serial form, a number of which were not released as books until the 1980s. Some of these reformist novels were ‘considered too advanced to be published in her lifetime’.47 Praed wrote around twenty novels set in Australia, plus others set in or around Westminster.48 Martin’s later novel The Incredible Journey, deemed so ‘sympathetic to the Aborigines’, reflects a white writer’s best effort to represent the personality of an Indigenous female Australian.49 Quite rightly, all three writers appear prominently in Lynne Spender’s edited collection of nineteenth-century writings by Australian women.50 All three received close critical reviews in Debra Adelaide’s edited book on Australian women writers.51 Spence, Praed and Martin were all remarkable public intellectuals; each in their own way a quiet revolutionary. At the time these three works were originally published, women were denied the vote in Australia—at least until 1894, when the colony of South Australia granted them the franchise in the decade before Federation. Each of these women novelists was a special type of public thinker, using their fiction to broaden and deepen community understanding of politics in colonial Australia. From the vantage point of the present, each exists as a neglected contributor to Australian political thought. This book argues that these innovative intellects used fiction to revise and expand political possibilities in Australia, all the while promoting a civic agenda of self-government. They were progressive writers using language and story to help set the pattern for a deeper civic culture in colonial Australia, in pursuit of a more egalitarian and explicitly democratic nation. The second set of authors are notable public intellectuals in their own right. Each is a frequent commentator on the country’s most pressing public questions, with common bylines in the nation’s newspapers and literary journals (Tsiolkas even writes a regular film review column in the Saturday Paper). But all three gained their initial prominence through fiction. Winton, Tsiolkas and Scott are all career novelists, managing mostly sustainable professions in the writing industry, at least after their initial moments of success. Many of their books have sold well—some very well. All have gained critical acclaim at different points, winning local and international literary awards, including the Miles Franklin, Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal. As familiar names to Australian readers, the three authors have received healthy attention from literary academics. This includes case studies in comprehensive works on contemporary Australian writing, as well as book-length studies, either in collected volumes or by single authors. While the three possess their obvious differences—as a white child of colonial Australia, a Marxist son of Greek immigrants, and an Indigenous man on a mission of cultural regeneration—they also share a certain literary mission as Australian writers. Winton, Tsiolkas and Scott are all fascinated with points at which different world views collide, those moments when contested ideologies become urgent and unavoidable, and how a complex society handles those instances of dissonance. This makes for explosive, occasionally violent literature—but always alert to the way politics can permeate social life, where power and identity are fluid and contested, constantly up for grabs.

Australian literary culture In From Deserts the Prophets Come, Serle contended that there were no works of real quality in Australian literature before roughly 1850.52 The 1850s really do stand out as a foundational decade for the culture of Europeans in Australia. Serle traces this back to the influence of ‘cultural missionaries’ who introduced a range of public institutions and practices, such as libraries and literacy programs, designed to promote science and the arts, especially literature. In Serle’s words, it was ‘culture not politics [that] made a nation’. These proselytisers considered literacy ‘the great civilizer’ (a sentiment held in common with other, less secular missionaries, who directed their gaze towards Australia’s Indigenous people— with all its paternalistic and destructive consequences).53 In the 1850s, Australia experienced the growth of ‘a fairly sophisticated migrant provincial culture’, with the development of not only science and the arts but also the writing of its first political novels—starting with Catherine Spence.54 Writing in 1865, journalist and critic Frederick Sinnett urged colonial novelists to develop their skills by creating ‘a picture of universal human life and passion … as modified by Australian externals’.55 He then declared ‘the best Australian novel we have met with’ to be Spence’s Clara Morison.56 Sinnett accepted the novel’s essential ‘Australianism’, even though he recognised that Spence was not simply writing about local conditions for local readers; she held an equal ambition to reach an international audience. According to Sinnett, the book was ‘not a work of mere description, but a work of art’. The novel depicts the turbulence of the gold rush era, composing a picture ‘of the state of society’ and indeed of ‘the public history of the time’—in the ‘characteristically Australian’ colony of South Australia.57 Clara Morison was not Catherine Helen Spence’s (1825–1910) only novel.58 It might not even be the most compelling example of her striking ability to write political fiction. Several of her five later novels deal explicitly with the reform of political representation, including its extension to women (Barnes rightly says of Spence that her ‘strongest interest was in public affairs’).59 In fascinating ways, these novels evoke Spence’s personal interest in alternative models of electoral politics, including her advocacy for proportional representation, born in part out of discussions with her great British mentors, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.60 But for this book’s purposes, Clara Morison properly sets the stage for her subsequent career as a public advocate—introducing her ideas and revealing her enthusiasm for institutional change. This novel about ‘the gold fever’, as Spence described it, was published in the year of the Eureka stockade and deals with many of the same concerns about autocratic power and social irresponsibility raised by the rebels. Clara Morison was published in London in two volumes, comprising around 530 pages. As a 29-year-old author, published just fifteen years after she arrived on the continent as an immigrant, the young Spence clearly had much to say.61 Rosa Praed (1851–1934) wrote around forty novels—a remarkable innings by any standard. Her second novel, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life (1881), is said by Serle to be ‘the best of her works’, an assessment echoed by critic Cecil Hadgraft.62 Born in

Queensland, Rosa was the daughter of an early member and minister in the colonial parliament. She spent much of her youth in Brisbane, with plenty of time to visit her father at work. Praed wrote novels about the politics of ‘Leichardt’s Land’—the name she gave to her home state—where Policy and Passion is also set. After later moving to London, Praed reflected her disappointment that she never really thought ‘to become a genuine Australian story-teller’ in her early days in Queensland.63 Perhaps because of this self-doubt, critics such as Barnes tend to underestimate Praed’s claim to be ‘a major Australian novelist’. Yet he goes on to concede the very real quality of Policy and Passion as a political novel, with the leading character presenting ‘an excellent instance of Australian values’.64 After leaving Australia, Praed continued to write political fiction, co-authoring books with Justin McCarthy, an Irish MP in the House of Commons— the first of which was the 1890s parliamentary novel The Right Honourable. Considering this keen and enduring fascination with politics, Hadgraft suggested that Rosa was ‘more interesting than the novels she left us’.65 But many critics disagree. Praed shares with Spence an ‘acute intelligence and intellectual depth’, which helped dramatise the political world she encountered—revealing what T. Inglis Moore described as an exemplary Australian ‘wit’.66 In important ways, Catherine Martin’s (1848–1937) debut novel, An Australian Girl (1890), reflects the author’s close relationships with Catherine Spence.67 Both writers were born in Scotland before migrating to South Australia. They became friends and associates in the 1870s, when Spence was a prominent public figure and Martin a junior public servant. An Australian Girl was the first of Martin’s four fictional works, a hefty novel that confronted suitably weighty questions—the nature of the so-called ‘Australian girl’ emerging in the colonial world, oceans away from the refining influence of Britain and Europe. Were Australian women growing in a different direction to the traditional image of British femininity? This question was hotly discussed in the nineteenth century, with many intellectuals wondering how gender would relate to political and civic identity. What makes Martin’s story so compelling is her insistence that her main female character remains passionate about German arts and letters—becoming something of a disciple of Kant down under (as Webby notes, Martin’s interest in socialist politics was at the time ‘usually only associated with male writers of the realist school’).68 As with her two fellow preFederation novelists, Martin’s work does much to illustrate the influence of female writers in ‘the making of Australia’—a group robbed of an electoral voice, but finding their own room for political expression through literature and the novel.69 The set of three contemporary authors arrived in a much more established literary and publishing culture than Spence, Praed and Martin. Since 1982, when Tim Winton released the first of the group’s novels, local authors have won five Booker or Man Booker prizes— realising some of Deniehy’s dreams for Australian intellectual life. Winton, for his part, has contributed more than thirty books to this catalogue across almost four decades of writing, including more than a dozen novels. From his first book, The Open Swimmer (1982), which he published as a university student, to his most recent novel, The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), the Western Australian author has collected four Miles Franklin awards, while reaching a mass audience of readers. At least one of these novels, Cloudstreet (1991), has been celebrated as

an Australian classic. Anchoring this career has been Winton’s reputation, in the words of Peter Garrett, as a ‘great writer about our landscapes’. Winton’s vivid and often loving depiction of Australia’s physical world—departing from the dominant strain of European thought on the continent—is closely tied up with his own politics as an ecological activist. Since the early 2000s, Winton has involved himself in a number of green campaigns, including the fight to protect Ningaloo Reef from development, the establishment of national marine parks, and opposition to forestry and logging in Tasmania. For Winton, these campaigns went deeper than any immediate clash of interests, reflecting a more profound disagreement within Australian culture between the ‘the colonial assumption that nature exists to be exploited’ and the idea that ‘nature has value in its own right’—itself one of the author’s most common literary preoccupations, and a frequent source of friction in his novels. Winton’s eighth novel, Dirt Music (2001), animates this cultural tension. Set in a small fishing town, the book follows Georgie Jutland, a middle-aged woman who finds herself at the crossroads of life. She is also torn between the affections of two men, Jim Buckridge and Lu Fox, who represent very different attitudes to humanity’s place in the natural world. One claims the heritage of Australia’s ‘settler ethos’; the other fights against it. Through Georgie’s personal journey, we see these mentalities collide in increasingly dramatic ways, with the intimate lives of three people tracing the larger story of ecological politics in Australia. While Winton became active in formal campaigning midway through his career, after establishing himself as a novelist, Christos Tsiolkas placed politics and ideology at the centre of his earliest writing. As a young man emerging from university in the early 1990s, Tsiolkas was an insistent and articulate Marxist, at a time when Marxism was at perhaps its lowest ebb. This coloured his early novels, such as Loaded (1995) and Dead Europe (2005), which expressed anger and disappointment at the options available to a young leftist—from a flagging socialist movement, to hypocritical and insular communal identities, to the dreary pathway of work and suburbia. While always provocative, Tsiolkas’s political writing was also conflicted and self-aware, becoming more ‘hesitant and exploratory’ in the course of his career. This partly grew out of his personal situation, straddled between the working-class ‘old left’ of his migrant childhood and the progressive ‘new left’ of his university education and queer sexuality. Tsiolkas’s best political novels animate the tension between these different progressive tendencies, revealing the experiences and beliefs that motivate them. The Slap (2008) is such a book. His most successful novel commercially, selling more than a million copies and inspiring two separate television adaptations, the novel begins with a simple and shocking scene—a man strikes another couple’s child at a family barbecue, after the young boy leaves a trail of stroppy destruction and violence across the afternoon, with little parental oversight. Opinions on the act differ. The novel follows eight characters as they react to the day—the cast is ethnically diverse, with different class backgrounds and personal histories—providing a glimpse into each person’s life and world view. Concerned with the various ‘privacies’ characterising the era’s soul, The Slap reveals a country deeply fractured by the blossoming culture wars, instincts about social change, and the effects of prosperity on solidarity and class.

The book’s final chapter examines the novels of Kim Scott, the only Indigenous author under discussion. Scott is a Noongar man from Western Australia—he grew up near Albany, where Winton also spent much of his youth—and his work begins with a different set of premises to much of Australia’s literary tradition. As a novelist, Scott prioritises the other side of invasion, centring the people and ideas often dismissed by the ruthless logic of conquest. As an activist, he has sought to reverse this process of cultural dispossession, through his work with the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project. Scott acknowledges that this can sometimes be an ambivalent fit, using the language and literary form of colonisation to confront its hegemony. But in a country that traditionally ignored or patronised Indigenous voices, the stories carry an undeniable power. Through a simple but in practice often revolutionary shift of gaze, Scott’s work reconceives much of Australia’s popular history, with the assumption of black rather than white protagonists. The novels cover much ground—from the early years of British invasion (That Deadman Dance), to the policies of assimilation and bureaucratic erasure that consolidated it (Benang), to the contemporary attempts to confront Australia’s violent history and revive Indigenous culture (Taboo). This book focuses on That Deadman Dance (2010), Scott’s second Miles Franklin–winning novel, which depicts nineteenth-century Western Australia and its socalled ‘friendly frontier’. Like Eleanor Dark’s classic novel The Timeless Land (1941), the novel shifts between black and white characters—enlivening two radically different cosmologies thrust together by colonisation. Through its irrepressible hero, Bobby Wabalanginy, we see the possibility of cooperation slowly give way to white expansion, as the British thirst for land overwhelms Noongar hospitality. That Deadman Dance is a frequently funny and joyful book with a grim ending; one so asymmetric and cruel, so essential to Australia’s past and present, that Scott insists we grasp in all of its implications.

Notes 1 2 3

Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, with a new Introduction by David Bromwich, Ivan R Dee, Chicago, 2002, p. 19. Howe, Politics and the Novel, pp. 20, 21, 24. C. Flynn and P. Brennan (eds), Patrick White Speaks, Primavera Press, Leichardt, 1989. Another excellent example (dedicated to Patrick White) is David Headon (ed.), Looking Beyond Yesterday: The Australian Artist and New Paths to Our Future, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990. 4 Catherine Helen Spence, The Laws We Live Under, Government Printing Office, Adelaide, 1880. 5 Thomas Keneally, The Cut-Rate Kingdom, Penguin, 1980, ‘Author’s Note’. Also relevant is Michael Wilding, Studies in Classic Australian Fiction, Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 16, Shoestring Press, Sydney, 2006; and Social Visions, Sydney Studies and Culture 8, Shoestring Press, Sydney, 2006. 6 David Headon and Elizabeth Perkins (eds), Our First Republicans, Federation Press, Sydney, 1998, p. 114. 7 Frances Devlin Glass, ‘D.H. Deniehy as a Critic of Colonial Literature’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, May 1980, pp. 329–34. 8 John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, pp. 214–21. See also Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1974; and In a Critical Condition, Penguin, Ringwood, 1984. Similar rethinking of the 1890s can be seen in Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 4–11. Note also Bruce Scates, ‘My Brilliant Career and Radicalism’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, October 2002, pp. 370–8. 9 Ian Turner, ‘The Social Setting’, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), The Literature of Australia, rev. edn, Penguin, Ringwood, 1967, pp. 13–57; Bruce Clunies Ross, ‘Australian Literature and Australian Culture’, in Laurie Hergenhan (ed.), New Literary History of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988, pp. 3–26. 10 Catherine Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, ed. L.D. Ljungdahl, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1987.

11 Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature, Heinemann, London, 1960, p. 40. An alternative view acknowledging political novels is H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature: Volume 1, 1789–1923, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 672–3. 12 Nettie Palmer, Modern Australian Literature, Lothian, Melbourne, 1924; Hadgraft, Australian Literature, pp. 278–9. 13 See for example the Golconda trilogy, so well examined by Vivian Smith in Vance and Nettie Palmer, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1975, pp. 112–22. 14 C. Hartley Grattan, Australian Literature, University of Washington Book Store, Seattle, 1929. 15 Grattan, Australian Literature, p. 22; C. Hartley Grattan, ‘The Australian Bush Songs’, Musical Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, July 1929, pp. 426–37. 16 On Nettie Palmer, see John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1856–1964, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 161–3, 200–3. Relevant to the relationships between American and Australian writers in the nineteenth century is the work of one of C.H. Grattan’s academic colleagues: Joseph Jones’ Radical Cousins: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Writers, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1976. 17 C. Hartley Grattan, Introducing Australia, John Day, New York, 1942, with ‘cultural life’ at pp. 146–65; C. Hartley Grattan (ed.), Australia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1947, with Grattan at pp. 265–75 and the Palmers at pp. 279–90. On Grattan, see J.J. Healy, ‘C. Hartley Grattan Remembered’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, May 1996, pp. 299–303. 18 Vance and Nettie Palmer, ‘On Australian Culture’, chap. 19 in Grattan (ed.), Australia, p. 285. See also J.A. La Nauze and Elizabeth Nurser (eds), Walter Murdoch and Alfred Deakin on Books and Men: Letters and Comments 1900–1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974. 19 Grattan, Australian Literature, p. 13. 20 Grattan, Australian Literature, pp. 28–9. Grattan arranged for the US publication of Such is Life in 1948, with Grattan’s own ‘biographical sketch of the author’: see ‘About Tom Collins’ in Such is Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948, pp. 375–94. 21 A prominent example is T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971. On debates over the public role of writers in Australia, see Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1856–1964. See also W.S. Ramson (ed.), The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974. 22 Galarrwuy Yunupingu, ‘Barunga Statement’, in Anita Heiss and Peter Minter (eds), Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008, pp. 126–7. 23 Heiss and Minter, Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, pp. 146–7, 147–50. 24 Heiss and Minter, Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, pp. 183–5. 25 See, for example, Maggie Nolan, ‘White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL), vol. 18, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1–2; Michael R. Griffiths, ‘Review of Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia by Anne Brewster’, JASAL, vol. 17, no. 2, 2017; Kerry Kilner and Peter Minter, ‘The Blackwords Symposium’, JASAL, vol. 14, no. 3, 2014. 26 Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals And Australian Public Life, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2009. 27 R.A.W. Rhodes (ed.), The Australian Study of Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009. 28 Sol Encel, ‘Political Novels in Australia’, Historical Studies, vol. 7 (1956), pp. 303–13. Very useful on literature and politics is Marian Sawer, The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2003. 29 Geoff Stokes (ed.), Australian Political Ideas, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1994. 30 Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Kibble Books, 1978. 31 Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973. See also John Thompson, The Patrician and the Bloke: Geoffrey Serle and the Making of Australian History, Pandanus Books, Canberra, 2006. 32 Richard Nile (ed.), Australian Civilisation, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization: A Symposium, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962. 33 A leading voice is Michael Wilding. See, for example, his Political Fictions, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984. 34 Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, pp. 238–64. 35 See A.A. Phillips, ‘The Democratic Theme’, in The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture, Cheshire, Melbourne, pp. 35–57; Grahame Johnston (ed.), Australian Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne; John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia. On theology, see Manning Clark, ‘Faith’, in Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 78–88. 36 John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1996. 37 Richard Nile, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002, p. 12. See also Richard Nile, ‘Literary Democracy and the Politics of Reputation’, in B. Bennett and J. Strauss (eds),The Oxford Literary History of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 130–46. 38 Delys Bird, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee (eds), Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950– 2000, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2001. 39 Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England, 1848–1914, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1928, pp. 161–79. 40 G.D.H. Cole, Politics and Literature, Hogarth Press, 1929. 41 Bernard Crick, Essays on Politics and Literature, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1989. 42 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 59. See also Thompson, The Patrician and the Bloke, pp. 289–96. 43 See Debra Adelaide, Australian Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide, Pandora, London, 1988. On Spence, see pp. 182–3; on Praed, see pp. 160–2; on Martin, see pp. 133–4. 44 See Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteeth Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988. For Spence, see pp. 28–34; for Praed, see pp. 151–3; for Martin, see pp. 153–5. Surprisingly, none of these three writers is examined in Kay Schaffer’s excellent Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. 45 Elizabeth Webby (ed.), Colonial Voices, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1989: Spence at pp. 407–16; Praed at pp. 296–306. 46 Winifred Birkett, ‘Some Pioneer Australian Women Writers’, in Flora Eldershaw (ed.), The Peaceful Army, Penguin, London, 1988 [1938], pp. 115–33. For Spence, see pp. 115–21; for Praed, see pp. 125–7. 47 Adelaide, Australian Women Writers, p. 182. On Spence, see also Martin, A History of Australian Literature, pp. 200–7. 48 Adelaide, Australian Women Writers, pp. 160–2. On Praed, see also Martin, A History of Australian Literature, 236244; and Colin Roderick’s 20 Australian Novelists, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1947, pp. 1–21. 49 Adelaide, Australian Women Writers, pp. 133–4. See Catherine Martin, The Incredible Journey. Pandora, London, 1987. 50 Lynne Spender, Her Selection: Writings by Nineteenth Century Australian Women, Penguin, 1988. For Spence, see pp. 77–85; for Praed, see pp. 227–42; for Martin, see pp. 189–202. 51 Debra Adelaide (ed.), A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, 1988: with Helen Thompson on Spence at pp. 101–16; Margaret Allen on Martin at pp. 151–64; and Dale Spender on Praed at pp. 199–216. 52 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 2. 53 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 24. 54 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, pp. 30, 35. 55 Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, ed. Cecil Hadgraft, University of Queensland Press Brisbane, 1966, pp. 33, 52–3. Extracts are included in Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, pp. 8–32. See also Hadgraft, Australian Literature, pp. 106–7. 56 Sinnett, p. 34. 57 Sinnett, pp. 34–5, 40–1. 58 Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, with Introduction by Susan Magarey, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986. See also ‘Clara Morison’ in Helen Thomson (ed.), Catherine Helen Spence, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1987, pp. 1–408. Note the praise of Spence by G.A. Wilkes, Australian Literature: A Conspectus, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1969, pp. 19, 21, 30. For a negative view of Spence, see Barnes, The Writer in Australia, p. 6. 59 John Barnes, ‘Australian Fiction to 1920’, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), The Literature of Australia, p. 155. 60 On Spence and Eliot, see Bruce Bennett, An Australian Compass, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1991, pp. 146–57. 61 Hadgraft, Australian Literature, Heinemann, London 1960, p. 19. Spence wrote extensively: see Bibliography of Catherine Helen Spence, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1967. 62 Rosa Praed, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2004 [1881]; Hadgraft, Australian Literature, p. 89; Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 37. Note Palmer’s praise of Praed, Modern Australian Literature, p. 6. On Praed as a superficial political novelist, see Desmond Byrne, ‘Introduction to Australian Writers’ (1896), in Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, p. 58. For praise of Praed’s early novels, see Hadgraft, Australian Literature, pp. 53, 88–91. 63 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 58. 64 Barnes, ‘Australian Fiction to 1920’, pp. 170–3. 65 Hadgraft, Australian Literature, 91. Note that Colin Roderick’s In Mortal Bondage of 1948 is a serious study of the life of Rosa Praed: Hadgraft, Australian Literature, p. 283.

66 Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 37; Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, pp. 186, 192. 67 Catherine Martin, An Australian Girl, ed. Graham Tulloch, with Introduction by Amanda Nettelbeck, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999 [1890]. See also the Pandora ‘Australian Women Writers’ edition published in London in 1988, with an Introduction by Elizabeth Webby. High praise for Martin is contained in Desmond Bryne, ‘Introduction to Australian Writers’ (1896) in Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, pp. 59–60. 68 Elizabeth Webby, ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’, in Elizabeth Webby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 71. 69 Tanya Dalziell, ‘No Place for a Book?’, in Peter Pierce (ed.), The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 111–13.

Part One

Chapter 1

Catherine Spence’s Clara Morison

Our studies of Australian political novels begin with an unusual story of colonial white settlement. What might seem like a convenient point of departure will surprise many readers. Our first novelist is writing about the settlement of South Australia as a political community differing in many ways from the standard Australian model of unified powers of church and state directing transported British convicts under military supervision. South Australia was planned in Britain as an imperial exception: the foundation of a new Australian colony without convicts and without established religious authority guiding the powers of government. An important element in the South Australian experiment was a migration scheme involving a balance of females and males—thereby facilitating the remarkable female ‘presence’ that ‘pervades South Australian history, contrary to the masculine images that still prevail in the history of Australia’.1 This chapter examines the first of many political novels written by Australia’s first (and probably the first ‘in the British Empire’) female political candidate: South Australia’s legendary advocate of progressive social reforms, Catherine Helen Spence.2 Spence stood unsuccessfully for election in 1897 for a seat in the South Australian body of representatives for the Constitutional Convention established to debate and draft the proposed constitution for the Commonwealth of Australia. Spence’s Clara Morison was published in London in 1854, many years before that significant electoral innovation.3 Spence’s first of half a dozen novels was published in the year of the (gloriously unsuccessful) rebellion at the Eureka stockade in the Victorian town of Ballarat. This famous incident saw Peter Lalor lead many miners to resist the intrusion of colonial police and British soldiers. The government forces were strictly enforcing the oppressive mining licences imposed by the British-appointed autocratic governor, Charles Hotham. Clara Morison is a story of colonial origins, with the drama of the gold rushes forcing the South Australian colony to test its commitment to its distinctive civic purpose as a cooperative new community against the temptation of rapid individual riches claimed to be on offer in neighbouring colonial Victoria. It is ‘the first good novel that was really Australian’.4 Set in 1852, the novel charts the civic confusion that would ignite the Eureka ‘rebellion’ (or rather, the miners’ resistance movement) in December 1854.5 The novel compares life in the two Australian colonies, with two variations of Australian senses of community. The novel also compares the differing senses of community in young colonial Australia and imperial but quite traditional Britain. Her first biographer says that Spence ‘found her sword in the repression of self-interest’.6 The scheme entertained by Spence ranks

South Australia ahead of Victoria and Australia potentially ahead of Britain, with civic equality emerging as the prize won by Adelaide as the colonial new town rejecting not only the Australian inequality of convictism but also the British inequality of established class and religious hierarchy. As one character explains towards the end of the novel, South Australia is doubly distinctive, having neither convicts nor gold.7 Importantly, the novel also poses a number of significant comparisons between settlers and Indigenous Australians. Before departing for South Australia, Clara’s Scottish aunt warns her against going ‘far in the bush’ around Adelaide because of the risks to safety posed by ‘natives and bushrangers’.8 A letter early in the novel has the character Julia refusing to think of living in colonial Australia with her beloved Charles ‘so many miles from civilization, among savages and snakes’.9 At another point, the heroine Clara thinks about who might be able to receive some cast-off clothes, wondering if it might be ‘the first black woman who might come to chop wood’, before recalling that ‘her acquaintance, Black Mary’ might instead deserve to receive the clothes.10 Later, Clara is pleased to be visited by ‘Black Mary’, who responds at some length when asked ‘what she remembered about her history’, which reminds Clara that ‘the natives’ seem a little too fond of ‘medicine’, especially ‘castor oil’.11 Finally, Charles the decent squatter later debates with one of his rural colleagues who believes that ‘those lazy natives’ seem uninterested in managing sheep. Charles—whose personal virtue (reflecting his ‘perfect philosophy’, according to Sinnett)12 steadily grows in importance as the novel develops—replies that he has found ‘natives’ ‘very serviceable’ when invited to work as ‘native shepherds’.13 Spence appreciated many of the colonial complexities of the ‘strange land’ of Australia,14 so it is no surprise to learn that her novel was reviewed as then ‘the best Australian novel’, to quote critic Frederick Sinnett, who in 1856 argued that Clara Morison was ‘free from the defect of being a book of travels in disguise’.15 He insisted that this was ‘not a work of mere description, but a work of art’. Arguing that ‘the Australianism of Clara Morison’ shows that the novel is ‘thoroughly Australian’ in its tale of ‘something very strange, and strangely alarming too’—recording the movement of so many individuals from Adelaide who go to Victoria in search of instant wealth from the gold rush. The wide range of quite ordinary characters are portrayed realistically, so that we see them surprisingly ‘as distinct and disagreeable as they would be in real life’. Spence’s remarkably realistic novel was praised in part because the private story of Clara and other characters blended in so well to ‘the public history of the time’.16 This chapter explores the political dimensions captured in Spence’s literary realism and her commitment to ‘The Australian in Literature’—to borrow her national literary creed used around the time of the birth of the new Australian Commonwealth in 1901.17

Reading Catherine Spence Clara Morison is subtitled ‘a tale of South Australia during the gold fever’, with a story of many South Australian residents travelling to work as miners in the neighbouring colony of Victoria.18 Although noting many of the hardships experienced by those caught up in the

Australian gold ‘fever’, the novel was written many months ahead of the heroism of the Eureka miners’ call for constitutional reform for elected responsible government. The uprising at the Eureka stockade occurred in December 1854, helping to drive the constitutional change to a system of responsible government a year or so later—in the colony of South Australia as well as the colony of Victoria. As noted earlier, Spence’s novel was published in London in 1854, capturing some of the mood of colonial politics in that period of intercolonial constitutional crisis. A novel promising ‘a tale of South Australia’ was probably intended to illustrate that colony’s distinctive founding as a settlement free from convicts and free for religious dissent. The ‘province of South Australia’ was founded in 1836, with Spence’s family arriving from Scotland three years later as part of the earliest generation in this innovative ‘paradise of dissent’ attracting interest from European, especially German, Protestants as well as mainstream British settlers. Spence’s novel thus examines an Australian exception, with South Australia ‘founded by doctrinaires’ as an experiment in a new form of colonisation deliberately intended to foster a system of civic order unlike the more authoritarian Australian colonies based on convict labour.19 As Clara writes to her Scottish family: ‘this never has been a penal settlement’.20 Spence’s novel can be seen as innovative in breaking ranks from conventional colonial sentiments about many of the social inequalities associated with established political and religious authorities and with the continued transportation of British convicts, which only terminated with the struggle for elected responsible government in the late 1850s. Readers learn from letters between the novel’s main characters about the lure of that ‘wonderfully stirring town’ of Melbourne during the gold rush—which, despite its dynamism, ‘is not a nice place to live in’.21 The religious theme deserves closer comment. Spence’s family were Scottish Presbyterians who had raised her with deep respect for the conservative power of ‘original sin’ to dampen human interest in unrealistic hopes for social moral progress. Spence’s Autobiography records her conversion from this firmly Calvinist doctrine ‘of the gloomy religion’.22 Spence slowly learned new respect for a form of Unitarianism associated with settlers from England’s Birmingham. Unitarianism as promoted by this small Christian minority encouraged an alternative social doctrine of ‘meliorism’ through which its supporters moulded a progressive social ethic driving an egalitarian spirit of civic reform.23 Spence’s conversion occurred shortly after publication of Clara Morison, allowing her to use her many remaining years of active citizenship to become personally responsible for devising and managing social reforms in such areas as electoral reform, the fostering (or ‘boarding-out’) of children, public schooling, and kindergarten programs. Two of her chosen professional interests appear in the character of Clara in her first novel, who is described as having interests in journalism (through which Spence made so much of her public impact) and in delivering religious sermons (Spence gave around 100 sermons in Unitarian churches).24 Spence’s Agnostic’s Progress marks out her intellectual independence as something of a free-thinker—a self-described ‘fervent agnostic’, released from ‘the dark veil of religious

despondency’.25 Strikingly, Spence’s religious faith generated her commitment to social progress to such an extent that she became a noted Unitarian preacher in Adelaide, with additional invitations to preach at Unitarian gatherings not only in establishment Melbourne but also in the United States, which she visited in the 1890s. Sadly, few of these many religious orations have been published but those publicly available show a remarkable blend of ethical and civic belief reflecting intellectually progressive concepts of ‘duty’ far removed from Spence’s earlier form of Scottish Calvinism. Spence nicely bridges the foundational period in the 1850s introducing elected responsible government based on manhood suffrage and the later period of national Federation marked by the start of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. This chapter frames her orientation to the craft of political novels by focusing on her first of several novels —the first was published before her sustained later involvement in South Australian politics.26 Our primary interest is to recover Spence’s own early expectations about the composition and role of political novels from the experience of one who went on to write very significant experimental works of political fiction quite beyond the simplicity of Clara Morison. Spence’s Autobiography was (almost but not quite)27 completed in the year of her death and this remarkable work of an author’s public record as a citizen-at-large provides us with the companion bookend for our review of her first work of published writing. The busy life in between these two works of 1854 and 1910 gives us many other attributes of Spence’s career as a civic activist. Marilyn Lake regards Spence as the exemplar of Australian ‘progressives’ who ‘shaped American reform’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.28 After the publication of her first work at the age of twenty-nine, having lived in Adelaide for eighteen years, Spence went on to write six broadly political novels (one unpublished until the 1980s), one work of civil religion (An Agnostic’s Progress), one work of futurism (A Week in the Future), one work of autobiography, and one commissioned work of civics (The Laws We Live Under). Less than a decade after Clara Morison, Spence also wrote her one great work of political theory, which attracted considerable international interest (A Plea for Pure Democracy).29 We have not even begun to list her vast archive of periodical and newspaper publications, which include many of high value in literary studies, such as the two exemplary articles on one of her literary models, George Eliot. Of her many political interests in civic reform, electoral systems predominated—with Spence becoming not only Australia’s but one of the world’s expert advocates for proportional representation. This system of representation features in her later political novels, such as Mr Hogarth’s Will published in London in 1865. Spence’s political interests revolve around the promise of proportional representation to promote what she termed ‘effective voting’ as a rejoinder to prevailing systems of majority representation, which tended to minimise the rights of minorities. Spence became an ally of English philosopher John Stuart Mill through their shared support for proportional representation, thought by both to reward the very real rights of vulnerable minorities, including those most precious of minorities—progressive public intellectuals representing valuable but neglected civic virtues. Admittedly, historians have other ways of evaluating Spence’s reformism. Critical assessments have been made of Spence’s elitism, with claims that Spence illustrates a strong

movement of moral reformism seen more openly in Britain where so-called middle-class moralists used the power of the state to regulate the behaviour of the poorer working classes. A good example of this precautionary criticism is available in Magarey’s excellent biography of Spence, which aligns Spence with British reform activists promoting extensive state regulation through ‘new patriarchal structures’ reaching deep into civil society to reshape the civic identity of the poor.30 There certainly is a type of elitism in Spence’s approach to politics. Clara Morison comes early in Spence’s career of civic activism, possibly not revealing evidence of any subsequent strategies of class domination supposedly favoured by Spence. What is evident, however, is Spence’s fundamental political strategy of promoting an innovative form of democracy that acknowledges the equality of opportunity earned by the mode of intellectual elites Spence believed she shared with her British mentors, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.31

Reading Clara Morison Spence is not always acknowledged as a gifted writer. Her skills are sometimes complicated by Spence herself, as if she were even more obscurely elitist than some of her critics have contended. Spence often writes at several levels, with a surface story intended to satisfy most readers and a deeper story directed at more discerning readers. Clara Morison contains more than a few hints about the clever indirectness of ‘the veiled maid’s’ own art of writing.32 Spence provides many hints to readers to look out for indirect and secretive forms of communication. For example, Spence at one point notes that her character Clara is exercising ‘a little excusable dissimulation’, which we think can also apply to this novelist.33 There are other examples, such as where Spence states that the author has ‘no secrets with our readers’; or near the beginning of the novel when Spence identifies that Clara has feelings ‘she did not communicate’ to her sister.34 Later, Clara discovers the business of being a governess surprises her because it requires ‘thought and management’ rather than simply ‘instinct’.35 Spence has Clara engage in important protective schemes, which can alert readers to the very real possibility that the author too can engage in protective forms of disclosure. For instance, Clara adopts the practice of writing up ‘a short-hand journal’ where her most secret ideas remain unsighted and unread—or when accidentally read, the discoverer Gilbert complains that ‘not one word of which I could read’.36 Spence allows Clara’s ‘journalizing’ to become her passion, where she reveals ‘my secret correspondence with myself’.37 A final example is the form of concealment practised by Clara when dealing with her eventual lover Charles, when she is doing her best to conceal her growing love for the one she fears is already promised to a rival. Spence ensures that this determined concealment only lifts in the concluding chapter when Clara explicitly renounces this scheme.38 Spence’s Clara Morison is a novel with a primary character called Clara Morison who might, mistakenly, be thought to represent Spence herself. Clara certainly resembles Spence in being a Scottish child who moves to settle in South Australia, where she finds challenges and opportunities as a migrant. Spence composed the novel so that readers learn to see South Australia through the experience of Clara, whose development as a character is the main

source of interest in the novel’s extensive plot of Adelaide’s exposure to the social changes associated with the gold rush in Victoria. The novel takes many turns and roundabouts that allow Spence to tease out many alternative aspects of community development in different elements of South Australian life. The novel becomes a portrait of the type of colonial settlement devised in South Australia in its first twenty years leading up to responsible self-government several years after the novel’s publication. Included in this portrait is another important character whom Spence later identified as more of a self-portrait than the admirable Clara: this other character emerges as the self-assured and independent Margaret Elliot, a long-lost cousin of Clara. Spence later revealed that ‘I was Margaret Elliot’.39 The novel ends with the marriage of Clara and one of Margaret’s former close friends, the well-read and successful squatter Charles Reginald: ‘the hero’ according to nineteenth-century Australian literary critic Frederick Sinnett.40 With these and many other interesting characters, Spence uses the novel to showcase the turbulent highs and lows (and highs again) experienced by Clara as she makes her way towards the happy marriage with which the novel ends. Spence named her novel after Clara precisely because her story best illustrates the ordeal of socially enforced emigration, which Clara must have shared with many other immigrants to South Australia. It is not always a happy story: Spence opens the novel with the story of the origins of Clara’s emigration arising from her uncle’s cold decision to unleash his young niece, whose chances of social improvement seem remote in Scotland, at least compared to the proclaimed opportunities for personal advancement friends have reported from the new colonial town of Adelaide. We never get to see Margaret’s story of migration, which was, we can assume, more convivial and better supported. What readers do get is the picture of the docile Clara arriving in Adelaide only to find that her uncle’s mentor has recently lost his wife to whom Clara had been offered as a family servant. The uncle’s cold logic of enforced emigration repeats itself as Clara is transmitted to a boarding house whose female owner might—or might not—be able to put Clara to good use helping to manage the business. Much later, Clara’s Scottish family are aghast at the gracelessness of those who treated Clara so poorly ‘in that miserable Australia’.41 Yet for good reason, Clara feels ‘so little desire to return to Scotland’: at several points she threatens to return, before agreeing to take a position in the colony as a governess.42 The bleak beginnings of Clara Morison are compensated by the rewarding ending with the marriage of two British migrants, Clara and Charles. Two themes dominating Clara’s story are the politically interesting stories Spence tells about Margaret and Charles. Cousin Margaret plays the role of social critic in Spence’s account of early Adelaide, articulating a norm of virtuous equality in a colony prone to replicate hierarchies of vice and inequality. She becomes the rare character with the not always welcome social conscience: articulating many of what readers might come to think of as the author’s lessons on individual and social virtues worthy of the emerging Adelaide—and of the individual and social vices unworthy of this growing colonial town. Spence invests time and energy in Margaret’s somewhat stern and irrepressible character: she is often the person left to explain the rights and wrongs on

display in the developing town. The fact that Margaret remains single at the end of the novel is used by Spence to highlight the individuality and possibly larger self-sufficiency of this exemplary individual.43 Margaret is the character who identifies Clara as a distant cousin of the Elliot family. Although Margaret reads Clara correctly as a lost relative, she admits that she lacks Clara’s remarkable ability to read the world around her. Spence allows Margaret to confess that she can ‘often find myself mistaken’; by contrast, Margaret knows that Clara is ‘so quick-sighted you could read people at a glance’.44 Margaret has the reputation of being not only thoughtful but also outspoken—indeed, something of ‘a blue’. She admires Charles Reginald but prefers her favourite Macaulay to his preferred Carlyle and ‘those dreamy Germanized minds’ valued by Charles, such as ‘Kant and Fichte’.45 Spence almost finishes the novel with an account of Margaret’s ‘pet aversions—Carlyle and the German philosophers’, thereby making it clear that the fondness for British philosophers faces quite a challenge in this untraditional British colony being shaped by the German-speaking Charles Reginald.46 Spence refers many times to the valuable contribution of German settlers in South Australia. She includes a number of important German characters and despite her identification of Margaret as somewhat akin to herself, readers can also conclude that the German dimensions in this novel reinforce the sense of new beginnings promoted in the colony of South Australia. This theme of German contributions to Australia will return in greater detail in our later chapter on Catherine Martin’s 1890 novel An Australian Girl.47 Charles Reginald plays another political role. Spence portrays him as the decent colonial hard worker sent to South Australia to make a quick fortune so that he can return to marry his beloved Julia Marston, who willingly remains comfortably back home in England. Charles remains silent about his secret engagement as he uses his energies productively in earning his rural fortune. Yet his heart longs for female companionship. He searches for the friendship and completeness that will reward his somewhat lonely enterprise of working north of Adelaide in the harsh countryside. Spence here paints a picture of a male character who seems far removed from the ‘bush type’ of backcountry larrikin so often celebrated in Australian nineteenth-century literature.48 Charles is at home in colonial South Australia and reluctant to return to England where marriage awaits him. He cultivates Clara as a new friend and discovers her worth as a soul mate. He learns to compare her favourably to his English partner-to-be, trying to balance his formal duty to return eventually to his former lover against his growing fondness for Clara. Spence devises a political tale around Charles through the frequent mental comparisons he makes between his two endearments. The novel says more than Charles can ever really know by revealing the contrasting characteristics of Julia and Clara. Spence develops readers’ close interest in old and new societies through a related comparison between the unreturning colonial Charles and one of his former friends, Robert Dent, who, having made his colonial fortune, returns to England, there to find and later marry Julia. Spence’s novel contains quite extensive comparisons between the traditional English social scene of conformity associated with the engaging relationships between Julia and Charles’ former friend Dent, and the less rigid and more open social arrangements developing in colonial Adelaide.

Charles is an English migrant who is learning to value the non-traditional opportunities open to him in Australia. The surprise is that Spence lets us see Charles as a deserving carer for Clara rather than as an outstanding ‘man of the land’ rising to wealth and respectability in South Australia. Charles becomes politically interesting because he slowly rejects the option to return to the established social order of England—preferring to draw on his colonial wealth to provide opportunities to share his life with Clara in the unestablished colonial margins of South Australia. Although his taste in reading is quite wide, his preference is for poetry rather than prose: Spence thus renders Charles as a poetic character at home in the Australian bush but never really reflecting the earthiness of the bush. Charles and Clara carve out reclusive space in colonial Australia that outweighs the social esteem both might earn if they returned to England as a wealthy married couple. Spence thus provides a justification for newly Australian communities as less derivative and in many ways more poetic than the prosaic English communities from which colonial Australia derives the bulk of its settlers. Charles is fond of reading English poetry so dearly treasured by many of the female characters in this novel. His political attributes derive from his close association with women as equals: first his secret lover in England, who eventually grows tired of Charles’ endless interest in South Australia; and second his slowly emerging new love for Clara, who strikes Charles as more of the marrying type than her fetching but feisty cousin Margaret. Spence allows her readers to begin to see Charles as happy to be caught in the middle, as it were, between the two extremes of the grimly possessive lover in England and the grandly independent Margaret in Adelaide. An important implication here is that Spence says little in the novel to justify or defend the value of the British polity or British imperialism. We know that Spence once returned to Britain and drew heavily from her intellectual mentors such as J.S. Mill and George Eliot. In this novel, however, Spence lets the imperial power fade away as she draws readers’ attention to the emerging power of a new self-governing community learning to make its own way.

The mother country Spence has Clara refer to ‘the mother country’ when debating the comparative merits of life in the colonies and in England. This reference is important because Clara is urging her distant cousin Gilbert to remain in the colonies and serve as a lawyer, noting that ‘antiquated abuses cannot be looked on with the same reverence here as in the mother country’. Gilbert thinks it might be better to take ‘home a large bag of nuggets from the gold-fields’; but Clara argues that it would be better for him if ‘people date your rise from the time when you made an eloquent speech or an important reform’.49 This fascinating debate between two of the most interesting characters in the novel matches the larger contrast Spence makes between the decision by Julia Marston and Robert Dent to marry and remain in the home country and the decision made by Clara and Charles to remain married colonials. Julia is secretly engaged to Charles, impatiently awaiting his return with riches from his colonial adventure, which she does not want to share by being there. Robert Dent has made enough money from his time in South Australia to return to England. Julia and Robert meet with the help of Charles’ mother (in ‘the mother country’), who brings the two people

together. Spence structures this engagement around visits made by her English characters to the famous 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which more than anything should have reinforced the cultural superiority of England over the meagre distant colony of South Australia. Spence’s surprising audacity is to reverse many of the expected superiorities by allowing readers to take a closer look at the faulty social psychology on display by her English characters in England and by one particular English character very much not at home in colonial Adelaide: to use the phrase used by that colonial patriot Minnie, ‘this dreadful woman’ Miss Withering.50 Spence took some courage in seizing on the Great Exhibition in London, which was really the first world’s fair, read about perhaps but certainly never visited by Spence. Spence surprisingly admits that ‘even we in the colonies are getting tired enough of that Great Exhibition and its appendages’.51 It is initially mentioned by Charles, who has sent home some of his woollen produce in the hope that it might be displayed at the exhibition. It is next mentioned by Clara when writing to her family, comparing the likely display at the exhibition with the new lessons now coming to her as she enters service as a governess, previously having ‘lived too much in books’.52 The role of the Great Exhibition grows as we later see Julia in London with Charles’ mother, who talks fondly of her son—‘listened with patience, if not with interest’ by Julia. Unlike Charles’ mother, Julia has little interest in ‘the colonial news’. Visiting the exhibition, Mrs Reginald is greeted at the modest ‘South Australian division’ by Robert Dent. He is charmed to meet a woman ‘so strikingly beautiful’ as Julia— so preferable to his former colonial close friend, Margaret Elliot. Dent recalls Margaret’s claim that ‘the great colonial sin’ was ‘an overweening love of money’.53 He parades around the exhibition recalling Margaret’s lack of vices but also her lack of enduring virtues. Spence here speaks more openly than in many other parts of the novel, noting that ‘it is surprising how easily a man can gain a good character’, as though Robert Dent simply owed his to his very great wealth. The generally silent author here says: ‘He had no greatness of soul, no high-minded generosity; nothing in fact to look up to’, thereby commending Margaret for withdrawing from his company when so many others saw their marriage as a foregone conclusion. We now see Dent giving Charles’ family a grim account of life in South Australia and of Charles’ general ‘carelessness’ with his clothes and appearance. Julia expresses her fear that Charles will marry a colonial girl, prompting Dent to use Margaret as a portrait of what such a colonial girl might look like, in their ‘half-polished, half-educated’ ways. The impact is immediate, as Julia begins to think of breaking off the engagement.54 Robert Dent’s ‘cast of mind’ warms to Julia, who is so unlike the demanding Margaret. Julia in turn writes to Charles, asking if Dent is right to suggest that there might indeed be a colonial marriage. Privately, Julia balances the happiness Dent could bring her with the misery Charles manages to bring. Spence’s harsh description of Dent’s engaging alliance with Julia contrasts with Charles’ ever so slow and not so steady engagement with Clara.55

The electoral contest Few critics of Clara Morison pay close attention to the role of electoral politics in the first

half of the novel. Margaret is often described as preoccupied with politics, to the extent that she seems to put off friends through this prominent preoccupation. She stands out as the one character keen to talk about politics generally and especially when there is political debate over public schooling—illustrated in her agitation over the debate between the two political parties over ‘the education question’: referring to the role of church schools, whether government subsidised or, as hoped for by the colony’s founders, independent.56 In the novel, only one character emerges as a political activist: Mr Bantam, who serves on an ‘election committee’. Arriving home late one night after his electoral work, he is forced into ‘a discussion of politics’ with Spence’s fascinating example of a recently arrived English settler, Miss Withering—who is ‘very High Church indeed’ and who has little ever to say in praise of colonial life. Moreover, she declares soon after this event that ‘I was born to rule, and cannot stoop to my inferiors’: no surprise then that she is firm in ‘not admiring Australian society’.57 Bantam turns out to be quite the reverse: a radical, a dissenter, and a voluntary—to cite three of Spence’s descriptions of his non-conservative leanings. Mrs Bantam tries to moderate the discussion between her guest and her husband, but she has great difficulty in restraining what Mrs Withering calls ‘our war of words’ within the norms of what Spence ironically calls ‘parliamentary language’.58 Bantam also engages in a lively political debate in the home of Clara’s distant cousins the Elliots. His daughter Minnie is Spence’s working model of a young colonial patriot, somewhat out of step with the young Elliot adults with whom she travelled from England to Adelaide some years earlier. The two Bantams receive plenty of polite opposition from the Elliot household. A conservative young man such as Gilbert Elliot sees himself as ‘a red hot Tory’ who fears that ‘bad times’ are approaching the colony: he especially fears that there is too much ‘truckling to the masses’, too much abuse ‘of the term liberty’, as though ‘Yankeeland’ had arrived in South Australia. He states that his liberal opponents hold that the ‘working-men’ are regarded as ‘infallible dictators of what is right or wrong in colonial policy’.59 Spence allows Margaret and Gilbert to debate electoral politics over several pages, without Spence disclosing too openly her own political preferences.60 The effect is to deepen the description of colonial society with a rich account of how political questions reach far into colonial civil society—out of the immediate control over any ruling clique as might be favoured by any number of imperial or colonial administrators. Bantam later meets Charles and reminds him of his duty to ‘give your vote’ in the forthcoming election. Bantam notes that he and Charles ‘differ on politics’, yet he contrasts that civil difference with his own conflict with that ‘strong church and state lady’, Mrs Withering.61 Spence lets readers see that Charles is also closely interested in politics and prone to display ‘his somewhat hot discussions on politics’.62 Politics is as much the management of public opinion as the arrangement of party schemes. Spence turns readers towards this wider frame of political reference when Gilbert and Margaret debate what role he should play in writing about politics for the newspapers.63 Gilbert has high views but only low respect for the press. Margaret disagrees, stating her alternative ‘idea of a public instructor’. Importantly, she

knows that ‘the working classes’ look to the press in ways not practised by ‘gentlemen’: workers take ‘their political creed … from the journal they read’. Better newspapers can make for a better society, contends Margaret. Gilbert fears that ‘a style too high’ as he would contribute would be ignored by the workers who prefer ‘trash’—provoking Margaret to denounce that we must ‘do like the Americans’ if colonial society is ever really to recover its ‘regeneration’. Spence occasionally reveals some of her own edginess about politics. In chapter 12 of volume two, Gilbert goes on to taunt Margaret for thinking that she could properly write for the newspapers or even prepare reports for him to have published as his own. Such an arrangement resembles the first steps of Spence’s own entry into journalism, where an unfranchised citizen uses the power granted to her brother to have published reports prepared by his sister.64

The rush of gold fever Clara Morison gives us a picture of a society caught up in the ‘fever’ of a gold rush. Spence’s special art of writing is to allow readers to stay in and around Adelaide while so many of their ambitious or simply voracious young men succumb to the call of the gold rush. The novel is an important document in economic history as it records a community in anxiety over falling income and the rising attraction of internal colonial migration as large numbers of citizens move from relatively poor South Australia to the neighbouring colony of Victoria. The two Victorian towns of Ballarat and Bendigo feature as magnets, drawing many South Australians into their busy goldfields. Readers never really get to see for themselves what is occurring in Victoria: Spence uses the technique of letter-writing to let her own readers feel the force experienced by those who seek their fortune in the neighbouring colony. The larger story is that few of the new miners return rich; but there are many minor stories about how different characters relate to the challenging experience of living as ‘diggers’ in another colony with quite different social and political conditions. Spence’s novel is one of Australia’s early literary works examining ‘the diggers’, whose name was to live on famously after Spence’s death when used to describe another era of transported workers— Australia’s soldiers during World War I. In volume two of Clara Morison, Spence generally refers in her chapter headings to ‘the diggings’, but she also refers in two chapters to ‘the diggers’ who ‘return’ and ‘settle down’.65 Before Spence examines the lessons learnt by the returning ‘diggers’, she lets readers slowly learn through various references in volume one to appreciate the importance of the first evidence of an Australian gold rush. Victoria will emerge as the hot centre of this gold rush, surrounded as it were by the early reports made of gold discoveries in the colony of New South Wales and the last reports made about gold discoveries in South Australia.66 The theme of the first interest that her characters have of the Victorian gold rush is the very opposite of healthy ambition: the Elliot family eventually sees its male members hurtling off to Ballarat, yet the first we really hear of this goldfield is the fears expressed by deserted female members of the Elliot family. Margaret is the first to speak of her grief about gold and the mistaken virtue of those who are so keenly ‘worldly-minded’ and so fond of ‘unearned money’.67 What Spence calls ‘the gold-fever’ is critically examined by Anne Elliot in a long

letter to her close friend Minnie Bantam describing the sad effect of the removal of the diggers from South Australia, with reduced salaries for those like Gilbert who refuse to chase the gold or wrap their language in ‘the words nuggets, ounces, gold-dust, cradles, and diggings’.68 California sits at the edge of Spence’s story: some colonials such as Mr Handby are returning from the United States having unearthed little during the US gold rush, yet ready to try again at Ballarat; and some Americans are entering Australia in search of easier access to gold where there are fewer competitors to dampen their enthusiasm.69 The drama of volume two almost begins with reports brought to the Elliot girls about the ‘the miserable state of things at the diggings’, where fear of ‘being robbed and murdered’ reduces the selfconfidence of the diggers.70 The larger substance is carried by two chapters of letters between South Australian diggers and their Adelaide families.71 The letters contain important accounts of such classic devices as the expensive and demanding mining licences required for inspection by the Victorian police, the perils of cooking and of washing, of rivalry among competing miners, and of their longing to return to South Australia as soon as they have earned a sufficient reward. Letters indicate that the diggers are far from lucky, that they risk thievery all around them, that they are short of water and that disorderly ‘Victoria is not to be compared with’ their orderly home colony. Victoria is reported to be ‘not such a democratic colony as our own’, with so much lawlessness surrounding the diggings, despite the formidable presence of soldiers inspecting for ‘licence fees’.72 Spence allows the diggers’ plight to worsen before their welcome return is celebrated. The licence fee proves increasingly hard to pay in the absence of discovered gold. The post offices at the mining sites are poorly administered, with lots of mail getting lost or remaining undelivered. The winters are ‘miserably wet’ for miners with scant housing facilities. Illness was on the rise as luckless miners refused to retreat from their ordeal, despite the absence of such essentials as reliable drinking water. Gilbert writes to his sister Margaret about the comparatively ‘obstinate’ Victorian government, suffering ‘an exclusive attachment to old interests’, which is so unlike the system in South Australia. Margaret also hears from William Bell, who has declined a job in ‘troubled Melbourne’ with its population dominated by ‘the sweepings of British jails’, made worse by a ‘feeble government’ led by squatters and administered by ‘a wretched police’. The conclusion is that the ‘colonial sin of worldlymindedness’ has eaten further into the colony of Victoria than in South Australia.73

Conclusion There is more to Catherine Spence than Clara Morison. Our approach has been to focus on this early political novel as one way of alerting readers to the wider relevance of this largely neglected novelist. Once a conservative, Spence adopted democracy and embraced progressive reform to make Australia more ‘purely’ democratic.74 She remains valued as a public figure because of the progressive reforms she championed in the time away from her novels. We know that she stands out as a political thinker who sketched out A Plea for Pure

Democracy early in the decade after Clara Morison. Spence broke ranks by seeking election as one of the South Australian representatives to the pre-Federation constitutional convention. Our interest in this chapter has been to recover her own foundation story, which happens to be a fresh account of white Australia’s foundation story as gold ‘revolutionized Australia’.75 Spence built solidly on this experimental novel in her later work, where her political achievements constitute a remarkable contribution by one of Australia’s pioneering theorists of civil society—portrayed in the first instance in Clara Morison. While many critics have acknowledged Spence’s novels, few have praised the ‘spinster of steel’ for her humour as a writer.76 Miles Franklin described Spence as ‘a rebel’, which still sounds very accurate.77 Spence’s use of humour is an important part of her political teaching, if we can use such an ambitious term to describe her deeper literary purpose. Part of her intention is to ridicule practices inconsistent with the movement towards ‘pure democracy’ emerging in Australia. The electoral contest examined in her first novel does not have a set of winners and losers: Spence’s point is not to record political or partisan success and failure but to evaluate conventional political contest in its deeper procedural context agitating and irritating interests in civil society. Humour emerges as a major feature of Spence’s characterisation of political behaviour, especially when ridiculous political beliefs distort the social conventions of civic equality honoured by Spence. The ridiculous conventions might be practised by political activists such as Mr Bantam or by conservative reactionaries such as Miss Withering: Spence’s humour reflects her close interest in the type of civic virtues and civic vices as distinct from any particular interest in partisan or ideological types. As Spence later wrote, ‘we need some powerful satirist to make ridiculous what is so demoralizing’.78 Readers can fail to notice this social interest in humour if they expect Spence to stick to the job of a journalist and tell colourful stories about prominent political figures. The type of political novel Spence wrote fits with the times she lived in: she as an author was not strictly a citizen with the right to vote or, before South Australian reforms of electoral legislation in 1894, to stand for office. Not surprisingly then, Spence’s type of political novel focuses less on ‘who’s in and who’s out’ of high political office and more on who is shaping and who is restricting the civic virtues of the emerging democratic regime. Susan Magarey rightly calls Clara Morison ‘social purpose fiction’.79 Her characters play important roles in the novel, even when they are only on the edges of formal political processes. The regime is only as good as the goodness of its leading characters or as bad as the vices of competing characters. Spence invites readers to follow her plot so that they can begin to study competing characteristics encouraging and discouraging the civic virtues required by what Spence— well ahead of most Australian public intellectuals—promoted as ‘pure democracy’.80

Notes 1

Susan Marsden, ‘South Australia’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 598–600. The standard authority is Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2nd edn., Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967, esp. pp. 1–7,

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

74–95. Geoffrey Blainey, A Land Half Won, Sun, Melbourne, 1995, p. 284. See also Susan Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence and the Federal Convention’, The New Federalist, no. 1, June 1998, pp. 20–2; Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, Text, Melbourne, 2018, pp. 51–2, 63–4. Clara Morison, in Helen Thomson (ed.), Catherine Helen Spence (Portable Australian Authors series), University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1987, pp. 1–408. This work at p. 576 lists the original 1854 London edition as published anonymously by J.W. Parker in two volumes. Other editions include Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, Introduction by Susan Eade, Rigby, Adelaide, 1971; and Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, facsimile of first edition with Introduction by Susan Magarey, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986. A recent review of Spence’s children’s writing is Anne Jamison, ‘Economies of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Australia: Catherine Helen Spence’s Short Fiction for Children’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2014, pp. 395–408. Miles Franklin, Laughter, Not for a Cage, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956, p. 58. On Franklin and Spence, see Susan Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Novelist’, in Philip Butterss (ed.), Southwords: Essays on South Australian Writing, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1995, esp. pp. 27–8, 31, 33. See also H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. Volume One, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 200–7; Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, pp. 28–34. Generally, see Helen Jones, In Her Own Name: A History of Women in South Australia from 1836, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986, pp. 99–101, 189–91. David Headon and John Uhr (eds), Eureka: Australia’s Greatest Story, Federation Press, Sydney, 2015. Jeanne F. Young, Catherine Helen Spence, Lothian, Melbourne, 1937, p. 44. On ‘The Effects of Gold’, see Pike, Paradise of Dissent, pp. 442–60. Clara Morison, p. 382; on the evils of convictism, see Spence, Autobiography, pp. 472–3. Clara Morison, p. 4. The best account of Clara Morison is Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Novelist’, pp. 27–45. Clara Morison, p. 37. Clara Morison, p. 130. Clara Morison, p. 165. Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, ed. Cecil Hadgraft, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1966, p. 40. Clara Morison, pp. 183–4; on Spence and Indigenous themes, see also Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Novelist’, pp. 37–8; and Helen Thomson, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Enlightenment Woman’, in Xavier Pons (ed.), Departures: How Australia Reinvents Itself, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press 2002, pp. 239–41. Clara Morison, pp. 41–2, 112. Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, p. 34; see also Tanya Dalziell, ‘No Place for a Book?’, in Peter Pierce (ed.), The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 111–13. Sinnett, Fiction Fields of Australia, p. 41. On Spence’s literary realism, see Helen Thomson, ‘Love and Labour’, in Debra Adelaide (ed.), A Bright and Fiery Troop, Penguin, 1988, pp. 101–15. Spence, Autobiography, in Thomson, Catherine Helen Spence, pp. 492–4. Text of Spence’s ‘The Australian in Literature’ is at pp. 492–4 of Thomson’s Catherine Helen Spence. See generally Spence on ‘novels and political inspiration’, Autobiography, pp. 426–31. Spence, Autobiography, pp. 420, 438. Clara Morison, p. 72. Clara Morison, pp. 217–19. Spence, Autobiography, p. 418. ‘Meliorism’ comes from George Eliot: see Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 77. Clara Morison, pp. 304–5, 327; Spence, Autobiography, pp. 447–51. See more generally, R.B. Walker, ‘Catherine Helen Spence, Unitarian Utopian’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 5, 1971, pp. 31–41. Spence, Autobiography, p. 425. See R.B. Walker, ‘Catherine Helen Spence and South Australian Politics’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. XV, no. 1, April 1969, pp. 35–46. Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, p. 24. Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2019, pp. 74–105. C.H.S. [Catherine Helen Spence], A Plea for Pure Democracy: Mr Hare’s Reform Bill Applied to South Australia, Rigby, Adelaide, 1861. Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, p. 91; but see generally pp. 89–104.

31 Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, pp. 144–8. On the connection between Spence and George Eliot, see Bruce Bennett, ‘Catherine Spence’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1986, pp. 202–10. 32 The best criticism comes from Miles Franklin, Laughter, Not for a Cage, pp. 52–68. See also Blainey, A Land Half Won, pp. 278–88. Blainey at p. 287 notes that Spence ‘disguised herself’ so that she could exercise greater public influence. 33 Clara Morison, p. 355. 34 Clara Morison, pp. 229, 4. 35 Clara Morison, p. 69. 36 Clara Morison, pp. 82, 315 37 Clara Morison, pp. 156, 165, 202. 38 Clara Morison, pp. 402–3. 39 Spence, Autobiography, p. 430. As Colin Roderick says, Margaret ‘is the nearest character to the Catherine Spence of the political world of South Australia’: An Introduction to Australian Fiction, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950, p. 10. 40 Sinnett, Fiction Fields of Australia, p. 38. 41 Clara Morison, p. 256. 42 Clara Morison, p. 358; see also pp. 373, 385, 391, 401. 43 Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, pp. 62, 66–7. 44 Clara Morison, pp. 177, 212–13. 45 Clara Morison, pp. 160–1. 46 Clara Morison, pp. 384, 408. 47 On the early history of German immigration, see Pike, Paradise of Dissent, pp. 130–3, 209–11, 335–6. 48 Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, pp. 56–7; see also Young, Catherine Helen Spence, p. 136; and Magarey, ‘Preface’, Clara Morison, p. x. 49 Clara Morison, p. 386. 50 Clara Morison, p. 109. 51 Clara Morison, p. 147. 52 Clara Morison, pp. 44, 72. 53 Clara Morison, pp. 146–8. 54 Clara Morison, pp. 149–51. 55 Clara Morison, pp. 152–5. 56 Clara Morison, pp. 85, 103. For a detailed review of these important elections, see Pike, Paradise of Dissent, pp. 426– 37. 57 Clara Morison, pp. 91–2. 58 Clara Morison, pp. 76, 79. 59 Clara Morison, pp. 104–5. 60 Clara Morison, pp. 101–3. 61 Clara Morison, p. 81. 62 Clara Morison, p. 98. 63 Clara Morison, pp. 304–9. 64 Young, Catherine Helen Spence, p. 46. 65 Clara Morison, vol. two, chaps 3, 4, 11 and 12. 66 Clara Morison on New South Wales, see pp. 78, 169; and on South Australia, see vol. two, pp. 377–82. 67 Clara Morison, p. 162. 68 Clara Morison, pp. 170–3. 69 Clara Morison, pp. 111, 118–19, 166. See also E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, Young America and Australian Gold: Americans and the Gold Rush of the 1850s, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1974. 70 Clara Morison, p. 216. 71 Clara Morison, pp. 230–41, 266–75. 72 Clara Morison, pp. 230–41. 73 Clara Morison, pp. 266–75. 74 Young, Catherine Helen Spence, pp. 50–9, 72, 74. 75 Spence, Autobiography, p. 425. On Spence’s ‘didactic’ purposes for her ‘novels of ideas’, see Helen Thomson, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Pragmatic Utopian’, in Who Is She? Images of Women in Australian Fiction, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1983, pp. 12–25. 76 Blainey, A Land Half Won, p. 286. 77 Franklin, Laughter, Not for a Cage, p. 53; and on Spence’s interest in Jane Austen’s ‘constant ripple of amusement’, see

Autobiography, p. 431; see also Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Novelist’, p. 33; and Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1960, pp. 19–20. 78 Spence, ‘Some Social Aspects of South Australian Life’, in Thomson, Catherine Helen Spence, p. 538. 79 Magarey, ‘Catherine Helen Spence: Novelist’, p. 30. 80 Spence, Autobiography, pp. 464–8.

Chapter 2

Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion

Rosa Praed’s reputation as a novelist is now mixed. Yet her political novel Policy and Passion (1881) is historically important as a pioneering work of Australian political fiction. Literary critics welcome interest in Praed’s novels, even though her achievement seems more measured now than might have been the case in the past when, for instance, Policy and Passion was held as important to those living ‘in a democratic state … [with] observations of particular interest to us today’.1 Contemporary literary critics acknowledge Praed’s innovation but some label her as ‘typically paternalist and landlordist’, noting that some treatments of Indigenous themes—by this ‘unpopular radical’ who wrote in a ‘quite extraordinary’ manner about Indigenous issues—now appear as ‘toe-curlingly paternalistic and condescending’.2 Praed’s reputation as a feminist depends on how we read her cast of female characters, with many critics now discounting earlier generations’ high praise of Praed’s portrait of the enforced subjection of women.3 Of even greater importance, Praed’s reputation as a literary nationalist now attracts close scrutiny for the ‘awkward position’ this international novelist is now given in Australian and British literary history.4 In our reading of Praed’s Policy and Passion we will try to rehabilitate the more constructive and frequently neglected parts of this political novel as one of our set of three pre-Federation novels exploring Australian politics. One can doubt the traditional view that this novel ‘is inspired by contempt for the vanity of Queensland politics and politicians’.5 Sure enough, each novelist wrote much more than we can examine here. Our aim is to reveal important parts of the foundation of politics each novelist displayed. In this as in other cases, one should take note of the advice passed on by earlier great writers: for instance, one can be reassured by the confidence Mark Twain, when visiting the Australian colonies in 1897, placed in Praed’s reflections on the new world of Australia.6

Praed’s project Queensland-born writer Rosa Praed was born (as Rosa Murray-Prior) in 1851, almost exactly the time in which Catherine Spence set her first work, Clara Morison. Spence remained very busy as a writer well after her first novel, completing what became her last written work, the Autobiography, shortly before her death in Adelaide in 1910. The Autobiography was edited and published by her friend Jeanne Young from articles Spence had only recently contributed to the Register. Although the Autobiography makes no mention of Praed, it contains quite a few references to Adelaide writer Catherine Martin, whose An Australian Girl (1890) is

examined in the following chapter.7 Spence identified Martin as the only exception to the rule that she knew ‘no Australian novelist of genius’.8 Interestingly, Spence makes no mention of Praed, possibly because Praed left Australia before publishing any of her novels, including those about Australia and Australian politics. Yet Praed is a genuine innovator: later scholars note that, despite early ‘moral objections’ to her lack of ‘moral sense’, Praed ‘was the first native-born Australian woman writer to gain international recognition’.9 Some things are shared among Spence, Praed and Martin. Notably, all published their political novels (anonymously, as was then the norm for female writers) in London—the publishing centre of the world. Spence and Martin wrote and lived in South Australia, while Praed left her native Australia when she was twenty-five years old, moving with her English husband to live for the rest of her life in London, where she died in 1935. While Spence travelled internationally twice from her home in Adelaide, Praed returned to Australia only once, in 1894–95. Spence and Praed thus moved in different directions: Spence came to South Australia from her native Scotland and remained an Australian resident and prominent citizen (or ‘subject’, to use the historically correct term), although with a number of extended periods of international travel. Praed grew up in Queensland before marrying a visiting English cattleman and in the mid 1870s moved with her husband to London, where she pursued a busy career and wrote around fifty works—initially in the 1880s a series of Australian and, in the 1890s, British political novels, before her increasing interest in composing stories about spiritualism and the occult. Remarkably, Praed published some fifteen novels in the decade of the 1880s, with Australia featuring prominently in five or six of these works. Policy and Passion (sometimes called Longleat of Kooralbyn after the name and pastoral station of the main character) is the second of these Australian-focused works, published in London in 1881.10 Many of the same public and personal themes of ‘policy and passion’ return in later works such as Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893), which deserves as close attention as we now give to its predecessor, Policy and Passion.11 Both of these political novels are set in ‘a fictitious state’ called ‘Leichardt’s Land’ modelled ‘on colonial Queensland’, where Praed’s widowed father enjoyed ministerial office as a member of the colonial parliament—allowing his only daughter to share with him the modest glamour and entertainments of official life.12 Until she was a teenager, Rosa lived under her mother’s important educational care when her family lived on a cattle station in the Logan region not far from Brisbane. Her mother, who died when Rosa was fifteen, was a niece of the great Australian poet Charles Harpur, which might explain Praed’s ‘ability to describe and evoke the most extraordinary settings which characterises her fiction’.13 Praed’s interest in and high respect for the subtropical Australian environment brings the land directly into her stories of Australian politics. While Spence had acknowledged threats to conventional land management arising from the frenzied diggings of the gold rush, Praed goes considerably further by providing striking pictures of Australian landscapes—complete with moody settings where ‘the bush’ seems to speak in its own native way. Related to this poetic and somewhat spiritualist gift was Praed’s youthful close association with Australian Aboriginal communities with whom she grew up, which

marks Praed out as one of the few white Australian writers who ‘recognised the humanity of the blacks at a time when it was not orthodox to do so’.14 This last element features in important ways in Policy and Passion. In preparing to enter that imaginative work, we should also note that Praed later developed a very productive literary collaboration with Irish member of the House of Commons Justin McCarthy, with whom she co-wrote several important political novels about British politics, including The Right Honourable (1886) and The Ladies Gallery (1888). Praed quickly emerged as a talented and worthy writer of internationally recognised contemporary fiction who from time to time also wrote memoirs about life in her home country of Australia, as well as surprising political novels about such racially controversial topics as Fugitive Anne (1902) with its interracial ‘romance of the unexplored bush’, to quote that novel’s subtitle.

Whose policy, whose passion? Policy and Passion echoes incidents in Queensland colonial politics. The colonial parliament struggled in the early 1870s with heated political debate over a railway linking the rural town Ipswich and the capital city Brisbane. At one point, the serving Palmer government was defeated on a vote of confidence yet refused to allow the governor to commission the opposition as the new ministry. Instead, as in Policy and Passion, the governor granted the defeated government’s wish of a fresh election. Praed’s father was a minister at this time, which helps answer premier Palmer’s question when he first read this novel: ‘Where on earth did Rosa Praed learn all these things?’15 Policy and Passion is the first Australian novel (or work of any type) with ‘policy’ in the title. The author by then was no longer living in Australia. Yet it is important to see this Australian-born author tackling a political novel framed around this concept of ‘policy’—a very traditional term that derives from the classical Greek term politeia for polity or regime, as well as from polis, city. A policy thus refers to a course of action promoted or at least promised by a government or a political party interested in better government. Praed’s title joins ‘policy’ with ‘passion’: her work examines relationships between public affairs and private passions or strong personal drives such as sexual love. The two terms in the title could refer to alternative activities, as though people in colonial Australia were potentially caught between two competing interests—one being the disinterested love of public affairs and the other being the passionately self-interested love of private affairs. Thus the novel might promise to portray some characters who turn away from the life of ‘passion’ in order to serve ‘policy’, and other characters who reverse the options and privilege ‘passion’ well ahead of ‘policy’. Alternatively, Praed might want readers to think of unusual convergences between ‘policy’ and ‘passion’, made intelligible through some outstanding characters in the novel who do justice to both commitments. Dyson Maddox is a character who serves this role. He manages to align his policy commitment to support the best parts of the Longleat government program with his devoted yet cautious longing for the hand of the premier’s daughter, Honoria. Towards the end of the novel, Maddox as head of government invites Thomas

Longleat’s entrenched opponent, opposition leader Middleton, to join the ‘amalgamation Government’ as the attorney-general: this amalgamated or cross-party government changed existing policy and practice, with ‘the views of both parties … modified in an extraordinary manner’.16 This realignment of partisan forces establishes a new foundation for policy and government—beyond the palatable myth of the heroic former premier who preferred to manage things personally and individually, with little help from even his closest allies such as Maddox, and no end of opposition from enemies such as Middleton. Praed’s remarkable title refers to relationships between public and private affairs where readers can begin to investigate and compare two sets of ambitions, with deep private passions intersecting with grand public ambitions—sometimes driven by private, romantic passions, which themselves can often reflect ambitions for public policy. The scene is broad enough to include passionate interest in high (e.g. nation-building) or low (e.g. parish-pump politics) matters of public policy. It is also deep enough to include policy interests in grand or long-lasting arrangements (e.g. deep personal relationships) as well as minor or passing passions (e.g. flings). The pursuit of private passions can help or hinder public policies, just as interest in public policies can warm or cool personal passions. Near the centre of the novel, Praed is at her most expansive in relating policy and passion.17 Readers see Longleat growing distant from his confused and suspicious daughter Honoria, who fears the intrusion of Mrs Vallancy, wife of another member of parliament, into her father’s life. Here Praed carefully presents a false reconciliation of policy and passion as she demonstrates the power of Longleat’s passion for Mrs Vallancy during the turbulent events of the general election. Confident that both the election and the love encounter will turn in his favour, Longleat relishes being seen as ‘the hero of the hour’ as ‘the Ministerial faction’ trumps the opposition. Feeling that he is approaching his ‘zenith’, Longleat prides himself on his eventual gratification of ‘ambition and love’—his anticipated but flawed reconciliation of policy and passion.18 This unfortunate relationship between a head of government and the wife of a former parliamentarian contrasts with the more fortunate relationship between minister Maddox and the premier’s daughter Honoria which, given Maddox’s solid and sober model of prudence, offers a more promising match of policy and passion.

Publisher warnings Publishers act as mediators between writers and readers. Praed’s Policy and Passion attracted considerable criticism from two potential British publishers: Chapman and Hall, and George Bentley. The first publisher declined the novel, based on reports from their ‘reader’, noted British author George Meredith, who met Praed to discuss the merits of the work. His argument was that although the work dealt extensively with love, the result was not ‘healthy, stirring love’.19 The second publisher also rejected Praed’s initial draft of the novel, until her revisions promised greater success. The core problem was the theme of passion: Bentley argued that the publisher did not want ‘to see the process of demoralization’, with intimate descriptions of female characters that ‘are so realistic as to leave a very unpleasant impression’. Trying to make a point, Bentley wrote to Praed to warn her that in her published

novel ‘you cannot very well say what Mr Praed may’—out of public earshot.20 Although Bentley did publish Policy and Passion, he was persuaded by his firm’s reader that this work had ‘the trail of the serpent … over it all’, with too much emphasis on ‘the animal passions of the principal characters’. Bentley considered relations between premier Longleat and Mrs Vallancy ‘so repulsive’, and he disliked ‘the animal quality of Barrington’s conversation’—itself a poor reflection of an English visitor to the colony. Interestingly, Chapman’s reader later praised Praed for retaining ‘the unsavouriness of the subject’, despite her many editorial changes.21 The advice of the eventual publisher Bentley was to moderate the sexually explicit language: ‘tone down, tone down, tone down’. Suitably modified, Policy and Passion ‘was widely and favourably reviewed in England’.22 This novel stands out as one of the very best of Praed’s literary works, echoing in some important ways the style of political fiction devised by Anthony Trollope in his Palliser series.23

Framing the narrative Praed’s novel begins with an ‘Introductory Note’ from the author, followed by forty-three chapters.24 The author explains ‘the Antipodes’ to ‘the English public’ living so far away in ‘the mother country’—so far that they fail to grasp ‘the hidden sources of thought and action which govern the lives’ of colonial Australians. The English will fail to discern ‘the formation of a distinct national type’ emerging as the Australian people develop ‘an independent position’ among the world of nations. Unseen as yet by English eyes are the relationships between policy and passion characteristic of colonial Australia evident in ‘the conflict of personal and patriotic ambition’ featured in this novel. Praed reveals that her story about ‘the main interests and dominant passions’ will appear surprisingly novel to her English audience because the developments of the story are ‘influenced by striking natural surroundings’ reflecting ‘a vigorous and impulsive nation’. The author knows, however, that ‘my Australian readers’ will appreciate what it means to have ‘nature’ so close that it ‘surrounds’ you.25 The novel proper begins with Hardress Barrington, an English newcomer to the colony, hearing heated public commentary about the premier, Thomas Longleat, and about colonial politics.26 The novel ends with the death of Longleat and the surprising but welcome marriage between the two most interesting characters: the young and passionate Honoria and minister Dyson Maddox, who is soon to become premier of Leichardt’s Land.27 The novel traces their relationship over several years, as the honest emerging politician Maddox watches and waits for his chance to save Honoria from a range of politically powerful but unworthy suitors. The most prominent suitor had been the persistent Barrington, who remains on his mission in the final chapter when Honoria is at last alone without her protecting father. The novel’s last scene is set by the sudden death of Longleat, who had been the colony’s premier for many years. Longleat’s death was by suicide in response to political opponents campaigning against the premiers’s concealed history of his crime of murder in England and transportation as a convict to the Australian colonies. Threat of revelation of his criminal past and his undisclosed name-change force Longleat into a corner, fearing that he will never be

able to recover from the humiliation of public disgrace. As the successor premier, Maddox manages things very carefully, concealing from family and community the remorse that drove Longleat to suicide, later reported as a case of accidental overdose of medicine. Longleat is mourned by the people of the colony ‘as though he had been a hero’, with wide public interest in celebrating ‘his patriotism and his virtues’.28 The recent election had indeed generated community support for ‘rather a personal than a political victory’, as Maddox tells Honoria. He knows that the ‘general feeling’ is Longleat is ‘a conquering and powerful leader’—regardless of doubts people might have about ‘his policy’.29 Maddox does little to erase the public myth of Longleat’s heroic leadership, even though he knows only too well how unheroic his predecessor was in accumulating his immense personal wealth. Publicly, Longleat always attributed his wealth to his bullock driving days when young; but privately, he admitted that the wealth arose from the Tarrangella Mine— which, although it is not seen in the story, provides the life stream for Honoria, as Maddox certainly appreciates. Yet what the premier proudly calls ‘Longleat’s policy’ is overturned by Maddox.30 In many ways, Maddox’s prudence is put to the test with his retention of that wealth, now possessed by Honoria and shared with him in their marriage. The more urgent task solved through Maddox’s prudence is the replacement of the former system of singleparty government with a new form of bipartisan government through the accommodation of Middleton’s forces. This final chapter also separates Barrington from Honoria. He returns in her time of grief to push, yet again, his case for their marriage. In so many earlier chapters, ‘his presence had overpowered her’; but now ‘the enchantment had been broken’: with a new strength, Honoria dismisses Barrington, who eventually concedes that ‘the spell is broken’.31 The situation facing Honoria is that her dead father had urged her to marry Maddox, knowing that his calm self-control was ideally suited to his daughter’s irregular and often wayward passion. That marriage occurs in the last page or so of this final chapter when the two finally overcome their hesitations and confess their love for one another. Maddox is seen exercising ‘great tact and delicacy’ to protect Honoria from ‘all distasteful companionship or malevolent gossip’32 —emphasised by Praed because of the distressing political intrigue that ruined her father’s life and the ever-present malice of suitor Barrington, whose shadow lingers late over this story. The novel ends with Honoria and Dyson Maddox touring the world, where they get an opportunity to visit London and at one point dine in high society with many others, including Barrington and his newly acquired English wife. The last sentences of the novel speak of ‘the stalwart young Australians’ who are Honoria’s children, intent on distinguishing themselves ‘on the boards of the House’—that is, the colonial parliament house—to satisfy ‘their grandfather’s ambition’.33 Praed frames this novel around the early moves towards Federation, which is striking in a work completed twenty years before national unity. She has Longleat dream of his grandchildren being ‘the federators and liberators of their great and glorious country’. Although the premier admits that ‘the time is not yet ripe’, he advises the governor of his advocacy ‘for Independence and Federation’—following the American

model of a federated nation, as the British governor would have heard only too clearly.34

The Australian environment Many political novels pay only slight attention to the natural environment. Their authors take for granted the natural landscape already well known to their readers. Yet in Praed’s case, we find a London-based Australian author writing for two audiences: her adopted English audience living around her and her Australian audience living in her homeland. Praed used her powers as author to challenge and revise existing perceptions about the limited or primitive qualities of Australian landscape as noted by so many visiting English observers. This revisionist theme is easy to establish from the novel’s many examinations of the distinctive qualities of Australian landscapes.35 We give some examples below, but we think it important to note Praed’s apology or defence of native Australian landscape against what she sees as mistaken perceptions of a mute or inarticulate natural environment in Australia. We think this revisionist ‘naturalism’ or ‘environmentalism’ is an important part of Praed’s approach to her Australian political novels: ‘political’ refers in part to the polis or community shaping a novel’s account of political activities, and we find that Praed’s polis includes the natural as well as the civic environment. Policy and Passion elevates this relationship between the two types of environment so that readers begin to understand the daunting ‘Australianness’ of the three leading characters, each of whom soaks up natural as well as civic elements shaping their political identity. Although born in England, premier Longleat presents himself as an Australian bushman alienated from English conventions of landscape or lordship. Much of this eventually emerges as a tall tale. His Australian-born daughter Honoria is a striking example of ‘an Australian girl’ educated in a spirit of independence, which makes her compete vigorously with envied English rivals and suitors. Dyson Maddox is the native-born explorer of the colonial interior whose adventures give him the self-assurance to cope with political enemies as well as natural calamities. The skill of Praed’s narrative is to allow readers to see how each of these three characters has ‘groomed’ the Australian bush into politically persuasive garments to sharpen their place in colonial politics. For instance, Longleat constructs a convincing story of his bush-based fortune that suppresses public knowledge of his criminal past; Honoria models her feisty but flawed independence on some kind of clever bushcraft; and Maddox uses his explorer’s courage to bend and hide the truth in his effective defence of Longleat’s shady political reputation. In her craft as ‘an Australian writer’, Praed is unusual in repeatedly describing the changing natural setting surrounding the characters and their evolving story. These descriptions reflect Praed’s determination to show non-Australian readers the distinctive quality of the Australian environment. Praed deserves close comparison with other Australian writers—Lawson is a good example—intent on making something of a tradition of ‘the bush’ in their tales about life in Australia. This comparison would reveal Praed’s unusual focus on the undeveloped landscape rather than the conventional focus on the burdens of ‘bush work’ related to rearing animal herds such as cattle and sheep. Those writers who ventured with

their readers beyond the work sites of cattle- and sheep-rearing often encountered untamed territory best described by Marcus Clarke as ‘fear-inspiring and gloomy’: indeed, so ‘funereal, secret, stern’ that Clarke named ‘the dominant note of Australian scenery’ ‘Weird Melancholy’. For Clarke, the ‘phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land termed the Bush’ transformed itself as ‘the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write’.36 Praed sees things quite differently, in part because she admires native flora and in part because she notes the place of exotic plants alongside native flora. Frequently in Policy and Passion, readers have opportunities to learn about a more literate nature with more positive affinities with humans and of course many other animals living on the land. The opening chapter is about a meeting of citizens ‘at Braysher’s Inn’, featuring in its third paragraph a description of plant life around the inn during a late afternoon summer storm: ‘the acacias in the garden dropped with sickly languor; and the spiky crowns of the golden pine-apples beneath them were thickly coated with dust. Flaming hibiscus flowers stared at the beholder in a hot, aggressive fashion’.37 She also describes the landscape around the inn, where two roads intersect. One road ‘stretched away into the bush, where it wound among the gaunt gum-trees, and lost itself in the dull herbage with which the country was overgrown’. The other road ‘seemed to terminate abruptly near the summit of a chalky ridge, where a clump of grass trees, with their brown, spear-like tufts erect, looked like sentinels to the barren scene’. One of the most explicit proponents of the Australian landscape is Longleat’s chief hand, Mr Ferris, who dismisses European criticisms of Australian scenery with his own experienced view of nature, which is ‘sublime with a wild grandeur that I have never seen equalled’. Ferris speaks as one who appreciates the ‘close link between nature and humanity’.38 Barrington is another English character with sympathetic interest in the Australian bush. He says that ‘they are fools who tell us there is no poetry in an Australian forest’. Yet he takes the point a little further: ‘But a native singer must arise and coin new phrases in which to paint its beauties’, given that ‘the hackneyed similes of the old-world poetasters … do not harmonise with the booming of the waterfalls, the moaning of the sheoaks, the hum of life in these wild glades’.39 Praed uses these two very English characters, each with sophisticated literary sensibilities, to showcase the surprising attractiveness of ‘the bush’. The Australian landscape is far from mute. As Praed reports a horse ride: Sometimes the river-banks closed in steep and rocky; sometimes broadened into a level pocket overgrown with bracken fern and blady grass. Sometimes the stream flowed in murmuring accompaniment to their talk; sometimes the water course was shallow, dry, and stony. Now they were in a valley where sleek kine [cows] stood knee-deep in the right pasturage, and the she-oaks dropped their cones, and the hills on each side, crowned by a dark-green belt of scrub, rose higher and steeper, so that it was early in the afternoon of a March day, they were in deep shade. The country looked as lonely as though no human foot had ever trodden it.40 Praed thus invokes a sense of admiration for the Australian bush as a congenial place to encounter and contemplate nature.

The Indigenous inhabitants Literary commentary on pre-Federation novels notes either the elimination or the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples from the stories of white settlers. Many important novels from this time say little about native Australians, possibly hoping that the future of the country would involve a diminishing presence for the original inhabitants. Yet historians insist that relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples were a constant theme of life in the Australian colonies. Praed seems to be an exception to the colonial literary rule in that she gave some prominence to Indigenous characters in novels such as Policy and Passion.41 As a young child, Praed grew up with Indigenous communities and was close enough to them socially to claim that she considered herself at one time engaged to an Indigenous boy— before her family moved from the bush to live in Brisbane. Shortly after Federation, Praed wrote that ‘the natives have not deserved their fate nor the evil that has been spoken of them. It was mainly the fault of the Whites that they learned treachery, and were incited to rapine and murder.’42 Policy and Passion has no major Indigenous character to rival or contest the place of the white establishment. Yet the novel does portray a number of minor Indigenous characters whose contribution is significant to the development of the narrative. The leading Indigenous character is probably Cobra Ball, who manages horses, including prized stock horses, on Longleat’s Kooralbyn station. Cobra appears as an important character in at least three chapters in the novel and his name is referred to in later chapters.43 It helps to see that his name first appears in a friendly greeting from Maddox—described by Praed as a ‘summons’ to care for Maddox’s horse. Maddox clearly values Cobra’s assistance. Praed then deepens the picture by quoting from Cobra Ball’s spoken responses ‘in the curious vernacular common to half-civilised natives’.44 The short conversation between rider and horse hand provokes contemporary text editors to provide ‘translations’ of Cobra Ball’s statements—as though that language is too distant to be well understood by non-Indigenous readers. That sense of distance is reinforced towards the end of this chapter when Honoria warns her young sister against playing in the yard with Cobra Ball.45 We later learn from one of Barrington’s encounters with Angela, the artistic daughter of Ferris, that she thinks of Cobra Ball as ‘a bogie’ for warning her about ‘the Bunyip’ supposedly living in a pool on the property.46 We find later that he had also warned Honoria about another water pool that ‘has no bottom’: only a seasoned bushman would or could be sure of that mysterious feature.47 Praed thus uses Cobra Ball as a source of debatable advice on the inscrutable qualities of the Australian landscape. Cobra Ball also leads a party of picnickers in a horse ride into the mountains. Despite the burdens of his ‘pack-horse’, Cobra Ball finds himself ‘unable to resist the infection of sport’ when kangaroos start up—‘bounding in long fleet strides’, chased by Cobra and the kangaroo dogs. A kangaroo hunt develops, with Cobra Ball seizing the prized tail, proudly having it ‘swinging at his saddle’. When the party finds a camp site, Cobra Ball explains that he will not go into this particular part of the bush because he understands it is where his mother was buried, far away from her home. Remaining at the camp site, he prepares a fire and makes tea for the party.48 This one

character stands out in the novel as a fascinating representative of a minority of first inhabitants working with white settlers. The novel often refers to other Indigenous characters, with around a dozen or so references to native individuals participating in or near the main story. Many of these additional characters appear without being named other than as ‘our black boy’ or even more generally as one of the ‘Aborigines’ or ‘blacks’. Our modest but important point is that they appear in the pages of the novel, saved by Praed from being rendered either invisible or marginalised.

Debating political morality Before we descend into Praed’s cast of characters, we should try to locate the core theme of ‘political morality’, which brings the leading characters together. In a chapter boldly titled ‘The Coup D’Etat’, Praed lets readers see and feel the drama of parliamentary politics in colonial Queensland.49 The chapter is a colourful portrait of colonial society on display, with the main parliamentary actors placed under close public scrutiny amid the high ceremonies of the official opening of the new parliamentary session. Amid the rush of movement and high expectation drawn from ‘the belligerent tendencies of the Opposition’, readers hear Longleat quietly advising Mrs Vallancy that her husband has accepted the unusual offer of a government appointment that will send him far from home. Praed makes the drama complex as well as colourful, with many layers of ‘opposition’ being revealed. For instance, at one point Maddox complains to Honoria that, despite his reluctance ‘to discuss Cabinet matters’, he can report that this appointment ‘was done in opposition to my wishes’.50 The implication is that Maddox’s commitment to policy differed from that of Longleat and was unlikely to be eroded by his interest in passion. Later we learn directly from Honoria of her belief that her father hated ‘the suspicion of favouritism’ and that he ‘would not give a Government post to anyone who had not good claims upon the country’.51 Praed thus let readers begin to see the pragmatic ‘worldly wisdom’ of Longleat, who senses the great difference separating the ‘painfully discordant’ father and daughter.52 A new session of the bicameral parliament is about to be opened by the governor and we know from earlier discussion that the premier fears that his ministry will be defeated by the parliamentary opposition led by Middleton—who might well emerge as the newly appointed premier. At several points before this reopening of parliament, premier Longleat praises his proposed railway policy while also admitting that his days are limited because of the government’s weak or unstable party support. The general policy in dispute is the proposal by the serving government to get parliamentary authority for a loan to construct a new railway system to open up the colony for sustained commercial growth. This is strongly opposed as misguided southern regionalism by the parliamentary opposition. The specific party disagreement is that the government party has a shortfall of country members who, because of floods severely affecting existing roads and railways, have been unable to travel to the capital for the start of the new session of parliament. Here the parliamentary opposition see their opportunity to force the government to resign. Increasing public pressure on Longleat comes from the plan to appoint opposition member Mr Vallancy to a remote government office in the far north of the colony. Praed uses

this incident to qualify the premier’s proud claims to the highest integrity in all aspects of what he terms his ‘political morality’. This irregular move might help the government live a little longer from defeat by the opposition. More importantly, the official move helps the premier with unofficial interests, such as his flirtation and romance with the former member’s wife, who prompted the premier to use his official power to rid her of her unworthy husband. The parliamentary debates move between the high policy of the railway scheme and the low passion of the premier’s official bribery. Readers can feel the growing power of Middleton’s forceful opposition as it reaches so very close to toppling Longleat’s unstable government. This surprisingly intricate chapter ends with quite a surprise: the serving government loses a vote of confidence yet refuses to hand over office to the opposition. Instead, with the important support of the governor, the government dissolves parliament with a call for a fresh election—later won comfortably by the government.53 Praed carefully includes in the chapter a dialogue between ‘two Government clerks’ who foresee that the premier ‘must have put considerable pressure to induce the Governor to sanction’ the election. The clerks note that the governor’s term of office ‘is nearly up, and he is in mortal terror of doing anything unconstitutional’ such as refusing to act on the advice of his serving head of government.54 This chapter divides Policy and Passion into two parts. What appears to be the looming end of Longleat’s term as head of government is the beginning of yet another series of events that will eventually lead to his suicide in office. The affair with Mrs Vallancy will later unravel as the premier’s lover uses her power to obtain from him diamond jewellery intended to help restore relations with her long-lost original lover, Brian Fielding. The premier admits that something is eroding his world of policy and passion: he concedes that ‘the people at large have no consideration for political morality. It’s for me they care, not for my policy’.55 Yet as Praed soon lets readers see, people close to him, such as Mrs Vallancy, care less for him or his policy than Longleat might think. The dramatic chapter about his government’s defeat on a matter of confidence comes after ninety pages of narrative about awkward and unreliable relationships between policy and passion. It is followed, however, by another 170 pages about an eventual realignment of relationships between policy and passion—at least in the case of the two leading characters. Accordingly, the very next chapter deals with Honoria’s first meeting with Barrington, who inspires her, as a lover of plays rather than novels, with longing for ‘a promising opening for a drama’.56 Surprisingly, it is not until chapter nineteen that Barrington and Maddox meet, after Maddox has been invited by Honoria to come to her station for reasons not immediately revealed. Readers see Maddox’s discomfort at the closeness between the other two, as they learn about ‘our little drama of love and politics’ played by Longleat and Mrs Vallancy.57

Longleat and the invention of Australia In so many ways, Thomas Longleat’s life and times are central to this political novel. The novel opens with him as premier with a commanding reputation for his personal qualities in office, yet facing challenges to his proposed new policy of the railway. Readers see Longleat win an important general election, yet his railway policy remains stalled. Something about his personal passion hinders the success of his favoured public policy. The novel ends soon

after Longleat’s suicide, with the fallen warrior distressed at the discovery by the political opposition of evidence about his past that will ruin his reputation as the colony’s revered public leader. The genius of Praed’s novel writing is her slowly emerging contrast between Longleat’s cultivation of civic virtue as the exemplary Australian and the work of a coalition of opponents who threaten to reveal the foundation of civic vice on which the premier’s reputation rests. What appears to be a conventional political novel about competition between ‘ins and outs’ becomes an unconventional novel about the construction and reconstruction of Australian political identity. The term ‘invention’ captures a core of Longleat’s deceptive narrative about his rise to eminence as a representative of the bush men of Australia—which is, at best, only partly true. Policy and Passion moves slowly forward as readers accumulate a train of incomplete evidence—starting with minor characters such as Ferris but eventually reaching right up to the leader of the opposition, Middleton—about Longleat’s criminal past as a transported convict. Public trust in the premier seems ready to fall into public distrust if the new information reaches, as it certainly does, the leader of the opposition. With chilling grimness, Praed lets Longleat save his reputation by taking his own life. This act of suicide brings Maddox into place as the next premier, and again Praed lets readers see the new head of government’s transformative role as keeper of the Longleat legacy—achieved by sharing the power of government with Middleton, former leader of the opposition but now a minister, forsaking political use of the damning information about Longleat’s hidden legacy. Praed allows the positive case for Longleat’s leadership to be presented by the premier himself. In many ways, this clever construction of an ‘Australian’ political identity is Longleat at his best. Early in the novel, readers learn that the premier is wealthy yet popular, with his reputation resting on his often-told tale of his hard working life as a bullock-driver. His reputation is as a progressive man of the people: masculine but also an advocate of female employment in government agencies. We see Thomas Longleat in the first chapter, as he approaches the inn during discussion of whether parliament will carry ‘his railway bill’— given the opposition being voiced by the premier’s parliamentary competitor, Middleton. Bush men debate the politics of the proposed railway scheme, with one of Longleat’s defenders noting that ‘He said he’d make the colony’ through such policies as immigration and public works. Other supporters describe the premier as ‘Champion of the working class; the Pillar of Progress; and the Enemy of a tyrannical and parsimonious democracy’. Middleton’s defender curiously replies that ‘for all the blather that people talk about impartiality, there’s no doubt that bribery tells in the long-run’.58 With such brief interruptions, Praed loads her novel with the counter-tale of deception that will eventually dominate the last days of Longleat. The so-called ‘mob’ who greet the premier at the inn demand that he speak about the proposed new railway, which will join their district and the colonial capital port. For the ‘mob’, Longleat’s proposed railway ‘was the herald of a new era of pay and plenty’. Longleat spells out ‘my policy’: ‘our colony requires the fresh impetus which she will receive from the circulation of new moneys’ to be raised through a railway loan. The scheme has political opponents, especially the ‘folks up north’ who view the scheme as biased in favour of the populated south of the colony. The premier denies this suspected parochialism: he claims that

the authority for the new loan will generate a wide range of public benefits, including new railways, new bridges, new mines, new plantations—in all, ‘the introduction of new life and vigour into a glorious but debilitated colony’. Of course, not everyone buys the golden tale told by the premier: for instance, in the capital, ferryman Pettit complains about the government ‘making a railway that wur only good for the squatters and free selectors’.59 Longleat understands that Honoria has been educated to a level well beyond that of his own experience. His task is to study according to his political vocation: ‘studying political precedents, and the principles of representative government’.60 This has been his deliberate choice, as he tells his daughter: ‘to set on your being a lady that I would not have had you like myself’. He sees himself as not only less educated but also less established or privileged. At times, he speaks as though reflecting aspects of his English past: for example, when revealing to Honoria that he ‘hated the aristocrats’ with ‘their caste prejudices’ and their ‘snivelling contempt for honest, independent men’ whom he represents politically. Honoria’s deceased mother ‘had fine ways’, Longleat tells his daughter, ‘had some education—she was a London girl’.61 Yet when Barrington requests Longleat’s consent to engage and marry Honoria, Longleat warns that ‘I have some little knowledge of your class’ and ‘I detest it’. The premier is determined that Honoria marry an Australian: ‘She is an Australian, and her money belongs to Australia.’ Her husband ‘shall be an Australian, who will take my name and carry on my work’, which he calls ‘Longleat’s policy’. He asks, ‘have I not seen something of these d—d aristocrats’ who ‘believe in their sacred prerogative to make laws and to crush the people’? They ‘are the curse of England’ and have no place in Australia where there is ‘liberty for man or beast’.62

Longleat’s fall The leader of the opposition strikes the formal blow (the ‘impeachment’) against the premier.63 The blow is not against Longleat’s public policy but against his private passions. Middleton’s case against the colony’s ‘principal legislator’ is the subject of intense parliamentary debate, where the premier’s defenders challenge the procedural regularity of the opposition’s threatened ‘impeachment’. The blow is formal rather than substantive because parliament adjourns before the conclusion of the opposition strategy, through clever parliamentary management by Maddox. But the core of the premier’s deception is made very clear. Middleton fears that Longleat has talked himself into being embodied in ‘the person of her representative’—‘Leichardt’s Land’ under another name. Yet ‘what manner of man’ was Longleat really? After ‘the galleries have been cleared’ of unelected representatives, Middleton’s ‘lengthy prelude and accusation’ is finally brought forward. The parliament learns more than the community will ever hear about the passionate past of the premier. From Ferris’s archive of old newspapers, Middleton has unearthed a story of invented personal identity. Checks with English public authorities have confirmed the story: Longleat is really Thomas Prancard, a convicted murderer of an English aristocrat, said by the convict to have seduced his sister. Found guilty but with a ‘recommendation of mercy’, Prancard was transported to Western Australia as a convict where his term was reduced for his period of good behaviour. Upon release from prison, he changed his name to Longleat and headed to

‘the Ballarat Diggings’ to begin his search for wealth—purportedly through bullock driving, although Ballarat was the centre of the gold rush.64 Two problems confronted Longleat. The first was the possibility that at some point Ferris would unravel the lost story of his criminal past, which happens when daughter Angela dies, robbing Ferris of his longed-for future as the father of a world-class painter. The second problem was that Mrs Vallancy would eventually tire of her affair with the premier—which she does when arranging to dump him for her long-lost early lover, Brian Fielding. These two problematic passions undermine Longleat and his policy. Mrs Vallancy is not an accuser of Longleat, yet her prolonged affairs with him are enough to provoke her husband to carry the message of past misconduct to his former parliamentary colleague the leader of the opposition. The real accuser is the subordinate farm manager Ferris who, stimulated by a load of anxieties about his beloved daughter, documents the premier’s deceit about his personal identity. Praed’s narrative about the coalition against Longleat pitches passion against passion. The world of policy seems more important to Longleat than to his critics. Longleat’s preference for brevity about the past helps readers start to make sense of many other abbreviated or incomplete accounts of his past conduct. Near the beginning of the novel, Ferris first appears as Longleat’s business manager, never with a friendly attitude to his master. Some of Ferris’s curt sayings are hints about past misconduct that Longleat is determined to conceal: he wanted ‘to shroud in oblivion’ his early life, alleges Ferris. With his ‘morbid vanity’, Ferris lets Barrington know how ‘absolutely uneducated’ his master was when entering politics, when he knew nothing then of ‘the classics’; yet Longleat has since risen to the top of colonial life, proving to Ferris that Australia is ‘if not a hell of discontent … [at least] a sink of degradation’.65 Ferris claims that ‘I am Longleat’s master, and he knows it’, warning the restless Sammy Deans about the ‘secret’ hidden by Ferris. Deans senses that Longleat ‘gives you a good salary to keep your tongue quiet’. Agreeing, Ferris says that he possesses ‘a heap of old newspapers, and they tell a tale’.66 Ferris has higher but forlorn hopes, sadly directed to his daughter Angela who might one day become a great painter. Ferris believes that Longleat has rejected or at least neglected him for appointment to a government job, despite Ferris’s genuine gifts for literature and painting.67 Praed makes these sly instances of insubordination all the more serious by recording doubts by other characters about the real reasons Longleat hired Ferris. Like Longleat, Ferris is from England and it appears that they share something important not noticed or understood by others. Some characters, such as the well-informed postman and the gentle English settler Dolph Bassett, simply cannot explain why Longleat hired and retains Ferris.68 Honoria is equally baffled by her father’s employment of Ferris. She dislikes Ferris intensely because she senses that he undermines her father and she despises his openness to the political ambition of Middleton. Ferris consoles himself by noting that ‘the time may come, we shall see—we shall see’, trying the patience of his friends such as Deans by muttering ‘wrathful but inaudible words’.69 Praed’s underworld of gloomy characters sinks Longleat. Ferris’s resentment against the

ill-treatment by Longleat reaches fever point when his daughter Angela dies of heartbreak at Barrington’s switch of affection from her to Longleat’s wealthy daughter. Praed brings two underworld characters into the narrative to transmit the secret information about Longleat’s past to opposition leader Middleton: Deans plays a part because he has been sent to prison for stealing from Longleat’s cattle herd; and Vallancy also plays a part because of what Deans tells him about Longleat’s affair with his wife. None of this coalition of the disaffected would have any real power to harm Longleat except for the deeper resentment of the Longleat family by the ever-crafty Ferris.

Maddox and the reconstruction of Australia Praed manages a love triangle among three important characters: the premier’s daughter Honoria; the premier’s preferred suitor for her, Dyson Maddox; and the reviled suitor, Barrington. The novel is fascinating because of the ways Praed tilts the narrative against two of these three characters on account of their English stain: Honoria is stained because of her misguided longing for English superiority and Barrington is stained because of his flawed past as a disgraced former member of the Guards. By contrast, Maddox is by birth and inclination more truly Australian—even more typical of the new Australia than boastful Longleat. In chapter seven, called ‘An Australian explorer’, Praed slips slightly out of her normal pose and uses her own language to describe Maddox. In many other cases, the best descriptions of characters come in the quoted speech of other characters. Yet in this important chapter, Praed’s prose elevates ‘the broad-shouldered and thick-set’ Maddox—a person with ‘much frank nobility’ resting on ‘muscles like iron’.70 This chapter describes Maddox’s role in Australian exploration. He is a ‘typical Australian … unconventional, courageous, and energetic’, with all the virtues that arise from ‘intuitive good breeding’. He decisively lacks that ‘aesthetic sentimentalism … of Old-World civilisation’ embodied in the characters of Honoria and Barrington. Praed deftly captures moments of grace and decorum when Honoria and Barrington revel in aesthetic contemplation of natural excellence in the Australian bush or literary excellence in English poetry. Both can thus appear models of sensibility; but generally, they appear at such moments as interrupting their deeper passionate interest in the sentimentalities of love. For instance, readers see much of Barrington’s ‘idealised epicurism’ and ‘his aesthetic philosophy’; they hear him acknowledge that ‘Australia is not all prosaic’ and praise ‘the spirit of these Australian wilds’; see him ‘in love with the beauty of Australian creeks’, and engaged often in his ‘quest for aesthetic perfection’.71 Maddox is different: his ‘passions were strong, but balanced by logical power’, which allows him to balance policy and passion in more deliberate ways.72 Praed’s readers see that Maddox is very fond of Honoria, despite her ‘touch of passionate sensibility that he himself lacked’.73 Honoria respects Maddox and knows that he is ‘the coming man’—‘a pillar of the state’ because of his fame as an explorer. Maddox even admits in his adventurous language that he now wants ‘to become a political great-gun’.74 Helping premier Longleat, Maddox watches over Honoria, who tolerates this mentorship even though she regrets his lack of ‘European address’.75

How reconstructive is Maddox? The answer in part is that he says or does nothing to fabricate falsehoods about himself. Yet another part of the answer is that Maddox is capable of lying for a good political purpose. He does this when dining with the governor’s party, claiming that he and Honoria are engaged as a credible way of shutting down the company’s coarse speech, sponsored by the troublesome Mr Vallancy, of her nocturnal escapades with Barrington;76 and he does this again when persuading Middleton to close down the parliamentary ‘impeachment’ of premier Longleat.77

Conclusion Literary critics acknowledge that Praed seems to measure up as a radical thinker and writer, given her ‘constant critiques of patriarchy and heterosexual marriage, her refusal of a masculine imperial ethos, her embrace of alternative religion, the sensational, Gothic character of her fiction and the inexplicable neglect even by critics directly concerned with the retrieval of female aesthetics …’—despite her ‘equivocal relationship to colonialism and its racial politics’.78 Our reading of Policy and Passion reveals other neglected dimensions of Praed’s radicalism as a novelist, with this particular novel raising ‘philosophical issues about women’s position, and men’s power’.79 Praed later recalled that her early Australian novels dealt with ‘the social makings of a new-born colony’, anticipating subsequent ‘promises [of] a literature as distinctly Australian in its key-note’—matching, for example, American literature at that time.80 Longleat certainly has his grand moments of ‘social making’. He confronts his parliamentary opposition with an election he wins comfortably. At the time of the opening of the newly elected parliament, he knows that the loan bill will now pass and usher in his railway policy. He foresees that he will later become ‘Sir Thomas Longleat … the great Australian legislator’—potentially ‘the Liberator of Australia’ ridding the land of the ‘cursed British yoke’. Amused, he also admits that ‘if it was put into a book no one ’ud believe it’.81 Praed thus conveys how incredible her narrative in Policy and Passion—‘usually regarded as one of her best stories’82—really is. We note that all of the chapters in Policy and Passion are named as well as numbered. Not surprisingly in a political novel, many chapter titles refer to the headlines of colonial politics. Four examples are notable in the way they manage leading political or ‘policy’ themes: chapter two is titled ‘The Premier’; chapter fourteen is ‘The Coup D’Etat’; chapter thirty-nine is ‘Before the Opening of Parliament’; and chapter forty-one is ‘The Impeachment of the Premier’. These chapter titles reflect Praed’s seasoned interest in colonial politics, with each of these chapters rich in institutional and procedural detail about places and processes of colonial politics. But Policy and Passion is not solely about politics. Many chapter titles refer readers to the other grand theme, ‘passion’. Praed helps readers to see that there are many competing passions other than erotic love. For instance, chapter three’s ‘The Premier’s Storekeeper’ refers to a subordinate character such as Ferris reacting to but rarely defining or shaping the life of politics. Ferris is passionately at odds with Longleat but even this is minor compared

to his passionate devotion to the artistic success of his talented daughter Angela. Some other chapter titles, such as chapter seven’s ‘An Australian Explorer’, refer to aspects of Maddox’s passionate character as a man of the bush, which impact on his later contribution to politics. Chapter eight is ‘The Enchantress of Kooralbyn’, referring to Honoria’s passionate longing to enchant and dominate a body of suitors. Yet in Praed’s fascinating story, Honoria is soon overtaken by Barrington’s inspiration (or is it mesmerism? readers will ask) that she learn to love by subordinating herself to him as the enchanting (or mesmerising) Englishman. Policy and Passion is a remarkable political novel drawing closely on the author’s experience as her father’s assistant when he served as a minister. The novel blends attractive elements of psychological idealism in many characters with realistic elements of materialism surrounding colonial politics. The theme of an emerging new Australia sits uncomfortably on the shoulders of Dyson Maddox, who sees himself as ‘a political great-gun’ capable of taking colonial politics in new directions, reassured through the graceful support of his wife Honoria, who is equal to any of the English noble ladies who fade away by novel’s end.

Notes 1 2

Colin Roderick, 20 Australian Novelists, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1947, p. 9. Dale Spender, ‘Rosa Praed, Original Australian Writer’, in Debra Adelaide (ed.), A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, 1988, pp. 202–3; Len Platt, ‘“Altogether better-bred looking”: Race and romance in the Australian novels of Rosa Praed’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2008, p. 31. Spender’s interpretation is supported by Rosa Praed, ‘My Australian Girlhood, chapter one’, in Dale Spender (ed.), The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing, Penguin, 1988, pp. 309–73. For more recent criticism, see Andrew McCann, ‘Unknown Australia: Rosa Praed’s Vanished Race’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, May 2005, pp. 37–50. See also Jessica White, ‘Stargazing with Rosa Praed’, Sydney Review of Books, 31 October 2016. On Praed generally, see Chris Tiffin, Rosa Praed, Victorian Fiction Research Guides, December 1988, . 3 See Michael Sharkey, ‘Rosa Praed’s Colonial Heroines’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, May 1981, pp. 48– 56; Kay Ferres, ‘Rewriting Desire: Rosa Praed, Theosophy and the Sex Problem’, in Kay Ferres (ed.), The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890–1930, Penguin, 1993, pp. 238–55. Sadly, few literary critics refer to Praed’s instructive ‘Literary Women in London Society’, North American Review, September 1890, pp. 329–36. 4 See Julieanne Lamond, ‘The Anglo-Australian: Between Colony and Metropolis in Rosa Praed’s The Right Honourable and Policy and Passion’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, May 2012, pp. 33–41. Also excellent is Susan Laverick, ‘Beyond the “point of decorum”: The political novels of Rosa Praed’, PhD thesis, Charles Sturt University, July 2014. 5 Colin Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950, p. 19. 6 Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand, Penguin Colonial Facsimiles, Penguin, 1973, pp. 209–13. 7 See also Rosa Praed, ‘The Australian Girl’ (1899), reprinted in Beverley Kingston (ed.), The World Moves Slowly: A Documentary History of Australian Women, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1977, pp. 16–20. 8 Catherine Helen Spence, ‘An Autobiography’, in Susan Magarey (ed.), Ever Yours, C.H. Spence, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2005, p. 133. 9 Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 151; Patricia Clarke, Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 2. 10 Rosa Praed, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, Sydney University Press, Sydney 2004 [1881]. 11 See Rosa Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker, with Introduction by Dale Spender, Pandora, London, 1988. See also Kay Ferres, ‘Shrouded Histories: Outlaw and Lawmaker, Republican Politics and Women’s Interests’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, May 2003, pp. 32–42. 12 Spender, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. See also Colin Roderick, In Mortal Bondage: The Strange Life of Rosa Praed, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1948, pp. 28–9, 34–6, 54–5. On the historical figure of the explorer Leichhardt, see Campbell [Rosa] Praed, My Australian Girlhood, Fisher & Unwin, London, 1902, pp. 6–7.

13 Spender, ‘Introduction’, p. vii. 14 Spender, ‘Introduction’, p. viii. 15 Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, pp. 56–7; Clarke, Rosa! Rosa!, p. 62. See also Sol Encel, ‘Political Novels in Australia’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, vol. 7, 1956, p. 304; Spender, ‘Rosa Praed, Original Australian Writer’, pp. 208–9. 16 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 267. 17 Praed, Policy and Passion, chap. 23. 18 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 142–3. 19 Quoted in Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, p. 77. 20 Quoted in Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, pp. 84–5. See more generally, Chris Tiffin, ‘“Our Literary Connexion”: Rosa Praed and George Bentley’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 27, nos 3–4, October 2012, pp. 107–23. 21 Quoted in Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, pp. 84–91. See also Spender, ‘Rosa Praed, Original Australian Writer’, pp. 212–13. 22 Clarke, Rosa! Rosa!, pp. 58–60. 23 Lamond, ‘The Anglo-Australian’, p. 36. 24 The 2004 edition of Policy and Passion from University of Sydney Press comprises 273 pages. 25 Praed, ‘Introductory Note’, Policy and Passion, pp. 1–2. See also Lamond, ‘The Anglo-Australian’, pp. 37–8. 26 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 5-9. 27 Praed, Policy and Passion, ch 43, pp. 267–73. See also Laverick, ‘Beyond “the point of decorum”’, chaps 3 and 5. 28 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 267. 29 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 155. 30 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 159. 31 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 268–70. 32 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 271. 33 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 273. 34 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 185. 35 Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, pp. 38-40; Praed, My Australian Girlhood, pp. 9–13. 36 Marcus Clarke, ‘Preface to Gordon’s Poems’ (1876), in John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1856–1964, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 33–7. 37 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 5. 38 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 15. 39 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 134. 40 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 113. 41 Literary critics tend to be very critical of Praed’s treatment of Indigenous peoples; see Platt, ‘“Altogether better-bred looking’”, pp. 31–44. A standard authority is J.J. Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, 1770–1975, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1978, pp. 60–73. 42 Praed, My Australian Girlhood, p. 4; Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, pp. 62–3. See also Twain, Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand, pp. 209–13. 43 Praed, Policy and Passion, with Cobra Ball appearing in chapters 7, 8 and 19, and also mentioned in chapters 12 and 17. 44 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 48. 45 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 48–9, 53. 46 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 82. 47 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 114. 48 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 121–4. 49 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 92–6. Longleat’s debatable ‘political morality’ is mentioned on p. 96. 50 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 95. 51 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 112. 52 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 141. 53 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 182–3. 54 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 94. 55 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 182. 56 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 97. 57 Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 140. 58 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 7, 11, 23 59 Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 12, 28.

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 161. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 88–9. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 158–62. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 249–58. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 252–5. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 16, 147. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 137–8. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 60–3. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 39, 42. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 62, 100. Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 44. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 71, 74–5, 80–1, 98, 119. Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 45. Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 47. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 51–2. Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 57. See also Laverick, ‘Beyond “the point of decorum”’, chaps 3 and 5. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 233–5. Praed, Policy and Passion, pp. 267–8. McCann, ‘Rosa Praed’s Vanished Race’, p. 48. Spender, ‘Rosa Praed, Original Australian Writer’, p. 209. Roderick, In Mortal Bondage, p. 47. Praed, Policy and Passion, p. 184. Clarke, Rosa! Rosa!, p. 58.

Chapter 3

Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl

Catherine Martin shares with Catherine Spence a Scottish birth and assisted family settlement in South Australia. Martin was twenty years younger than Spence, arriving in Adelaide in 1855 when she was ten years old. She first published as a poet, with her book The Explorers, published in Melbourne in 1874 when Catherine was just under thirty years old, school teaching in rural Mount Gambier.1 In 1875 Catherine moved to Adelaide to try to live as a journalist, where she met Spence at the time of the establishment of the University of Adelaide. Within a couple of years, she joined the Education Department as a clerk, where she remained until 1885 when she was dismissed in response to her complaints about female job insecurity. She had recently married a Unitarian friend of Spence’s who was professionally successful, and so turned her attention more solidly to a writing career. An Australian Girl was published in 1890 in London by Bentley, which had earlier published Praed’s Policy and Passion.2 The novel’s title An Australian Girl refers to international discussion in the late nineteenth century about ‘the new woman’ emerging in modern Western societies. Martin asks readers to wonder what type of ‘new woman’ might be characteristic of Australian colonial societies approaching political nationality as public support for Federation grew. Praed was also a contributor to these international debates about ‘the new woman’.3 Martin’s voice, then, is only one of many Australian voices but her novel is decidedly political in its presentation. The title of the novel refers to ‘Australian’ at a time when that term was starting to be accepted as an appropriate way of identifying those with a civic commitment to the Australian settlement over and above lingering commitments to ‘the old country’ of Britain. But the title also refers to ‘an’ Australian, as though this story might not be quite as representative as some readers might be hoping for. It is not clear whether being unrepresentative is admirable or not. The title also refers to a ‘girl’, which might suggest that the ‘new woman’ has not yet arrived or is only now ready to arrive, subject to certain interesting qualifications relating to her curious marriage to a person many critics surprisingly see as ‘the new man’ of the new nation—despite (or possibly because of) his many weaknesses. We noted in chapter 2 that London publisher Bentley exercised considerable censorship over Praed’s political novel. We will note in this chapter more of Bentley’s censorship, which minimises much of what some of Martin’s characters have to say about such politically controversial topics as euthanasia and social-democratic political parties.4 Martin did not publish her early poetry or her novels in her own name, preferring either ‘M.C.’ for her

poetry or ‘Mrs Alick Macleod’ as her pseudonym for the novels. Her Australian journalism published before the novels was also anonymous, even though much of it is quite learned and the wide coverage of modern European and especially German philosophy is relevant to the intellectual themes examined in An Australian Girl.5 Martin and her husband often lived abroad, mainly in Britain, where Catherine published another novel in 1892, also published by Bentley, and in 1906 a book of travel letters called The Old Roof Tree—‘describing from a socialist point of view the writer’s horror at the social inequalities and suffering of English life’.6 Martin also published another important work of fiction in 1923 when living back in South Australia: The Incredible Journey, written from the point of view of an Aboriginal woman seeking to recover her son taken by a white man.7 Martin was proud of her early efforts as a journalist, and many of her first works of fiction were published in Australian journals and newspapers. Recently, an innovative Canberra publisher brought out a collection of five ‘lost stories’ Catherine Martin had originally published in Australian journals, now recovered and edited by prominent literary scholar Katherine Bode.8 One of Martin’s first champions was Catherine Spence, who wrote a very supportive (and anonymous) book review of An Australian Girl soon after publication in 1890. Spence said that this ‘Australian book’ indicates ‘the growth of a genuine patriotic feeling among Australians’, including ‘the representation of the small but important class who left the old country, carrying with them the traditions of birth and culture’.9 This delicate description of European (and not simply ‘British’) ‘birth and culture’ is not the conventional approach to Australian patriotism because Spence speaks of something separate and distinct from Australian nationality or nationalism. The suggestion is that Martin’s ‘patriotic’ culture breaks ranks from commonplace notions of Australian distinctiveness driving the conventions of local nationalism. Spence noted that An Australian Girl was ‘deliciously comic … and very amusing’ in its critical assessment of Australian civil society and surprisingly daring in its revelation of the distressing situation of the potentially reformist civic culture of ‘German socialism’. The ‘old country’ emerges as a somewhat neglected social environment between amusing Australian self-confidence and the saddening picture of lost reformism in Germany. Spence’s remarkable Autobiography contains a famous reference to Martin: ‘Except for my friend [Catherine Martin], I know of no Australian novelist of genius, and her work is only too rare in fiction’.10 Spence politely admitted that ‘I take a very humble second place beside her’.11 Unlike Spence, Martin ‘was in no way a public figure’ and she remains relatively unknown today, despite her prodigious intellectual gifts informing her writing.12 The classic literary historian H.M. Green passes over Martin’s An Australian Girl, believing that it ‘belongs to the bookish rather than the real world’.13 The novel is indeed ‘bookish’. One reason why Martin was not a public figure was her refusal to cover over or disguise the ugly side of Australian social life. Spence’s review refers not only to the comedy of An Australian Girl but also ‘the tragedy of the book’ arising from a wealthy grazier being duped into paying his poor sister considerable financial assistance, in return for which she engages in ‘devious by-play and deception’ to win over an apparently

unwinnable bride for her grateful brother. The ‘clever manipulation of letters’ by Laurette falsely persuades the Australian girl Stella that the decent doctor Anselm Langdale is far less worthy a husband than her brother, the ever-ordinary grazier Ted Ritchie. In a novel about social conscience, this tragedy reflects the underlying power of conscientious social deception.14

Politics in brief Katherine Bode’s collection of some of Martin’s short stories of the 1880s and 1890s brings attention to political themes that will feature significantly but more subtly in An Australian Girl. Each of the ‘lost stories’ has a central female character, all of whom ‘resist or actively go against the mores of their respective societies’, to quote Bode. These leading figures are not all Australian: some certainly are but others are American or English or Italian, thus illustrating the range of Martin’s talent as storyteller of quite different national types. Bode calls this ‘an emerging sisterhood of women independent in thought and action’. These stories are framed around ‘European intellectual traditions and debates’, with author Martin displaying ‘her familiarity with key theological, philosophical and political debates of the time’. Unlike so many other writers from Australia, Martin shares something of the intellectual taste of progressive novelist Rosa Praed in her ‘thoroughly cosmopolitan author and world view’.15 The prominence of intellectual debate in Martin’s ‘lost stories’ prepares us for the depth of modern European philosophy in An Australian Girl. One feature of politics in these five stories is the prominent role of social justice in each of the leading female characters. These figures are caught in circumstances of relative poverty, far from the top of the social system and far removed from financial wealth. The stories allow Martin to chart interesting ways in which these characters manage and cope without resort to conventional instruments of social power and prestige. They manage to survive but they also manage to respond to those more needy than themselves, with Martin using the stories as portraits of socialism—displaying the entrenched nature of social injustice in modern Australian and European civil society. Another aspect of politics emerges from relationships of love and marriage depicted in these five stories. All politics is personal and Martin has the very rare gift of encouraging readers to see the political nature of human relationships. Often readers see uncomfortably sad examples of females learning to make the best of the worst circumstances dominated by unworthy male companions. Politics emerges here as readers see the worthy efforts of women to overrule or resist dominating males, or provide assistance to the poor who are so often ignored or suppressed by established male hierarchies. Martin is often described as ‘a socialist’, which in her case tends to mean the very opposite of ‘a socialite’: Martin’s short stories are fine examples of instructive social pity that fall short of appeals to the revolutionary socialism of movement socialists, if we can use that term. Martin’s socialism is about the character of individuals who deserve to live and act virtuously as independent rather than confined characters. Examples can show Martin’s keen interest in politics. The story of ‘Hanslein’s Disappearance’ tells the tale of a missing pet kookaburra known as ‘Hanslein’, which

becomes lost around Dresden in Germany where Marie lives with her German academic father who is director of a history museum. Marie is described as English and as having lived for a long period in London, where Australian friends presented her with a gift of a pair of tame kookaburras. Martin’s remarkable story is framed around Marie as she worries in part about the recovery of one of her lost birds—and more substantially about the recovery of her father from political entrapment for research interpreted as treasonable by German political authorities. What happens to official historians who publish warnings about threats to historical progress? This historian is like the canary in the underground mine whose presence and voice normally reassures miners of the healthiness of their worksite. Politics enters when the historian is threatened by German political authorities who see his ‘birdcall’ as socially offensive and deserving state censorship. In many of Martin’s stories, including An Australian Girl, animals feature as tests of the social responsibility individuals have to one another: many people look down on the animals, just as they look down on so many of their human colleagues; some people look up to the animals, often inviting others also to look up to them as the favoured one worth honouring. But in this story, the valued pet kookaburra is captured by strangers who themselves attract the interest of visiting Australians—who recognise the bird as that once given to and treasured by Marie. In an unusual story about fitness of location, the visiting Australians coax the bird to help them locate Marie in Dresden. The kookaburra signals the political theme in this story. The bird is well treated but its typical birdcalls can be misunderstood. The bird can be removed from its comfortable cage and can even be stolen and carried far from home. In this short story, Marie’s father is somewhat like a kookaburra, with his ability to communicate in ways that will attract the wrong sort of audience: government censors. He has just ‘retired’ as director of a history museum. He was allowed to retire but that was more of a polite formality: he ‘had to give up my position because of my article in one of those American magazines on the growth of militarism in Germany’. Writing increasingly on ‘more modern history’, Marie’s father declares to her that ‘I can only write of things as they are’; but he openly fears that ‘I may yet be put to death’ for such activities. His recent research was proving ‘how the heaviest burdens fall upon the poorest’. Friends had begun to warn him that to publish such work would be ‘dangerous’, as official charges of treason could follow. The gifted researcher knew that it ‘would be much more prudent to eulogise our crushing armaments’. Soon Marie is advised that both bird and father have been taken away: the bird will soon be relocated thanks to the care of Australian friends but the father’s case is more pressing; she learns from a relative that ‘he is under arrest for treason to his king and country’.16 Marie appreciates that this charge of treason is an official reaction against one who is ‘trying to help the weak and exposing the enormity of our crushing military system’. Martin allows Marie to state the progressive case for uncensored research. She also allows Marie’s German relatives to put the alternative case. They warn Marie that this government reaction ‘will teach him prudence’; responding, Marie protests that her father deserves praise for exposing ‘the despots who are impoverishing the nation for the sake of pre-eminence in the art of human slaughter’. Martin’s story ends with the release of Marie’s father, who surprisingly declares that his aim now is to write for the New Yorker about ‘the conditions of

labor in Germany’.17 Bode is right to alert us to ‘the dark side’ of Martin’s literary beliefs, which include a range of traditional stereotypes based on racial and social prejudice.18 Yet there is also a dark side to Martin’s storytelling, as in this case where the Australian friends of Marie urge her to return to Australia, partly to restore Hanslein to her homeland and partly to save her father and his research mission from state interference. The story ends but never really concludes— leaving readers to wonder about the historian’s puzzling prudence and about Marie’s longing for England and Australia. That note of cautious curiosity is the right note to have as we turn now from this brief review of Martin’s short stories to her original and unabridged 638 pages of An Australian Girl.

Writing and publishing An Australian Girl Literary scholars have given us three versions of the text of An Australian Girl. The originally published 1890 version was based on the complete text as submitted by Martin with minor revisions made by the publisher. The second version is the substantially shortened text of 1891 by Bentley who feared that readers would not appreciate some of Martin’s allegedly unnecessary reflections on eighteenth-century German philosophy, especially in relation to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and contemporary German politics. This reduced text was republished as a special Australian edition in 1894. The third version is the 2002 scholarly edition, which reconstructs the complete original text as finalised by Martin, free of unnecessary changes made for the 1890 publication by Bentley. Most readers of Martin’s An Australian Girl rely on reissues of the much reduced 1891 version. The 1891 Bentley rendition of the text is followed almost completely in the 1988 Pandora version edited by Elizabeth Webby and the 1999 Oxford World’s Classics version edited by Graham Tulloch—both editions running to 434 pages. The only complete published text of the novel is the 2002 Academy Editions of Australian Literature one edited by Rosemary Campbell—weighing in at 638 pages. One result of this variation is that there are multiple sources of commentary reflecting quite different texts, with most readers having to cope with a text missing around one-fifth of Martin’s original rendition: probably 50,000 words.19 Our interest is in the longer original version of the text authorised by Martin, which came to public light with the 2002 publication; the other versions give us only Martin’s text as abbreviated by her original publisher, who gave Martin little or no opportunity to debate the revisions made by Bentley and his publishing staff. Bentley took issue with what he called ‘metaphysical observations’ distracting readers from the main theme of the novel, which is the drama of the ‘Australian girl’ Stella and her two lovers—the Australian cattleman Ritchie and the English-German doctor Langdale. Elizabeth Webby notes that with Martin’s ‘somewhat reluctant consent’, Bentley published editions of the novel in 1890 and then in reduced form in 1891 and 1894.20 The ‘Note on the Text’ in the Oxford World Classics edition claims that their adherence to the reduced text from the 1891 edition ‘might be more acceptable to a modern reader’ than would the longer original text completed by Martin. However, this Oxford edition does identify the several sets of reductions made with surprising care by Bentley’s publishing team.21

At the heart of the matter was Bentley’s dismissal of Martin’s ‘metaphysical observations’, which biased ‘the more serious character of the book’—distracting readers from ‘its other merits’ as a story about a love triangle. Bentley’s publishing team exchanged many letters with Catherine Martin, noting her reluctance to delete anything from her completed text in the 1890 edition. Their aim was to reduce the text so that it contained ‘as little digression as possible’ in the ‘main line of the narrative’. The two disliked ‘digressions’ were the early intellectual discussion between Stella and her brother Cuthbert about the nature of German philosophy so keenly favoured by the intellectually gifted Australian girl, and the later descriptions of Stella’s time in Germany observing the social and political drama surrounding ‘German socialism’, which she so openly admires. These two German themes are quite central to the novel as Martin originally composed it. One final comment on the novel’s setting relates to the time period. The novel covers two calendar years, from the end of 1887 to the end of 1889: in 1888 Australia marked the centenary of white settlement, begun with the arrival of the first governor Captain Phillip in Sydney in 1788. Martin’s novel was published in London in July 1890, very soon after that centenary, which is used interestingly by Martin as we see her characters navigating different pathways around ‘the mother country’. At one extreme, Stella’s potential in-laws illustrate conventional colonial decorum respectful of the British crown and its Australian representatives as socially important. At the other extreme, Stella looks to Enlightenment philosopher Kant as her mentor—who was alive at the time of Phillip’s arrival, but as far removed from British conventionality as one can imagine. Critic Kevin Gilding rightly calls Stella’s mode of social navigation a form of ‘space exploration’—travelling outside the conventional earthly world.22

Defining an Australian girl Catherine Martin’s novel is one of many international works of fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries investigating ‘the new woman’ in modern Western society. Part of this movement’s task was to explore the characteristics of ‘the new woman’, who would highlight a new and appropriately gendered model of humanity lost in earlier generations. The motivating idea was that liberal social regimes addressed norms of civic equality but often failed to include female as well as male characteristics. Typical of progressive male support for women’s emancipation was Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House—whose bleak ending with a wife leaving a wrecked marriage anticipates the surprisingly bleak ending of An Australian Girl.23 The nerve of this reformist movement towards a deeper and wider sense of civic equality can be seen in John Stuart Mill’s political writings in the 1860s. Mill was a prominent male public intellectual and, in the late 1860s, an elected member of the House of Commons. Mill’s concept of individuality in his influential On Liberty reflects the creative input of his late wife—as is reflected in the unusual and often ignored introductory note to that work. Mill’s later work The Subjection of Women calls on liberals to overhaul the systemic ‘subjection’ of women by allowing them to define their own roles as equal citizens in liberal political systems.24

Mill’s links to the Australian literary community should not be ignored. Catherine Spence was the leading figure who injected herself into the intellectual circle of Mill and the progressive writer and novelist George Eliot. Spence was noticed: she received an author’s copy of The Subjection of Women from Mill, who had already praised her for the 1861 analytical work Plea for Pure Democracy with its pioneering advocacy of proportional representation. Spence met Mill and knew how influential his wife and stepdaughter were in shaping Mill’s feminism.25 Writing in 1869, Mill argued for ‘a principle of perfect equality’ between males and females as a means towards ‘human improvement’, to which the ‘legal subordination’ of one sex to the other had become ‘one of the chief hindrances’.26 The problem was not simply the misplaced confidence males took as legal superiors but the equally misplaced lack of confidence felt by women as subordinated subjects lacking effective citizenship. The reform case put by Mill faced huge opposition by those accepting traditions of male domination. Mill’s response was to identify this reigning domination as resting, to use his important phrase, ‘upon theory only’—devoid of real trial and experience about the potential roles of women as equal guardians of human improvement. Missing is what Mill calls ‘a sound psychology’ of the type he might have associated with prominent British novelist George Eliot, so well known to Catherine Spence and indeed to Catherine Martin, both of whom wrote important critical reviews of Eliot’s fiction.27 Mill believed that ‘equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character’.28 The fascinating implication is that Mill was encouraging the ‘George Eliots of the world’ to promote the cause of equality by using their works of fiction to provide ‘a sound psychology’ to what soon became known as ‘the new woman’. Martin’s An Australian Girl fits right into this framework. The novel examines ‘the present artificial ideal of feminine character’ in the setting of Australian society on the eve of nationhood. The work challenges dominant Australian customs and norms as striking illustrations of the forces dominating ‘the new woman’. Martin’s novel has her ‘Australian girl’ Stella caught between her intellectual independence as a student of German philosophy and her social dependence as the wife of a persistent but pathetic lover—the cattleman Ritchie. Stella feels strongly that she ‘had been betrayed into marrying a sot’.29 The drama of the novel is that the rich but alcoholic Ritchie wins the ‘Australian girl’ over all competitors, who include not only the studious Langdale but also Stella’s option to live in the independent manner of the unmarried Catherine Spence—a mode of independence so well known to author Catherine Martin. The benchmark used by Mill in his The Subjection of Women is not so much the means of individual liberty as the larger ends of ‘human improvement’. It is possible that Martin is using the same measure in her novel, so that readers can begin to see that the real tragedy of this ‘Australian girl’ is the cost to Australian ‘human improvement’ that comes from her capture or domination by Ritchie, despite all the promising potential of her philosophic learning so keenly admired by the lover she rejects, Anselm Langdale. An Australian Girl is a story about a love triangle. But it is also a story about the contribution that Australian women can make to Australian society. Martin as author certainly makes a great contribution through her novel, which celebrates the leading character

Stella as an example of a dilemma facing Australian women in choosing life partners. The novel lets readers see Stella choosing between alternative types of character associated with either spritely independence along the lines championed by Catherine Spence or spirited collaboration with a married partner along lines championed by author Catherine Martin. Stella’s fateful choice not only harms her personal integrity as a human being but also ruins what could have been her contribution to ‘human improvement’ modelled so unusually by Martin. The sad editorial error made so long ago by publisher Bentley took away from readers the intellectual wisdom displayed by Stella and left us with not only a reduced story but a reduced version of Stella—a loved but isolated Australian girl removed from her supportive intellectual resources so carefully composed by Martin.

Indigenous implications Martin’s The Incredible Journey was published around thirty years after An Australian Girl and reveals, as the novelist’s final work, her remarkable interest in Indigenous issues in Australian society. This final novel is written in the form of reflections by an Aboriginal mother about her search to find and recover her lost son, who has been taken by whites intent on saving a black child from its Aboriginal heritage. Martin’s lengthy ‘Introduction’ gives a detailed account of Martin’s anxiety over white racism.30 An Australian Girl addresses other social issues but it also reflects much about relationships between white settlers and Indigenous peoples. There are approximately twenty relevant references in An Australian Girl to the black community in a white-dominated social order. Critics will say that this frequent coverage of white–black relationships simply documents the nastiness of white intrusion more competently constructed in The Incredible Journey. Each of the preFederation novelists discussed in this book wrote early works that would appear tentative in the light of later works composed in maturity; and this certainly applies to Martin, whose 1890 novel hints at observations and implications made with greater vigour and severity in later works. Yet many references do appear in An Australian Girl and deserve close consideration. The first set of references occur in letters Stella writes to her brother Cuthbert, which make up a considerable portion of the first of the three volumes of the novel. Martin thus allows her leading character to use stories about Aboriginal peoples to explain her many differences from her conventionally devout brother, who fears Stella’s fondness for ‘the bush’ and its distinctive peoples, and might well wonder about her pride in her unusual ‘collection of Aboriginal myths and customs’. Stella takes a serious interest in Indigenous myths because she is curious about the nature of things as seen and understood by different peoples. When writing to Cuthbert about ‘an Aboriginal myth’, Stella draws a larger lesson, which is that ‘Australian myths’ share something with ‘those of classic Greece’ in that both ‘endeavour to give an account of the origin of things’.31 Stella gently makes fun of a former missionary whose enthusiasm for saving the souls of ‘the blacks’ meant he had no time for or interest in knowing ‘any myths’ or caring for ‘their customs’. She tells a longer tale about the same ‘zealous ex-missionary’ to illustrate the lack of real care such custodians show when managing those under their care. Stella’s deeper

interest is in the gaps separating native peoples from ‘the profoundly metaphysical dogmas of Christianity’: she reports to her brother her ‘great longing to know what conception an Australian aborigine could really form’ of that version of Western religion paraded before them. The problem is not the ill-intelligence of the receiver but the traditions of thought ‘imbedded in the marrow’ of the transmitter.32 Further on, Stella advises Cuthbert that there really is no comparison between the dull tales from missionaries and ‘the peculiar cachet of an aboriginal myth’. She admits that ‘these poor fugitives of Nature’ are wonderful in the way they weave ‘stories of the sun and birds and stars’—so wonderful that she asks ‘whether it would not be worth while to be even an Australian black, so as to look on the world with eyes purged from the sophistry of the schools’.33 The letters between the siblings end just after Stella tells a story about a neighbour known as ‘poor Thomson’ who raised a young black girl, Caloona, who became his wife and bore him a son. Eventually Thomson fell out with the son and ‘gave him a bad thrashin’’, which forced Caloona and her son to flee into the bush, never to be seen again by Thomson.34 There are other important references to Indigenous issues. At one point when being entertained in Melbourne high society, Stella challenges her fellow guests by insisting that an artist intent on ‘representing Australia’ should use the image of ‘a young black woman’ rather than native animals. Later, on one of the important journeys Stella makes to ‘the homestation of Lullaboolangana’, Martin injects many references about Aboriginal land care when describing the trek around the station made by Stella and friends: they note what they believe to be ‘complex social etiquette of the aborigines’, they see signs of a ‘stone axe of the aborigine’, and they wonder about ‘some unknown aboriginal tradition’ that might have shaped the landscape around them.35 These passages are no more than a sample of the repeated references to Indigenous issues Martin makes in An Australian Girl. To be sure, the most developed black character is the unfortunate Caloona, whose marriage to the white farmer Thomson fails, as we have seen. Martin leaves this as an example of how so many marriages find their own sad ending.

Learning to love again The earlier reference to the bleak ending of Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House a decade before the publication of An Australian Girl suggests that Catherine Martin shared some of Ibsen’s realism about women’s emancipation. Ibsen’s character Nora leaves her marriage and her home—accepting her new equality while rejecting the world of the stranger her husband has become. Martin’s character Stella becomes a captive in a failed marriage. She is independent of her husband but still not free to live independently as ‘a new woman’. Despite her remarkable intellectual learning, Stella remains, or so it seems, ‘a girl’. At the end of the novel, Martin lets readers wonder what it will take for this ‘girl’ to become ‘the new woman’ she seemed destined to be, based on the early parts of the novel. The optimistic reading would be that Stella does eventually find her role, which is as a source of Australian immigration: using her husband’s finances to buy colonial land to be offered to poor families she has cared for in London and Berlin. The final sentence of the novel has the ill-matched couple returning to South Australia,

with Ritchie pleased that something at last brings Stella back into this world. Martin has just described her as ‘a sleep-walker … a person who had seen a ghost’. The pessimistic reading cuts the other way: it highlights what Langdale in the penultimate chapter terms ‘the final separation’ between Anselm and Stella. Langdale knows of Stella’s marriage, knows that Stella was ‘feloniously betrayed’ into leaving him. Langdale warns Stella that her ‘fidelity’ to her husband ‘may eventually wreck your life’; he fears that she has foisted ‘ecclesiastical perversions’ on her conscience, destroying their only hope for ‘the salvation of our better natures’.36 Yet Stella is unmoved: she advises him that her mission is to work for ‘the poorest and some of the most depraved in the East-End’. Her late acceptance of a life more noble than ‘the pitiful egoism of self-seeking’ turns her to a kind of self-sacrifice, imitating the spirit of social service she sees in others ‘constantly working for the moral renovation of their country’. Langdale leaves Britain on a tour that Ritchie thought would include his wife. That possibility was ended when Stella made time ‘to say farewell’ to her former lover. That awkward conversation has Stella speak of her ‘forgetfulness of duty’ and of her having been ‘insensible to duty’—all overpowering her ever-weakening obligation to continue to love Langdale.37 The last chapter of the novel includes a lengthy quotation from a letter to Stella from her husband’s sister, Laurette, who finally pleads forgiveness for earlier having forged parts of an important letter to Stella from Langdale. Ritchie’s sister knows that Stella only married her brother when she believed, through Laurette’s clever forgery, that Langdale was already a married man. Martin’s readers see the confusion of these characters who fail to know that Langdale’s former wife has died, many years after she and Langdale had separated after their brief and unworkable marriage. In this important last chapter, Stella and her sister-in-law are almost brought together to consider the best interests of Ritchie, who has no knowledge of his ‘sister’s sordid fraud’. Ritchie expresses surprising praise for Langdale—unaware that Stella did and indeed still does love him. The only claim that Stella makes on her wealthy husband is to allow her to buy two hundred acres of South Australian farmland to grant to new immigrants she is confident she can find among ‘the East End paupers’ for whom she cares. His initial reaction is to ridicule Stella for preferring new pauper immigrants ‘instead of well-bred merinos’. Yet after hearing Stella praise ‘the Schulz family in Berlin’ who have ‘been in trouble through Socialistic work so often’ and ‘will go to the wall in the Old World’, he accepts her scheme and promises to buy land. The curious couple decide to return to Australia to enact their immigrant scheme, with Stella convincing Ritchie to leave London well before the arrival of his sister and family.38 Martin’s narrative is about the rise and fall of Stella’s many loves. These loves are partly intellectual and partly personal. The intellectual loves are partly philosophical—such as Roman Catholicism as reformulated by Cardinal Newman (who features in the novel as an observed public figure),39 followed as it were by Kant—and partly political, such as conventional colonial society followed by German-inspired social democracy. The personal loves are for her family, particularly for her brother Cuthbert, who is an Anglican clergyman,

and for her two suitors—the wealthy colonial cattleman Ritchie with his passionate commitment to marriage, and the European medical doctor Langdale with his more reasoned pursuit of a larger field of public health but not necessarily radical political reform. Stella struggles through the competing field of her many loves, valuing in turn the social doctrines of Roman Catholicism, of Kantianism and of socialism. This could be either an ascension or, less likely, a decline in political judgement. But the parallel struggle among her many personal loves is very much a decline, as Stella imprudently marries the wealthy old friend Ritchie—an unworthy male who is soon lost in alcoholic dissipation. In terms of the singular Australian girl-character, An Australian Girl portrays an intellectually very sophisticated person ruined by a quite unsophisticated personal morality of indecisiveness. Stella is not morally strong enough to know what to do with her dazzling intellectual gifts. Her brother and indeed her best lover tell her that she is unstable and insecure because of her weak self-confidence. For these two acute observers, Stella comes across as far too uncertain of what she wants to be. Both want to care for Stella in their different ways yet both fear that Stella cares too little about her deepest self. Much of An Australian Girl is about a girl who is unsure what sort of mature woman she wants to be. Stella is well informed but still not shaped by her intellectual passions: she knows many things but in the larger scheme of things she values very few of them. Mistakenly convinced that Langdale has duped her, Stella rashly accepts Ritchie’s offer of marriage—only to learn that it is really he who has duped her by hiding his alcoholism. The Australian girl becomes a very unhappy Australian wife. At the end of the novel it is far from clear which of her many loves remain in good order: seen from this fatiguing perspective, the novel takes on the style of a story about the loss of faith by this Australian girl. The miserable marriage with Ritchie seems destined to doom Stella’s individuality, as all the other loves fall away out of her reach. From this individualist perspective, Martin’s novel is about the sad hollowing-out of a promising female character who withers away from her better self and her better loves. Yet from the broader social perspective, Martin’s novel does not degenerate in quite the same way: the author forces readers to look beyond Stella to see what might be ‘loveable’ in some of her worthy if forsaken loves—such as the German model of social democracy reflecting German social philosophy.

Philosophy and socialist politics The English publisher Bentley had little time for Martin’s treatment of Kant’s historical reputation or contemporary German socialism. Part of this lack of interest can be explained by relationships between Stella and those thought by Bentley to be minor characters. Another part is Bentley’s curt dismissal of non-British theories and practices. This dismissal of around one-fifth of the novel pushes to the edges Martin’s unusual but acute interest in theories and practices of politics. The art of political philosophy as Martin pursues it invites readers to reflect on two radical tendencies in modern Western thought: first, Kantian frameworks for strict social duties of humanity free from the guardianship of religious doctrine, which is discussed when Stella confronts her Anglican brother; and second, German socialism, which

Stella examines as a pioneering approach to rebuilding the political health of contemporary nations in Europe. Martin’s first or theoretical treatment relates to Stella’s personal moral beliefs and the deeper sense of moral individuality for which she longs. She wants to know what is ‘the chief end of man? what he should most live for?’40 The second or more practical treatment relates to Stella’s active sense of citizenship resting on an unusual sense of social justice possibly informed by her close reading of Kant or of contemporary Christian doctrine. Martin’s gift as a writer is to encourage readers to ponder whether the source here is the mighty philosophy of Kant or the unconventional religious doctrines of former Anglican, now Catholic, Cardinal John Henry Newman. Newman’s name appears early in the novel when Stella is thinking about a Catholic religious vocation—which appears very unconventional and disturbing to her family: simply a ‘superstition’, as her brother says; ‘enough to make a Protestant’s hair creep’, as Ritchie says.41 Newman’s name returns late in the novel when Stella visits a church where Newman is conducting a religious service. She appears deeply moved by Newman’s articulation of a sense of mission to care for and assist the poor. Martin invites us to consider Stella as searching for a social mission, blending secular concepts from Kant and religious norms from Newman. The purpose of this invitation reflects the deep artistry of Martin as a novelist: she wants us to see potential relationships between philosophy and politics so that we can admire but also wonder about the way Stella responds so positively to the social problems raised by German socialism. Critics differ in their approaches, with some seeing Stella as a devoutly religious missionary and others seeing her as a secular socialist with only superficial interest in religion. We think that Martin has left readers free to think through many of these issues and that her novel serves as a form of political education when readers do what Bentley tried so assiduously to prevent them from doing: which is to read and reflect on the whole text. The fact that Martin is circumspect about ‘the real Stella’ reinforces rather than detracts from our view of her educational strategy in An Australian Girl. Consider the structural elements in both of these theory and practice themes in the novel. Much of the comedy of the novel occurs in relation to Ritchie’s married sister, Laurette, whose intrusive interference with Langdale’s correspondence to Stella ruins, as of course was Laurette’s intention, that potential marriage. Two early chapters on Laurette’s social circle illustrate what Stella (and Martin) think of conventional social custom in the Australian colonies. Included there is a description of political conventionality: ‘the whole art of politics’ is ‘the art of seeing’, which Laurette practices—by seeing ‘at any rate, what was on the surface’.42 The contrast emerges in the following two chapters where Stella and her clergyman brother Cuthbert engage in ‘speculative musing’, with Stella confessing her religious doubts and her indifference to the ‘rigid frost of small measured prudent pieties’. The first of these chapters reviews Stella’s interest in Catholicism, including her interest in becoming a nun, and her recent ‘disenchantment’ with this traditional religious faith; the second reviews her new faith in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.43 Again, the structure is important: the turn towards Kant emerges from Stella’s five years

of studying German with a certain Pastor Fiedler. German immigrants—even Protestant religious ministers—can bring with them the language and thought of secular philosophy such as that conveyed by Kant. The radicalism of Kant’s metaphysics is openly acknowledged by Stella’s unreligious praise of its ‘message’ as ‘the folly of knocking at doors that are immutably sealed’.44 This Kantian negativism formulates ‘the great function’ of Kant’s Critique, which is ‘not to extend, but test knowledge’. Students of political philosophy cannot but admire Martin’s ability to let Stella tell her religious brother much about the negative or possibly anti-religious tendencies of Kantian thinking. Readers learn more than they might expect about the form and substance of Kant’s philosophy, yet they also begin to learn more about the critical or negative character of that philosophy. Stella elevates the negativism, so that the positive consequences of taking Kant seriously emerge as deep scepticism. Kant’s moral philosophy receives almost no attention, as though author Martin was allowing her character Stella to appear intellectually sophisticated but morally uneducated: half a Kantian, as it were. Her brother asks her about the ethical implications of her interpretation of Kant, who seems ‘not the guide you needed’; Stella responds by noting that Kant thought it ‘absurd to expect enlightenment from reason’.45 The implications are awkwardly ambiguous: following Kant might lead to deep scepticism or it might, as Stella hopes and suggests, lead to a personal faith as she has found in the Catholic ‘house of prayer’ to which she still holds some strong connection. The second theme is socialism—or more properly, German socialism. Soon into their miserable marriage, Ritchie takes Stella on a European tour. Arriving in Berlin, Stella recalls poor old pastor Fiedler as a ‘lover of ideas’ who helped her generate ‘a duty’ of impersonal or pure character: the ‘categorical imperative’ with its burden of strict obligation. However, that sense of impersonal duty is soon challenged when Stella tours the city only to find so many needy poor people. Two small children accept her offers of financial help and she discovers their surname of Schulz—the same as German friends back in South Australia. Touring on, Stella encounters a confrontation between government officials and the poor who ‘carried treason so openly in their faces’. She recalls a German professor who ‘knew something of the forces behind the show’ and had advised her that socialism would soon emerge from ‘the revolution of labour against capital’. Stella visits the mother of the Schulz children, as her husband has been imprisoned for promoting ‘a Socialistic meeting’. The Schulz family become the focal point of Stella’s care and comfort; from them she learns more about the ‘cruel military despotism’ threatening to become a tyranny. This poor but resourceful family emerges as her model of the type of new immigrants she could bring to South Australia. Martin’s story has Ritchie leave Berlin for London on family business, which leaves Stella alone in Berlin to study socialism more closely. To us, it is important that ‘socialism’ does not here refer to a form of government or bureaucratic rule but instead to a form of popular protest against government misrule. Stella’s interest is not in an organised example of ‘state socialism’ but in socialist protest against dominant forms of political authority.46 Stella meets other non-Germans who share ‘Socialistic principles’ from which she can learn much about practical politics. These friends include some who are well known to Langdale and are in Berlin to support an arrested relative, Schiedlich—a person of ‘rare

disinterestedness of aim’ who mysteriously dies in prison a few days before his release date. A forceful Italian-German ‘Signorina’ speaks of Marx’s concept of the ‘floating mass of people’ and tells Stella and her family of the misery surfacing in Germany and of the hope of socialism which is described in terms much more politically gripping than Stella’s pure Kantianism. One of Martin’s most explicitly radical political characters is this ‘Signorina’ who, as a wealthy friend of the poor, reads and thinks like Marx. Curiously, Langdale’s sister becomes a favourite of the ‘Signorina’ and an ally of the imprisoned socialist Schiedlich. By contrast, the decent medical practitioner takes another view, which is critical of ‘the extreme party’ favoured by socialist radicals. This anti-radicalism is used by Martin to begin to distance the kindly but reserved doctor from his former lover—the increasingly politically active Stella.47 Bismarck had passed laws in 1878 against socialists. One result was that secret brotherhoods formed to meet in ‘secret assemblages’, one of which now welcomed friends to pay honour to the sadly deceased prisoner. Martin’s novel describes ‘a large underground apartment’ where social democrat elected members of the legislature would meet with fellow political radicals. Stella attends one such event, noticing Mrs Schulz as also present. Several speakers praise Schiedlich. Martin surprisingly gives the Signorina’s brother the greatest space—seven long pages about this sad example of politically discredited socialism. The ‘Signor’ replaces his sister as Martin’s most extensive example of a political radical. Langdale is also present at the meeting but makes no disguise of his taking ‘entire exception to the leading tenets of Socialism’—thereby placing himself at further remove from Stella.48 Martin’s novel has Langdale drift away towards the end of the narrative. Readers know that Stella and Langdale were an ideal pair of lovers and they fear that this perfect arrangement came unstuck through the dreadful intrusion of self-centred Laurette. An Australian Girl is so long and detailed that not all readers will notice that there are philosophical differences between the two that also explain Langdale’s separation. The easy explanation is that the love of his life has mistakenly but understandably married Ritchie— with the result that Langdale decides to do the right thing and keep his distance. The more complex explanation is that Langdale and Stella have quite different systems of belief, with one critic suggesting that Langdale embraces a highly principled but non-Kantian political philosophy historically at odds with Stella’s ambitious world of categorical imperatives: Hegelianism. What Gilding explicitly calls ‘Anselm’s Hegelian theorising’ is instructive but more explicit than Martin’s picture of Langdale’s spirited case against socialism on account of its unethical partisanship. Hegelian systems of politics would see ‘social ethics’ as a constructive reordering of a cohesive civic culture, compared to Marxistinspired socialism, which would be seen as destructive and resentful class politics.49 The novel’s chief case for socialism is the surprisingly detailed seven-page address given by the Italian-German ‘Signor’ at the secret memorial service for Schiedlich, who was a student friend of Langdale at the University of Berlin. Langdale has agreed to edit a publication of the early, possible pre-socialist, research writings of Schiedlich, and accordingly argues with Stella and his own sister that constructive political reform should be informed by the type of concrete and practical social research he and Schiedlich have supported. Langdale’s version of ‘social ethics’ is intended to trump socialism’s class ethics.

This ‘social ethics’ framework reflects his sense of duty in his role as a medical professional, which persuades him away from grand protest gestures of socialism towards more particularised social care through reformist public health schemes. Martin thus uses Langdale to present an alternative perspective to Stella’s Kantianism and give careful readers an instructive opportunity to see a professional medical practitioner living and working in the world—historically between the systems of belief of Kant and Marx, with ‘convictions that had become part of his mental equipment’.50 Landgale’s ethic of the professional role lacks Kant’s dogmatism and Marx’s revolutionism: Martin makes this intermediate German philosophy of ‘social ethics’ the guardian of a professional medical carer who quietly carries on while many others elect to define their dogma—amid the social misery so ably documented by Martin.51 Stella is eventually sparked back into social engagement when, later in London, by chance she attends a church service conducted by Newman.52 Langdale complains as much against this form of religious duty as a ‘devotional temperament’—as distorting of social realism as is her fondness for socialism.53 The novel allows the two lovers to part as they try to disentangle their contradictory modes of social duty, with Stella somehow refashioning religious, Kantian and socialist accounts of social duty that lead her to new-world endeavours far removed from Langdale’s innovative health reform strategies in the old world.

Conclusion London publisher Bentley warned Catherine Martin that her original draft of the novel was too heavily intellectual: ‘it requires more mental attention than most people care to devote to a novel’. Bentley advised that he wanted an abbreviated version that would satisfy ‘more thoughtful readers’ but appeal ‘to a still larger class of less educated persons’.54 Literary critic Lee notes that British reviewers of the original published novel tended to see it as a distracting tale about a love triangle. Australian reviewers saw it differently—as can be judged from the earlier attention we gave to Catherine Spence’s newspaper review. Readers such as Spence appreciated Martin’s extensive political philosophy as central to the deeper story of female and indeed national emancipation.55 Most contemporary commentary on An Australian Girl examines the conditional concept of being or becoming ‘Australian’. In one respect, Martin’s novel flatters Australia by showing Stella as an Australian character who knows so much about complex intellectual theory far removed from Australia and indeed from Britain. She differs from ‘the Australienne who has much money and little culture’.56 Some of that theory is philosophical (e.g. Kant) and some of it is political (e.g. socialism). The temptation is to read An Australian Girl as a flattering account of maturing wisdom, including wisdom about the rights of women, in the decade leading to Australian Federation. Martin’s sources for her knowledge of English poverty and German socialism turn out to be her own research as a visitor to England and Germany in particular, where critics are convinced that so much of this very ‘Australian’ novel was written in the late 1880s—by a colonial writer examining metropolitan fragmentation and trying to tease out implications for political and social

growth of colonial Australia.57 However, an alternative interpretation can come from commentary that examines the last term in the title—‘girl’. Martin’s contribution to the international project on ‘the new woman’ was to write about an Australian girl. Sure enough, this girl knows more than many women will ever know about superior thought and politics; yet Martin sees her as and calls her a girl as one important way of noting Stella’s puzzling immaturity. In Miles Franklin’s summary dismissal, Martin wrote ‘a trying rigmarole about a girl who does not know what to do with herself or her lovers’.58 Other interpretations exist: it could be that Martin is simply drawing attention to the comparative youthfulness of the Australian colonies—thus asserting that ‘the new woman’ from Australia will be younger and relatively unspoilt compared to northern hemisphere examples. We think we can see another approach. Critics have noted ‘the esoteric nature of (Martin’s) preoccupation’, reflecting perhaps the irony she found in so much German literature.59 It could be that the title of the novel tells readers that something is missing in this spectacular individual. It is possible that Martin also meant to convey another message: that there is something missing in Australian society that receives so broad a review in this novel. This second missing element is socialism in general and social democracy in particular, both of which can enter Australia with German immigrants if An Australian Girl is to be believed for its fascinating account of the congeniality of past German philosophy and current German socialistic politics. Even stern critics recognise that Martin’s novel ‘is one of the few early novels to proclaim a faith in Australia that is vital and warm’.60

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

On Martin’s poetry, see Michael Ackland, ‘Counterbalancing Doubts’, in That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1994, pp. 93–113. See also Margaret Allen, ‘What Katie Might Have Learnt in Mount Gambier or Some Early Influence on C.E.M. Martin’, Margin, no. 43, November 1997, pp. 2–20. Martin’s poem ‘Wrecked!’ is published in Michael Ackland (ed.), The Penguin Book of 19th Century Australian Literature, Penguin, 1993, pp. 339–41. Catherine Martin, An Australian Girl, Bentley, London, 1890; abridged and republished as An Australian Girl, with Introduction by Elizabeth Webby, Pandora, London, 1988; and again as An Australian Girl, ed. Graham Tulloch, with Introduction by Amanda Nettlebeck, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. The 1988 and 1999 editions reflect the text as abridged by Bentley in 1891. The edition used here is the complete text written by Martin and available in a valuable scholarly edition as An Australian Girl, ed. Rosemary Campbell, Academy Editions of Australian Literature, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002. A sample chapter from An Australian Girl is published in Christopher Lee (ed.), Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1999, pp. 339–45, which is volume one, chapter 27, located in the 2002 edition at pp. 205–12. See for example Rosa Praed, ‘The Australian Girl’, in Beverly Kingston (ed.), The World Moves Slowly: A Documentary History of Australian Women, Cassel Australia, Sydney, 1977, pp. 16–20. More generally, see Frank Bongiorno, ‘“Every Woman a Mother”: Radical Intellectuals, Sex Reform and the “Woman Question” in Australia, 1890–1918’, Hecate, vol. 27, no. 1, 2001, pp. 44–64. Campbell, ‘Introduction’, pp. xliv–xlv. See Ra Campbell, ‘An Australian Girl: A Case of Political Censorship’, Margin, no. 47, April 1999, pp. 16–26; ‘Making it Easier to Die: Catherine Martin and the Euthanasia Debate’, Margin, no. 43, November 1999, pp. 30–8; and more generally Margaret Allen, ‘Catherine Martin: An Australian Girl?’ in Debra Adelaide (ed.), A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, 1988, pp. 151–64; and ‘What Katie Might Have Learnt in Mount Gambier …’, pp. 2–20. See Debra Adelaide, ‘Martin, Catherine’, in Australian Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide, Pandora, London, 1988, pp. 133–4. See also Margaret Allen, ‘Catherine Martin, Writer: Her Life and Ideas’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 13,

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36

no. 2, pp. 184–97. Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalism in Nineteenth Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 155. See also Margaret Allen, ‘She Seems to Have Composed Her Own Life: Thinking about Catherine Martin’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 19, no. 43, March 2004, pp. 29–42; Elizabeth Webby, ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 71. Catherine Martin, The Incredible Journey, Introduction by Margaret Allen, Pandora, London, 1987. See also Margaret Allen, ‘“To Put on Record as Faithfully as Possible”’, in Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley (eds), Uncommon Ground: White Women and Aboriginal History, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2005, pp. 241–56. Catherine Martin, How I Pawned my Opals and Other Lost Stories, Introduction by Katherine Bode, Obiter Publishing, Braddon, ACT, 2017. Rosemary Campbell, ‘Introduction’, An Australian Girl, p. xxiv; see ‘Review: An Australian Girl’, Age, 13 September 1890, p. 14. Catherine Helen Spence, ‘Autobiography’, in Ever Yours, C.H. Spence, ed. Susan Magarey, with Barbara Wall, Mary Lyons and Maryan Beams, Wakefield Press, 2005, p. 133. Spence, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 115–16. Allen, ‘She Seems to Have Composed Her Own Life’, p. 30. H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. Volume One, 1789–1923, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 646. Spence, ‘Review: An Australian Girl’, Age, 13 September 1890, p. 14. Bode, ‘Introduction’, pp. iv, v and xiv. Martin, ‘Hanslein’s Disappearance’, pp. 178, 181–82, 186. Martin, ‘Hanslein’s Disappearance’, pp. 186–7, 196. Bode, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. Campbell, ‘Introduction, p. xliv; the 50,000-word count is in Enid Sedgwick, ‘An Australian Germanophile: Formative Influences in the Early Development of the Writer Catherine Martin’, Westerly, vol. 55, no 1, 2010, p. 186. Webby, ‘A Note on the Text’, p. xiii. ‘Note on the Text’, in Tulloch (ed.), An Australian Girl, pp. xxxii–xxxiv. Kevin Gilding, ‘Space Exploration: Catherine Martin, Australia, and the World, the Universe and Whatever’, in Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss and Amanda Nettlebeck (eds), Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture, Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Adelaide, 1995, pp. 61–70. Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans. with an Introduction by Eva Le Gallienne, The Modern Library, New York, 1957, pp. xv–xix. On Mill, see John Uhr, Prudential Public Leadership, Palgrave, London, 2015, pp. 83–102; and Performing Political Theory, Palgrave, Singapore, 2018, pp. 69–83. Spence, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 89–90. John Stuart Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’, in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 119. On the availability of Mill’s ‘Subjection of Women’ and Martin’s bookshop in Mount Gambier, see Allen, ‘She Seems to Have Composed Her Own Life’, p. 36. Spence, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 90–3. Spence’s review is in Melbourne Review, vol. 10, 1885, pp. 217–44; Martin’s review is published as E.C. Martin, ‘George Eliot’s Life’, Victorian Review, no. 12, June 1885, pp. 162–89. Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’, pp. 120–3, 158. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 502. See also Christopher Lee, ‘Strategies of Power and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl’, Southerly, vol. 51, no. 2, 1991, pp. 189–206; and Louise D’Arcens, ‘Meta-Medievalism and the Future of the Past in the “Australian Girl” Novel’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 26, nos 3–4, 2011, pp. 69–85. Martin, ‘Introduction’, The Incredible Journey, Pandora, London, 1987, pp. 1–14. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 105, 109. One of the best short examinations is Margaret Allen, ‘Reading Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl’, in Philip Butterss (ed.), Southwords: Essays on South Australian Writing, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1995, pp. 46–61. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 122, 133–5. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 136-7. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 165–7. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 207, 249–52. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 622–3, 630. A valuable but neglected review of Martin and her critics is that by John V. Byrnes, ‘Catherine Martin and the Critics’, Australian Letters, vol. 3, 1961, pp. 15–24.

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 620–1, 626–7. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 633–5. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 63, 614–15. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 20. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 13, 65. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 42. See chap. 3, pp. 37–49, and chap. 4, pp. 50–9. On comedy in the novel, see Allen, ‘Catherine Martin’, pp. 190–1; D’Arcens, ‘Meta-Medievalism and the Future of the Past’, pp. 73–5. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 60, 62, 73. See chaps 5 and 6, pp. 60–86. See also Sedgwick, ‘An Australian Germanophile’, pp. 186–203. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 77. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 77, 81, 85. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 509, 511, 513, 518, 522–3. Note the unusual praise of ‘State Socialism’ at p. 583. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 558–62, 583–4; see also Campbell, ‘An Australian Girl’, pp. 20–3. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 588–9, 591–607; on Bismarck, see Campbell, ‘An Australian Girl’, pp. 17, 20. Gilding, ‘Space Exploration’, pp. 66, 69. Langdale’s arguments against socialism occur at pp. 600–3. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 287; the place of Hegel is noted by Gilding, ‘Space Exploration’, pp. 66, 68. Hegelian ‘social ethics’ are explicitly mentioned in An Australian Girl, pp. 279, 282. Martin, An Australian Girl, pp. 614–15. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 625. Christopher Lee, ‘Women, Romance, and the Nation: The Reception of Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 17, 1993, pp. 68, 72. Lee, ‘Women, Romance, and the Nation’, pp. 73–5. Martin, An Australian Girl, p. 492. Campbell, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiii-xxv; Sedgwick, ‘An Australian Germanophile’, pp. 198–9. Miles Franklin, Laughter, Not for a Cage, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, p. 86. See also Colin Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950, p. 45: Stella ‘talks too much to no purpose, and entertains false notions of herself’. Sedgwick, ‘An Australian Germanophile’, p. 198. Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction, p. 44.

Part Two

Chapter 4

Tim Winton’s Dirt Music

When Tim Winton published Dirt Music, his eighth novel, he was in the middle of his first serious fight as a public environmentalist. Up until then, the award-winning author, already a ‘Living Treasure’ according to the National Trust, had lived as a self-confessed ‘failed recluse’—quietly supporting conservation causes, but preferring to maintain his privacy for the most part. This changed with the campaign to ‘Save Ningaloo Reef’, Australia’s longest stretch of fringing coral, and the proposed site of a $200 million resort. Over a three-year period, Winton lent the campaign his eloquence, his profile and his time. While Winton initially served as ‘bait’ for the movement—a ‘minor celeb’ designed to attract media attention, by his own description—he gradually discovered some of the skills needed in any successful campaign. The author learned to corral cynical journalists, stage publicity stunts, endure the necessary grind of fundraising, and decipher the movement of power in parliament and in cabinet. Looking back, Winton described the experience as ‘his midlife postgrad course in civics’.1 Winton might have been a political novice at the time, but he did know something about environmental sentiment in Western Australia. As he saw it, the struggle over Ningaloo Reef was ‘more than just a squabble over a tourist development: it was a battle of worldviews’. In one corner was the ‘settler ethos, the colonial assumption that nature exists to be exploited— it has no intrinsic value, there will always be more’. On the other side was the idea that ‘nature has value in its own right—it needs to be studied, nurtured and used with great care to increase its chance of enduring’.2 In a way, Winton had been writing about this essential conflict as a novelist for two decades, well before he ever raised his head above the parapet as an activist. From his first book, The Open Swimmer, published in 1982, through diverse novels such as Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1991) and Breath (2008), Winton’s works had always expressed his fascination with the Australian landscape, and the different possible relationships Australians could foster with it. Nature, in his words, was ‘a subject [of his fiction], not just an object, a character, a living thing and not simply backdrop’.3 The Battle for Ningaloo was ultimately a success. In 2003, premier Geoff Gallop vetoed the proposed development, extending sanctuary protection in the area and drawing ‘a line in the sand’ under the project. Other campaigns followed, with Winton variously advocating for a national system of marine parks, a logging boycott in Tasmania, and a ban on international whaling.4 But if Winton is now one of Australia’s most recognisable conservationists, the source of this image is as much his literature as it is his activism. As the author acknowledged, these concerns shaped his initial impulse to write novels. ‘I was just writing

about what I saw and knew, and much of that was either a human struggle against nature, or humans struggling within the constraints of nature … I [was] writing about people’s engagement with nature from the very beginning’.5 This chapter examines ecological politics and Tim Winton’s long literary career, with a particular focus on Dirt Music. We encounter in these books the author’s distinct image of environmentalism in Australia, coming from the movement’s so-called ‘redneck wing’.6 Winton’s ecological vision is as consistent as it is vivid. His is an environmentalism emphasising sensual experience over doctrine or ideology; prioritising earned wisdom over the mediated lessons of science. It is an environmentalism that rejects the green movement’s middle-class image, offering protagonists both prosperous and poor, rough and refined, educated and self-taught. It is an environmentalism without moralism, where characters hunt and kill animals even as they love and value them. The background to all this is the ongoing tension between ‘the old colonial alienation from the land and the new ethic of stewardship that has begun to take hold’7. The chapter begins with a discussion of this ‘old colonial alienation’, then examines Winton’s fiction.

‘That settler ethos’: Europeans and the Australian continent Before Europeans ever arrived in Australia, foreigners had long contemplated the possibility of a great continent to the south of Java. Early images of it tended towards the strange and fantastical, with Australia appearing sometimes as a magical land of plenty, sometimes as a troubling land of inversion and opposites. For Chinese scholars in the thirteenth century, for instance, the continent existed as a kingdom of women, where water flowed downwards to a hole in the ocean that drained the seas. When the Javanese and Sumatrans considered the world to their south, it appeared as a land of gold and Arcadian gardens, although tragically out of human reach, guarded as it was by an enormous bird.8 Early Europeans shared this sense of mystery and possibility. One popular idea was Australia as the ‘antipodes’: a place where natural laws were overturned, and where the world existed in reverse.9 While these mythological instincts lingered in European thought, other motivations gained strength in later centuries. When Europeans began genuinely to consider physical travel to a southern continent—what they called Terra Australis Incognita—their concerns were more ‘prosaic’, as one historian put it.10 When the Dutch explored parts of the continent in the 1600s, motives ranged from colonial extraction to scientific discovery to religious conversion. The first Englishman to touch the Australian land, William Dampier, travelled at the same historical moment as the Dutch, arriving on the continent’s northwest coast in 1688. A buccaneer and natural historian, Dampier sailed on the Cygnet, and stayed on land for three months. There he searched for signs of use in the landscape. In an inauspicious start for the English in Australia, Dampier was disappointed by what he found. After quickly judging the local Indigenous people inferior to European man—a racist dismissal which also anticipated much—he observed little of worth in Australia: The land is of a dry sandy soil, destitute of water except when you make wells … We saw no trees that bore fruit or berries … We saw no sort of animal nor any track of

beast but once; and that seemed to be the tread of a beast as big as a great mastiff-dog. Here are a few small land-birds but none bigger than a blackbird; and but few seafowls. Neither is the sea very plentifully stored with fish unless you reckon the manatee and turtle as such.11 Within a century of Dampier’s landing, the British had chosen New South Wales as the site for its newest penal colony. This was inspired in part by Joseph Banks’s enthusiastic description of the area’s natural qualities, a report very different to Dampier’s in both detail and spirit. Having previously visited with James Cook as the Endeavour’s official botanist, Banks told a House of Commons committee that the country’s soil was rich enough to maintain ‘a large number of people’, that its plains would allow oxen and sheep to ‘thrive and increase’, and that its oceans and waterways flowed with fish in ‘great plenty’.12 But when settlers eventually arrived on the continent after 1788—on the other distant coast to Dampier —many in New South Wales were more inclined to agree with his original assessment, expressing disappointment in a land so superficially different to Europe. For one, the earth seemed to resist conventional agriculture, at least in the colony’s difficult first years. In an attempt to explain this frustration, a number reverted to myths of antipodean inversion (one pastoralist, contemplating soil quality, concluded that ‘like most things in this strange country, [this is] nearly the reverse of what we find in England’).13 Local animals were equally puzzling. At least to British eyes, Australian beasts looked ‘contradictory and eccentric’, dominated by composite creatures such as the kangaroo and platypus, clumsily pieced together from more coherent animals.14 When European writers began to observe the continent, they tended to be more invested in the land’s spiritual qualities than practical questions of agricultural output. But the same sense of distance and confusion still coloured much of their writing. Marcus Clarke was one of the first to express this feeling in local literature, through his savage depiction of convict society. In Clarke’s words, perhaps the most enduring on the topic, to live in Australia was to experience its ‘weird melancholy’, in a land defined by ‘the grotesque, the weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write’.15 When Mark Twain travelled to Australia in 1895, he too could not escape this imagery, nor the idea of reversal: ‘to my mind’, he wrote, ‘the exterior aspects and character of Australia are fascinating things to look at and think about, they are so strange, so weird, so new, so uncommonplace, such a startling and interesting contrast to the other sections of the planet’.16 A few decades later, British novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence visited New South Wales for three months, and then published his book Kangaroo. Through the novel’s protagonist, a young British poet, Lawrence acknowledged the landscape’s alien power, but added a deeper sense of dread to the experience. When confronted by the ‘vast, uninhabited land’, the poet is terrified: It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him … It

was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting—the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret.17 These were not purely negative depictions. Each writer acknowledged something alluring in the continent, even if they could not quite decipher it. For Clarke, there was a ‘subtle charm in this fantastic land of monstrosities’. But when combined with a sense of exile from the European homeland, colonial alienation could be potent. Exile and attitudes to the land were not only entangled, they actively reinforced each other. As noted in the Introduction, Judith Wright was one writer to express this dynamic, even as she strove to change it through her art and activism. Like Tim Winton, Wright was a writer and an environmentalist—for two decades she was president of Queensland’s Wilderness Preservation Society—and made it her mission to help Australians feel ‘at peace’ in their landscape. Still, she understood the depth of local discomfort. ‘As a land of exile’, Wright acknowledged, ‘[Australia] could scarcely have been more alien to all European ideas of either natural beauty or of physical amenity; its unknown plants and animals, its odd reversal of all that British invaders knew and understood of their own country’. This feeling of detachment persisted in Australia, with the natural world both symbolising and reinforcing an emotional distance from the new continent. Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality; first, and persistently, the reality of exile; second, though perhaps now we tend to forget this, the reality of newness and freedom.18 These two impulses, what Wright called the country’s ‘double aspect’, ran through early colonial debates around politics and identity. If Australians suffered from a ‘tyranny of distance’, it was measured from their sentimental home in Europe. One historian compared the British story in Australia to the biblical tale of Exodus, traced through transported convicts, to pioneers striving to clear a strange land, to the settlers and pastoralists attempting to transform it.19 Towards the end of his life, Manning Clark pondered this dynamic in his own melancholy way. Clark’s lamentation combined the spiritual and the material; the outer landscape prompted his internal despair. Writing in the country’s bicentennial year, he spoke of ‘standing in the Australian bush on a clear and windless day’ and being visited by ‘strange thoughts’. Faced with the naked continent, the historian wondered whether European Australians could ‘ever know heart’s ease in a foreign land, because in a foreign land there live foreign ancestral spirits’. His instincts told him they could not. ‘We white people are condemned to live in a country where we have no ancestral spirits. The conqueror has become the eternal outsider, the eternal alien.’20 The second side of Wright’s ‘double aspect’ was what she called ‘the reality of newness

and freedom’—the sense of boundless possibility in a society liberated from the rigidity of British class and tradition. These sentiments underpinned the growing Australian nationalist movement, which emerged alongside trade union and progressive politics, in many ways a rejection of the sentiment of exile. But even these nationalists—proud of their new society, optimistic about progress, opposed to imperial nostalgia—still had a difficult, often antagonistic relationship to the land in which they lived. This was because many of them believed that, if Australia had indeed developed a more egalitarian culture than Europe, this had arisen in opposition to the continent’s primal hostility. According to Tom Inglis Moore, for instance, social differences ‘could be traced primarily to respective environments’. Australian democracy grew out of the country’s stubborn dirt. While pioneers thought they were conquering the land, the opposite was actually true. ‘In the end, it was the country that conquered the people, forcing them to adapt to its climate and physiography.’21 The same idea underpinned much of Russel Ward’s picture of egalitarian comradery among workingmen in The Australian Legend, which emerged in part out of the ‘material conditions of outback life’.22 When A.A. Phillips defined the outlines of an ‘Australian tradition’ in literature—a democratic style written ‘of the people, for the people, from the people’—it too was in battle with the continent that produced it: The flavour of that traditional attitude had been determined, I believe, largely by two early exaltations experienced by the Australian common man: the challenge of the sheer empty space of a continent to the men from the fetid slums and the tight little hedge green squares; and the knowledge that life and victory of the harsh nature could be won only by the strength of the individual quality of a man.23 Physical discomfort and spiritual unease were not the universal experience of life in Australia. Many convicts and settlers recognised the benefits of a warmer climate, ‘so soft that man scarcely requires a dwelling’.24 But ideas of exile and the grotesque were strong enough to foster particular cultural preoccupations, often expressed as Gothic art and literature. These Gothic concerns persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Marcus Clarke’s ‘weird melancholy’ to books such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wake in Fright. As one critic argued, European literature in the continent frequently explored ‘anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or of becoming lost in the bush, [all] distinctly gothic in effect— and dare one say, uniquely, originally, Australian’.25 Another critic defined the Gothic in darker language, suggesting ‘the attempt to map the Australian landscape in literature is at once a story of a nation coming into being as well as a horror story’.26 Sometimes the horror was the country’s vast outback and bushland, inscrutable and ominous. Sometimes it was the original inhabitants of the land, resisting the process of colonial invasion. The fear here was of Indigenous retaliation, ‘haunting the Australian landscape, spectres more frightening than any European demon, because they represented a physical threat to settlers and theories of enlightenment which believed in the

civilising presence of Whites’.27 Certain political and artistic movements did recognise this cultural ambivalence—and sought to confront it in their own ways. One of these groups was the ‘Jindyworobaks’, a loose collection of poets writing in the middle years of the twentieth century. Founded by Rex Ingamells, the son of a Methodist minister from outback South Australia, the movement dedicated itself to ‘freeing Australian art from whatever alien uses trammel it [and] bring it within proper contact with its material’.28 The Jindyworobaks shared many of Judith Wright’s concerns. Ingamells, for instance, thought that ‘whether convicts or freemen, most of our early settlers were misfits here’, endlessly looking backwards, yearning for the ‘snowcovered landscapes’ of their cultural past. Surveying Australian culture, the Jindyworobaks believed this disengagement was stunting the development of more organic patterns of feeling and thought. To be authentic, the country needed a ‘fundamental break … with the spirit of English culture’. Ingamells summarised the Jindyworobak mission in a manifesto published in 1938. Three goals in particular were urgent: understanding the local ‘environmental values’, debunking ‘much nonsense’, and recognising Australia’s true history, ‘primeval, colonial and modern’.29 While the objectives were all connected, the last was the most innovative—and also the most controversial. The term ‘Jindyworobak’ itself was borrowed from the Woiwurrung language, loosely meaning ‘to join’ or ‘to annex’, and Ingamells explicitly looked to Indigenous Australia for inspiration. In words that seem both dated and radical for their time, Ingamells argued that ‘contrary to the general conception, the passing of the Aborigines meant the passing of a culture that was age old’.30 While he shared the belief of many that Indigenous society was being overwhelmed by white colonisation, Ingamells did not dismiss it. If the Europeans in Australia were lost without a sense of ‘environmental values’, ‘the laws, the culture, and the art of Aboriginal Australia went to make a culture which was closely bound in every way with their environment’. In their ideas and practice, the Jindyworobaks tried to learn from this. According to Ingamells, it could serve as the foundation of a new Australia. ‘An assimilation of much of the spirit of it and the natural identifying of that spirit with our own experiences, in cultural expression, is essential to the honest development of Australian culture’.31 The Jindyworobak experiments did not last long. This was partly because of the lack of any great poetic talent in the movement. It was also partly because of criticism, coming from two different directions. One was from literary figures, most famously A.D. Hope, who accused the movement of immaturity and inauthenticity. This was a ‘Boy Scout School of Poetry’, dressing up in exotic costumes with little hope of genuine expression. The ‘poet who tries to write like a second-hand Abo[rigine] is no more likely to produce sincere work than the poet who writes like a second-hand Englishman’.32 The other criticism concerned the ethics of appropriating Indigenous symbolism and language for the purposes of white Australia. Sceptics accused the Jindyworobaks of cherrypicking superficial concepts and images, with limited curiosity about the actual lives of Indigenous people, and ‘extracting from them a kind of essence-of-Australia’. This was not an exercise in Indigenous cultural revival, these critics argued, but a kind of theft; with white

Australians pilfering the extractable parts of Indigenous culture before its presumed extinction.33 The Jindyworobak movement is best seen as a symptom of white Australian anxiety over the land, rather than a viable solution to the postcolonial condition. Moreover, it has not been the only Australian movement to articulate this historic discomfort, nor attempt this kind of literary re-evaluation. A more sophisticated strain of Australian writing—starting with Judith Wright’s work, moving through writers such as John Kinsella and Robert Drewe, to the poetry of Les Murray—has also sought to reimagine the continent, challenging the haunted pictures handed down by Clarke and Lawrence. Still, even with these kinds of cultural reactions, the feeling of ‘weird melancholy’, the colonial suspicion of space and silence, the nagging fear of being alien to an old and unhappy continent, continues to represent one of the defining themes in Australian thought, still colouring its writing, visual art and selfconception. It is within this cultural history that Tim Winton sets his fiction.

Tim Winton and the Australian environment Tim Winton’s four decades as a professional writer have been some of the most productive in Australian literature. Winton has written more than thirty books, including a dozen novels, a collection of children’s fiction, as well as memoirs, essays and short stories. This work has been adapted for television, film, theatre and opera, reaching a rare ubiquity in the national culture (it even produced a Twitter parody account in recent years). What is notable about a catalogue this vast—crossing decades and very different literary forms—is the unity of its ecological vision, with its creation of a distinct imaginative world in coastal Western Australia. If anything defines Winton’s work, more than any character or genre, it is an enduring relationship to the Australian landscape; a relationship both spiritual and nourishing, even when brutal and unforgiving. Winton began publishing his novels at an unusually young age. He released his first book, The Open Swimmer (1982), as a 22-year-old, and the outlines of these themes were present in even his earliest writing.34 Winton’s debut tells the story of a young man named Jerra, just a few years younger than the author himself, lingering awkwardly at the crossroads of school and adulthood. In an attempt to avoid impending life decisions, Jerra goes on a camping trip to a secluded beach, where he meets an old man living in a nearby shack (recluses are common in Winton’s fiction, although this one offers less wisdom and guidance than some in later books, particularly The Shepherd’s Hut). A precocious if imperfect work, The Open Swimmer began to sketch out Winton’s particular approach to ecology. Anticipating other Winton characters to come, Jerra is inarticulate in human society, but finds a richer inward expression in the natural world. The book is filled with vivid descriptions of his time in the ocean, swimming, surfing and spear fishing—all more intense than his dull life back in Perth. He enjoys an intimate if complicated relationship with animals, particularly fish and other sea creatures, whose unique moral worth he acknowledges, even as he hunts them for food. The book flirts with the romance of seclusion, but ultimately acknowledges the damaging loneliness of the hermit. If The Open Swimmer is a coming of age novel, Jerra never quite reaches his moment of clarity, despite the trip’s

occasional flashes of insight. In The Open Swimmer, Jerra’s environmentalism is largely implicit, an unspoken contrast to his dispiriting life in the city. It is an experience, not a doctrine, which is the most common way Winton’s characters relate to environmentalism. People feel alive in nature, but rarely consider their instincts political, at least in any formal sense. His only work to depart from this significantly—placing ecological struggle at the centre of its drama—was his second book, Shallows (1984).35 His first novel to win the Miles Franklin Award, Shallows depicts a regional town in the twilight of its whaling industry (‘Angelus’ is a barely fictionalised version of Albany, Winton’s childhood home, which went through a similar process in the 1970s). While the locals are proud of their history, still enjoying the ‘afterglow of its colonial romance’, the town’s long industrial peace is disturbed by the arrival of ‘Cachalot and Company’, a group of activists committed to stopping the slaughter. Like the Sea Shepherd, Cachalot boats attempt to get physically between harpoon and prey, disrupting the hunt. Their presence exposes long-dormant fault lines in the town, which are exacerbated by the participation of Queenie Coupar, heir to one of the town’s founding families, and thus a traitor to Angelus. Winton has written elsewhere about his own experience swimming with whales, an event he presents as almost spiritual, and Shallows conveys the majesty of these creatures, as well as the shocking violence of their killing. The book clearly sympathises with the conservationist impulse to protect them. But while the novel reflects Winton’s environmentalism, it is not a simple polemic. It also acknowledges the deep fissures separating activist and whaler—and the interests, legitimate or otherwise, underpinning their differences. While local business owners are the most prominent opponents of Cachalot— and in one instance, the book’s most grotesque villain—the industry is also supported by working-class people who depend on it for their living. They oppose the activists as passionately as do the local elite. At one point in the book, a trade union stages a protest against the environmentalists, reflecting a dynamic witnessed in other Australian industries such as mining and forestry. The clash of cultures is real. Unveiling a banner on the parliament steps—‘Hippies go home!’—the union’s secretary gives a vicious speech, directed at the Cachalot movement: ‘We believe it is the right of every working man in this country to work, if he so chooses, brothers, and you greenie bludgers are sacking good men. Go home to your rich mums and dads and leave the workers alone. You’re worse than scabs!’ In scenes like this, Shallows satirises the overly masculine language of blue-collar unionists, but it is not universally kind to its cast of activists either. The book is particularly sceptical of the slicker members of Cachalot’s crew, more interested in cultivating their media image than the creatures they pledge to save. They have little organic association with Angelus, its landscape or its people. The closest thing to a hero in the novel is Queenie Coupar, who is drawn to the whales by an intimate, lifelong connection, not an abstract or ideological commitment. Her activism is spontaneous, the result of her youthful experiences following whale pods migrating by her farm and who, like Jerra, feels most natural in the ocean: ‘she should not have been born a land mammal’, observes her husband. Like Winton’s own politics, Queenie’s ecological instincts grow out of her physical

geography. This is the Western Australian coastline where the author has spent much of his life, and which forms the usual setting of his fiction (Angelus returns in The Turning (2005) and Breath (2008), as well as his ‘Lockie Leonard’ series of children’s books). These towns can vary across his work, from the small and isolated to the modest and industrial, but they generally share a dependence on the ocean both for economic survival and cultural identity. What was notable about two of his most successful mid-career novels, then, was their departure from this carefully developed literary landscape. In Cloudstreet (1991) and The Riders (1994), Winton transplants Western Australians away from their homes, first from the regions to the city, then from Australia to Europe. In both books, the Australian landscape is still felt keenly, only this time largely in its absence.36 In multiple polls of readers and authors, Cloudstreet has been voted Australia’s most popular novel. It is Winton’s most famous book, a common high school English text, and one of the most successful ever written in the country. Compared to his earlier novels, it is also one of Winton’s most urban works, set among the inner suburbs of post-war Perth (one critic compared it generously to Joyce’s treatment of Dublin in Ulysses).37 At its heart, Cloudstreet is the tale of two families, surname Pickles and Lamb, who find themselves living together in a single house at 1 Cloud Street, after each is forced to leave their previous lives in the country. From the start, the two families make for an odd pair. On one side are the Lambs, sober, hardworking and patriotic—a small army of movement and energy who start a profitable shop on their side of the building. Across the corridor are the Pickles, unreliable and hedonistic, addicted to the gods of pleasure and luck. One reason the book resonated with so many readers was the way both families reflected different impulses in postwar Australian life. Each manages to be both distinct and archetypal at the same time. Another reason was its rich and amusing use of the period’s vernacular. Winton wrote the book partly as an ode to his grandparents’ generation, borrowing from their lives and language, and its story ends just as the author himself was born. Cloudstreet is a suburban novel that challenges certain myths of suburbia, particularly the clear demarcation between built environment and natural world. The book does this partly by emphasising the house’s physical presence, which often seems to exert a force of its own (we later learn that it previously served as a ‘reformatory’ for Indigenous women, which ended in a violent suicide). The house at 1 Cloud Street might seem large and sturdy, but it offers the families ambiguous sanctuary. Because of this and other sinister moments in the novel, one critic argued that Cloudstreet reflected an ‘anti-suburban’ tendency in Australian literature. While this can be overstated—despite the house’s ominous atmosphere, it also exerts a loving pull on both families, who decide to stay there in the end—events in the book unsettle cultural images of neat and ordered suburbia. Here domestic life is constantly penetrated by the wild. According to Winton, nature always finds a way of creeping in: Cloudstreet is essentially about two families trying to inhabit the same house. But it wouldn’t make sense without all that surrounding nature … landscape exists at the edge of consciousness, as an aspect of the divine. It’s certainly like that in Australia. You can never free yourself from the landscape: the minute you turn away it starts

reaching for your imagination again.38 Certain literary critics describe Cloudstreet as a work of ‘magical realism’—a genre that unearths ‘the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary and the mundane’—and Cloudstreet contains a number of fantastical moments and characters.39 Quick Lamb, for instance, receives guidance from a spectral Indigenous man at pivotal points in his life. Fish Lamb appears able to communicate with his pet pig, among other things. But the most consistent source of magic and wonder in Cloudstreet is the Australian landscape itself, particularly the Western Australian river system, which triggers the Lamb family’s migration to Perth and continues to shape their destiny throughout the narrative. This relationship with the water is expressed most dramatically by Fish, the book’s enigmatic narrator. Fish Lamb begins the story as a cheeky and charismatic child, whose life is changed one night when he almost drowns in a fishing accident. After this, he exhibits signs of brain damage and stunted development, although the book’s narration suggests he is more transformed than diminished. In his new state, Fish seems able to access a new language, grasping the rhythms and history of the house in a way that others cannot. Most of all, he wants to return to the water that changed him. In her grief, Oriel Lamb refuses this wish, and Fish spends most of his youth marooned in the house, longing for a reunion with what he calls ‘the big country’. ‘When are you sad?’ asks Quick. ‘When I want the water,’ Fish replies. The book ends on this note, at a waterside picnic with both families after twenty years at Cloud Street. It is a moving scene and a bittersweet resolution to the novel. As the Lambs and the Pickles enjoy the setting sun, their differences overcome for at least this one afternoon, Fish runs down the jetty and dives off. In that short instant, he becomes whole again: ‘I’m a man for that long, I feel my manhood, I recognise myself as whole and human, know my story for that long … And I’m Fish Lamb for those seconds it takes to die, as long as it takes to drink the river’. While the precise meaning of Fish’s death is subject to debate —some, for instance, emphasise its religious symbolism—his salvation is tied fundamentally to the physical river to which he ultimately returns. It is here, in Winton’s words, that Fish finds his ‘aspect of the divine’.40 While the temptation to reduce a book like Cloudstreet to its symbolism should be resisted, Fish’s story exemplifies Winton’s idea that ‘the landscape exists at the edge of [Australia’s] consciousness’, even within the boundaries of suburban life. Winton’s following book, The Riders, took this idea and extended it further, to Europe and the ‘mother continent’ of white Australian culture. The Riders occupies a number of unique positions among the author’s work. For one, it is his only work set outside Australia. It is also of a broadly different genre to Winton’s other books. Where Cloudstreet offered an enchanted family drama, The Riders resembled something close to a conventional thriller. The book’s slow dawning horror begins on a relatively placid note, with an Australian, Fred Scully, renovating an old cottage in Ireland, waiting for his wife and daughter to arrive on a flight from Australia. Scully is a simple man, but not stupid; he idolises his wife, Jennifer, and dotes on his daughter, Billie. As one reviewer argued, in many ways Scully is a modern expression of the ‘Australian

Legend’, ‘with his straightforward honesty and unsophisticated masculinity, his adeptness with his hands and his willingness to tackle hard work outdoors, his basic honesty and goodness and, it must be said, his inability to understand women’.41 The book’s real drama begins at the airport, when only his daughter arrives to meet him. Although usually extroverted, Billie now refuses to talk about whatever happened to her mother. The rest of the book follows Scully as he chases his wife’s shadow across the continent. Clutching at vague signals, he rushes through Paris, Italy and Amsterdam, as well as the bohemian Greek island of Hydra (Winton had stayed in these places while writing Cloudstreet). Even early in the book, it is clear to everyone but Scully that Jennifer does not wish to be found, despite his desperate efforts. The backdrop to Scully’s troubled journey is the distance he feels to an increasingly alien continent. In this, The Riders flips certain lingering ideas about Australia’s relationship with Europe. While Scully’s feelings about place are unavoidably tangled in his panic, he grows increasingly disdainful of these cities, populated he feels by devious and arrogant people. For the protagonist, Europe is a ‘symbol of personal defeat, social decadence and spiritual and physical deterioration’.42 Amsterdam is seedy and depressing. Paris is ‘pretty on top and hollow underneath’. The artists of Hydra are exhausted and irrelevant, pickled by alcohol and nostalgia. In Henry’s Lawson’s words, this was the ‘Old Dead Tree’ next to Australia’s ‘Young Tree Green’. Scully longs for home, a desire commonly projected on the physical landscape. Sometimes he tries to suppress it, to ‘stop thinking of blue water and white sand’ of his old home. At other times he lets his imagination wander further: There were moments in Scully’s day when he simply could not use a brush or plane or hammer for the thought of the summer he was about to miss back home: the colourless grass prostrate before the wind, the flat sea white-hot at its edge and the boats paralysed at their moorings with the heat and the smell of the desert descending upon them in the marinas and the coves and the river bends … the seamless blue sky and the loose clothing on brown bodies. Lord, it gave him bad pangs, the thought of leaving all that behind.43 Like that of Fish Lamb, Fred Scully’s psychological journey is entwined with his physical one. His exile is both intimate and geographic. This binding relationship to the Australian landscape runs through Winton’s work, even if his characters do not articulate it so explicitly. For these people, the local environment is not the sparse world of gothic horror. It is not alien or inherently threatening. For Winton’s characters, it is home.

Dirt Music Between The Riders and Dirt Music, Tim Winton did not publish a novel for seven years, the longest gap in his professional career. He did, however, release a collection of short stories, two books of children’s fiction, and a ‘contemporary fable’, Blueback (1997).44 This fable was brief—a simple story told in simple language—and allowed Winton to express his environmental themes in more explicitly moralistic terms than in his novels. Here the ethical

juxtaposition was stark, in a world divided between cynicism and wonder, avarice and altruism, cruelty and love. Anticipating the author’s later activism, the fable pits a mother and son against local developers and greedy fishermen. In another departure from most of Winton’s work, Blueback’s ending was unequivocally happy. The mother and son win the day. Like Ningaloo, their local reef is granted marine park status, where ‘everything that grew and swam was protected by law’. Novels, of course, are not fables. As the author himself has argued, ‘I don’t think the novel is an instrument of persuasion. Seduction, perhaps. Enchantment, yes. A reader of fiction quickly feels trapped and betrayed by a writer who sets out to persuade.’45 Dirt Music, Winton’s eighth novel, shares certain environmental preoccupations with Blueback, yet its themes and messages are more elusive, alert to the ambiguities existing within protagonist and antagonist alike. His third to win the Miles Franklin Award, the book is set in the fictional town of White Point, a Western Australian fishing town enjoying the spoils of an economic boom. At dawn, White Point’s trawlers head out to sea in search of lobsters and other crayfish, which are then exported to Asia. The town is prosperous but isolated, savvy if unsophisticated, verging on lawless at times. Here we meet Georgie Jutland, a forty-year-old woman and relative newcomer to White Point. For the last three years she has been living with Jim Buckridge, a recent widower and captain of the town’s most successful lobster operation. Georgie is stepmother to Jim’s children, a more or less effective arrangement, although she has recently begun feeling detached from the culture of White Point. Lost, she stays up late drinking and surfing the internet. It is in one of these midnight sessions that she hears the soft motor of an illegal fishing boat. This so-called ‘shamateur’ turns out to be Lu Fox, a local with his own painful history. Georgie and Lu soon become lovers, and this romantic triangle propels Dirt Music’s narrative forward. Financially and socially, Jim Buckridge and Lu Fox offer Georgie very different possible lives. But in a deeper sense, each represents a different potential attitude to the natural world available to Australians, premised on distinct and opposing world views. On one end of the spectrum is Buckridge, the unofficial leader of White Point’s fishing industry. In both blood and profession, Jim embodies the country’s colonial legacy. While not unaware of the town’s beauty, his attachment to the sea is primarily instrumental. In a business premised on extraction, the ocean is first and foremost a source of economic gain. Jim’s boat is named the Raider, which according to Winton is on the milder end of ‘aggro-extractive’ labels given to the town’s fleet. For all this, Jim is not an altogether bad man. He is not relentlessly sinister like Blueback’s villain. For the most part, Jim is a generous partner to Georgie, and wants to escape the worst of his past. But the pull of blood and tradition is strong in White Point. Buckridge is the son of ‘Big Bill’, a brutal man whose dominance of the sea was only matched by his dominance over the town. At different points in the novel, Jim expresses a seemingly genuine desire to transcend this past, hoping to atone for his sins as a young and arrogant man. He wants to be better. Yet for all Jim’s moral effort, this is a struggle, perhaps a doomed one. The Buckridge family’s idea of itself, built on generations of economic and social conquest, is also inescapably patriarchal. Jim’s quest for self-improvement is ultimately overwhelmed by his

anger. In this, his character foreshadows Winton’s later public commentary on modern masculinity, which ‘shackles’ Australian men.46 At the other end is Lu Fox, who has spent his life in the same hard town as Jim Buckridge, but with a very different social status. White Point locals considered the Foxes shabby and strange, hippies who sold watermelons from their modest farm on the roadside. When we meet Lu, he too is a widower of sorts, mourning the death of family members in a freak car accident. He is alone and determined to preserve his solitude. But as Georgie gets to know him better, slowly drawing Lu out of his mourning, she learns of depths not obviously present in other White Point men. Fox is gentle and vulnerable; when Georgie kisses him for the first time, he cannot stop himself from crying. He reads poetry, mostly Romantics such as Wordsworth and Blake, Judith Wright and Les Murray, authors who find transcendence in the sensual world. He tells Georgie of his life before the tragedy, when the Foxes played music in a family band. Inspiring the book’s title, Lu called their style ‘dirt music’, a kind of improvised bluegrass, evoking ‘land, home, country’. Running through all this is a less combative approach to nature than that evident in the rest of White Point. While Fox does engage in illegal fishing—partly to survive financially, partly as revenge on the town’s social hierarchy—it does not come from an impulse to expropriate and pillage. When he looks over his family farm, bordered by sandy creek beds and vivid tree lines, Lu sees something ‘alive’: He felt the ooze of the sap, the breathing leaves, the air displaced by birds, and he understood that if you watched from the corner of your eye the grasstrees would dance out there and people wriggle from hollow-burnt logs … You could stand there, stump-still, mind clean as an animal’s, and hear melons split in the heat. A speck of light, you were, an ember. And happy.47 In many ways Lu Fox is a classic Winton character, reflecting the author’s image of environmentalism. Like Queenie Coupar, Fox’s ecological impulses are organic. They are working class, from the country’s geographic periphery, and detached from institutional power. If Lu has a language in which to articulate them, it is largely self-taught. Winton’s decision to centre these kinds of people in his fiction reflects his own trepidations about environmentalism as a movement. In his memoirs, Winton writes about observing early green campaigners, people he supported in principle, but whose message was often ‘clumsy and needlessly divisive’: ‘I was troubled by the high handedness of some protestors. There was contempt for working people in general, and country folk in particular, which disgusted me. The inclusive, democratic impulses of visionaries like Judith Wright … were too often subsumed by something cultic and exclusionary.’48 Even if Winton’s fiction rarely follows active campaigners, its cast of ecologically grounded characters come from diverse life experiences, certainly more than cultural stereotypes of middle-class and urban environmentalists. According to his written history of the Ningaloo campaign, this impulse crossed over into his activism. As a ‘lifelong angler and spear fisher’, someone from the ‘redneck wing of the movement’, Winton was ‘determined to bring new people to the movement, to broaden it even further … to find common ground

with corporate types, nervy scientists and dreadlocked vegans alike’.49 In the second half of Dirt Music, Lu Fox leaves White Point after being run out of town by angry locals. Separated from Georgie, he hitchhikes north to Broome, through wild storms and dark red soil. From there, he charters a plane to a tiny island in ‘Coronation Gulf’, a deserted spot that Georgie has told him about earlier in the novel. Here Fox seeks the solitude he craves, among the ‘mangroves, boab trees and birds’, and away from painful memories of family. Fox lives a mostly self-sufficient existence on the island, fishing and hunting his food, and occasionally scavenging supplies from a nearby seasonal campsite. While Winton does not romanticise the experience naively—life on the island is tough, as is the rest of the north, sparsely populated by ‘pilgrims, traders, refugees, crusaders and lunatics’—Lu Fox’s time on the island flips many of the assumptions driving Australian gothic paranoia. Where much Australian literature emphasises the terror of ‘the bush’, whose eerie presence threatens European civilisation, the threat here is reversed—it is civilisation, omnipotent and arrogant, that endangers Lu Fox’s solitude. This dynamic is at the heart of the novel’s final act. When Jim hears of Lu’s location, he convinces Georgie to follow him to the gulf. The search is hopeless and increasingly frantic; the landscape is simply too vast. Although Jim has convinced himself the trip is for his personal atonement, he finds himself gradually consumed by fury and vengeance. Accustomed to conquest and victory, he cannot handle defeat—particularly at the hand of a Fox. Running beneath these narratives is the European Australian’s relationship with the land’s traditional Indigenous owners. As Judith Wright wrote, the Australian environmentalist cannot help but feel the ‘twisting of two strands—the love of the land we invaded, and the guilt of the invasion’.50 The continent that stores so much power for Winton’s characters, which enlivens and elevates, was once someone else’s—and it was their white forebears who took it from them. This ‘twisting’ represents the essential contradiction of Winton’s strand of environmentalism, grounded as it is in contested land, something the author has acknowledged and attempted to negotiate in different ways. In Winton’s nonfiction, for instance, he has linked the need for modern conservationism with the effects of colonialism —drawing a line between the arrogance of European invasion, the ‘arrival of catastrophe for Aboriginal people’, and the gradual degradation of the environment.51 In Dirt Music we see some of the consequences of this ‘catastrophe’, when Lu Fox meets two Indigenous men on his long trek to Coronation Gulf. ‘Axle’ and ‘Menzies’ live precarious lives, almost fugitives in their own land, avoiding its new legal owners, while maintaining what they can of their culture. The two men are kind and helpful to Lu—Axle lends him a small canoe for his trip—but their lives wear the mark of dispossession. At one point, Axle burns Lu’s last remaining maps of the area. For the Indigenous man, the paper represents the imposition of colonial logic on the land, and must be destroyed. ‘Just trouble, maps,’ Menzies tells Lu. ‘You can’t really blame him. Like they suck everythin up. Can’t blame a blackfulla for not likin a map’. But is this enough, one critic asked, for Winton’s characters to ‘establish themselves, in place, with the briefest of nods to Aboriginal presence and claims’, particularly given that ‘these historic and ongoing claims are still far from being met’?52 While we could justifiably

debate how brief these nods are—Winton has publicly supported a number of Indigenous political causes, including justice for the stolen generations and the preservation of Aboriginal art—Dirt Music does primarily centre the European experience in Australia. The same has been said of Cloudstreet. In its ‘attempt to grapple … with the heritage of colonisation’, Winton’s earlier novel faced similar criticism (perhaps even stronger, considering its reputation as a mythic national tale). Like Dirt Music, Cloudstreet is alert to the contradictions of settler nationalism. Symbolising the colonial nation itself, the book follows two white families as they attempt to establish their home in a new land, even as the past continues to unsettle them. Once a missionary home for Indigenous girls who ‘had been taken from their families’, its racial history seems to ring its walls—literally, in the case of the library, which throbs with a single piano note at the site of a young woman’s suicide. The novel’s house is haunted by the same crimes that stain the continent. Still, some critics question the sufficiency of acknowledging the country’s heritage without also emphasising Indigenous voices. Is the expression of sincere white guilt enough? In Cloudstreet there is no real negotiation between indigenous and non-indigenous characters. Nor is there an apparent attempt to animate a dialogue acknowledging the ghosts of our shared history … Winton’s work reflects a contemporary Australian postcolonial condition that appears within the structures of colonialism even as it is historically located beyond them.53 While this remains a live question in Winton’s work—in all forms of postcolonial nationalist literature—Dirt Music finishes with its three main characters together in northern Western Australia. It is one of Winton’s most dramatic and violent endings. After finding it impossible to locate Lu, Jim grudgingly accepts a flight home, in a flimsy aircraft that sounds ‘whiny as a power tool’. The plane’s occupants are hungover and glum; the mood is ominous. As Lu watches Jim and Georgie fly back over the gulf, the engine sputters and then dies, and the plane crashes back into the ocean. With the cabin broken and sinking, Lu paddles his canoe madly in an attempt to save them. Here Fox’s skills and experiences, learned in the long years spent free diving and spear fishing, come to the fore. It is the ‘shamateur’, with his intimate relationship to the ocean, who is able to save Georgie. Lu’s dive down into the wreckage ends the novel, mirroring Fish Lamb’s own dive into the Swan River: With a final breath he plunges under. He gets a handhold as the plane tips away. His hair and beard stream back in the current. His ears pop as he plunges through the milky deep with his eyes burning and his breath aglow like a coal in his chest. You can do this, he thinks with a bright, mad flush. This is what you do.54

Conclusion In Island Home, the author’s so-called ‘landscape memoir’, Winton acknowledged the story of William Dampier, the first Englishman to touch Australian soil. Like much of his writing,

Winton’s telling showed an awareness of Australian history, and the kinds of relationships Europeans had historically cultivated with the continent. Winton was struck by Dampier’s revulsion at the ‘kingdom of sand and flies’. This was the original expression of a certain ‘settler ethos’, which continues to mark the continent three hundred years on: ‘Europeans came to these shores fired by a spirit of adventure and acquisitive curiosity and they often left it sorely disheartened. The intensity of their revulsion lingers in place names all over Australia, and there’s no shortage of examples here in the west—Useless Loop and Lake Disappointment, just for starters.’55 Over four decades Winton’s novels have offered an extended rejection of this image of Australia. In his writing, the local environment is not dreary or barren. It is not the gothic world of unsettling terror nor the disquieting myth of antipodean inversion. For Winton, life in Australia is alive with beauty and sensual vitality. His protagonists might not all be activists, but they are alert to the world around them, and value it deeply. These characteristics were present from the start of his career, with The Open Swimmer and Jerra’s immersive seclusion. They continued through Queenie Coupar’s anti-whaling crusade, as well as Fish Lamb’s obsession with ‘the big country’. Perhaps most directly, it was animated in Dirt Music, in Georgie Rutland’s life between Jim Buckridge and Lu Fox; between ‘colonial alienation from the land’ and ‘an ethic of stewardship’. This preoccupation with the natural world still dominates his books, from the surfer’s Breath to the depressed environmentalist of Eyrie and the wise hermit of The Shepherd’s Hut. Since his days as a ‘failed recluse’, Winton has become increasingly vocal as a public commentator. He most recently intervened in the 2019 federal election, arguing that Australia’s leaders were ‘ignoring warming to the point of criminal negligence’.56 But his fiction remains the most consistent and powerful expression of his environmental values. Here the landscape is a character: potent, dangerous and life giving. On this point, Winton remains optimistic. Things have changed in the years since Dampier reached Australia; since Europeans began their uneasy relationship with the continent. It is a change that Winton welcomes, and in which his books have played their small part: ‘it seems that we’ve begun to see past Dampier’s infernal flies, to behold the remarkable diversity of habitats, landforms and species, the riches of a continental isolation that so long troubled us. Things once seen as impossibly homely, weird or simply perverse are now understood as precious’.57

Notes 1 2 3 4

Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2017, pp. 155–72. Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, p. 159. Alice Vidussi, ‘In Conversation with Tim Winton’, Le Simplegadi, no. 13, November 2014, p. 118. Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-intellectuals and Australian Public Life, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2009, p. 162. 5 Vidussi, ‘In Conversation with Tim Winton’, p. 118. 6 Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, p. 160. 7 Vidussi, ‘In Conversation with Tim Winton’, p. 118. 8 Manning Clark, A History of Australia: Volume I, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 6–8. 9 Paul Arthur, ‘Antipodes Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity’, History Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 1866–7. 10 Richard White, Inventing Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, p. 1.

11 William Dampier, ‘From a New Voyage Around the World: 1688’, in Ken Goodwin, et al. (eds), The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1990, p. 303. 12 Clark, A History of Australia, p. 62. 13 Arthur, ‘Antipodes Myths’, p. 1869. 14 Arthur, ‘Antipodes Myths’, p. 1869. 15 Marcus Clarke, ‘Preface’, Poems of the Late Adam Lindsay Gordon, Massina, Melbourne, 1893. 16 Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand, Penguin, Vic., 1973, p. 118. 17 D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ETT Publishers, Sydney, 1995, p. 9. 18 Judith Wright, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Double Aspect’, in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1965, pp. xi–xxii. 19 Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 61, 1999, pp. 1–19. 20 Manning Clark, Speaking Out of Turn: Lectures and Speeches, 1940–1991, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 14. 21 T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, chap. 1. 22 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, illustrated edn, 1978, p. 17. 23 A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1958, p. x. 24 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 2nd edn, Longman, New York, 1996, p. 42. 25 Geoff Turcotte, ‘Australian Gothic’ in Marie Mulvey Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998, p. 12. 26 Andrew Ng, ‘The Wider Shores of Gothic’, Meanjin, vol. 66, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–56, p. 151. 27 Turcotte, ‘Australian Gothic’, pp. 17–18. 28 Rex Ingamells and Ian Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, F.W. Preece, Adelaide, 1938, pp. 4–5. 29 Ingamells and Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, pp. 4–5. 30 Ingamells and Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, p. 16. 31 Ingamells and Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, p. 17. 32 Dan Tout, ‘Neither Nationalists nor Universalists: Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks’, Australian Humanities Review, vol. 61, May 2017, p. 10. 33 Tout, ‘Neither Nationalists nor Universalists’, pp. 13–15. 34 Tim Winton, An Open Swimmer, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982. 35 Tim Winton, Shallows, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984. 36 Tim Winton, Cloudstreet, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1991; Tim Winton, The Riders, Macmillan, Sydney, 1994. 37 Michael McGirr, ‘Go Home Said the Fish: A Study of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet’, Meanjin, vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 56– 66. 38 Michael McGirr, ‘A Conversation with Tim Winton’, Image, Summer 1995, p. 11. 39 Bárbara Arizti Martin, ‘New Possibilities of Neighbouring: Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet’, Coolabah, no. 10, 2013. 40 Helen Ranger, ‘The Sense of an Ending: Considering a Religious Reading of Cloudstreet’, Metaphor, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 35–40. 41 Andrew Taylor, ‘Tim Winton’s The Riders: A Construction of Difference’, Westerly, vol. 43, no. 3, spring 1998, pp. 99– 112. 42 Ivan Maver, ‘Tim Winton’s “European” Novel The Riders’, Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, vol. 18, 1999, p. 4. 43 Winton, The Riders, p. 44. 44 Tim Winton, Blueback, Pan, Sydney, 1997. 45 Vidussi, ‘In Conversation with Tim Winton’, p. 119. 46 Tim Winton, ‘About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny’, Guardian, 9 April 2018, . 47 Winton, Dirt Music, p. 104. 48 Tim Winton, Island Home, Penguin, Melbourne, 2015, p. 104. 49 Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain, p. 160. 50 Judith Wright, Born of the Conquerors, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1991, p. 30. 51 Winton, Island Home, pp. 89–92. 52 Rooney, Literary Activists, p. 180. 53 David Crouch, ‘National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2007, p. 100.

54 Winton, Dirt Music, p. 458. 55 Tim Winton, Island Home, p. 87. 56 Tim Winton, ‘Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It’s unforgivable’, Guardian, 20 April 2019, . 57 Winton, Island Home, p. 111.

Chapter 5

Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap

When discussing his path to writing, Christos Tsiolkas often retells a story that helps to explain some of the competing impulses in his politics and his novels. The memory is from the 1980s, when Christos was eighteen and recently accepted as a student at the University of Melbourne—a foreign world of sandstone and possibility, far removed from his workingclass youth. By his own admission, success had bred a growing arrogance in Christos, and he was aware of his newfound social mobility. As his uncle Costa reminded him, ‘your giagia can’t even read a map, and look at you, you are now a university student’. With the semester soon to begin, his uncle offered to drive him to campus, a place he had never before seen in person. But while still on the outskirts of the university, Costa slowed the car to a stop. There he offered Christos some guidance, part advice and part threat: As we were approaching it, he pointed to a tall, ugly red-brick building that towered over the campus. ‘Do you see that building there?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered in Greek. ‘Well, I helped build that—I was a bricklayer working on that building.’ We were stopped in traffic, and I was surprised to see that his eyes were moist. That’s when he slapped me, not hard, somewhere between affection and a warning. ‘We are so proud of you,’ he said, ‘but if you forget where you come from, fa se sfaxo [I will slaughter you].’1 Three decades on from that afternoon, Christos Tsiolkas is now the author of six novels. Although his work has evolved over time—from youthful rage and destruction in Loaded, to more ambiguous family drama in The Slap—they each share a preoccupation with this teenage memory with uncle Costa, of the point at which political and social worlds collide. (The Slap even borrowed the story, told by one of its secondary characters.) As a lifelong committed leftist, and someone who experienced the confusion in his own life, Tsiolkas often returns to the same difficult intersection: between middle-class ‘new left’ politics and working class ‘old left’ communities, between the liberalism of educated progressives and the communitarianism of multicultural suburbs. This is usually a tense relationship in his books, defined by the kind of mutual incomprehension Costa feared in his changing nephew. According to Tsiolkas, this reflected his own political journey, straddling two very different worlds. ‘At first I wanted to reconcile Marxism with the liberationist politics of feminism, sexual politics and what I guess is postcolonial politics. I failed in that project, in that feminism and queer politics are underpinned

by bourgeois understandings of selfhood and identity … I think that one of the drives I have in my writing is to express the complexity and violence of this tension.’2 This chapter examines the political novels of Christos Tsiolkas, with a focus on his fourth novel, The Slap. While Tsiolkas enjoyed critical support early in his career, The Slap brought him a new level of commercial success, selling more than a million copies, before being adapted for television in Australia and the United States. Its dramatic premise—simple but loaded—prompted an international debate over parenting, taking his work to book clubs and review pages across the world. Beginning with a flash of violence at a family barbecue—a man strikes another couple’s child—The Slap follows eight guests as they each deal with the day and its ongoing fallout, which lingers through court cases and broken relationships. Some guests are scandalised by the incident, considering it an unforgivable intrusion on childhood innocence, while others think it justified by the boy’s wild and undisciplined behaviour. Through this jarring if plausible moment of suburban anger, The Slap tells a story of family, of community and of a changing city—of the fractured visions of freedom and duty present in modern Australia, and the ‘complexity and violence’ of their coexistence.

To hell and back: The first three novels By the time Christos Tsiolkas released his first novel, he was a relatively common presence in Australian literary and political debate. After editing the University of Melbourne newspaper Farrago, he contributed short stories, film reviews and cultural criticism to various left-wing publications. For an openly identifying Marxist, however, this was a difficult time to be starting out. Capitalism was enjoying a victory lap: Frances Fukuyama had just diagnosed history’s demise, and socialism now existed in the Soviet Union’s long and ominous shadow. The left’s immediate future did not look good. Tsiolkas’s early nonfiction grappled with this historical moment. While generally pessimistic, the pieces nonetheless introduced some of his lasting preoccupations: the reality of racial politics beneath multicultural slogans, with Romper Stomper proving that ‘the vast majority of cameras in Australian cinema are still in skip hands and it is their stories that are being told’; the evolution and radical potential of queer politics (although conflicted about creeping consumerism in the gay community, he defended an early ABC broadcast of Sydney’s Mardi Gras); and the experience of those living at capitalism’s edges—he preferred Mike Leigh’s bleak alienation to Ken Loach’s romantic view of working-class community.3 The most striking of these was an approving review of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s brutal depiction of sadism and fascist violence. The Italian film resonated with Tsiolkas, mirroring some of his own ideas about art and contemporary life. He began the review with a quote by Pasolini, offering a stark message for modern leftists: ‘the real Marxist must not be a good Marxist … his function is to put orthodoxy and codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.’4 When Tsiolkas published his debut novel, Loaded (1995), he took Pasolini’s instruction seriously. Grouped with a generation of ‘grunge’ authors—‘the tradition of young, sexually charged, contemporary, angry, a historical, amoral, nihilistic writing’—Tsiolkas aimed his

considerable fury at cherished Australian myths; with extra poison for those held by the Australian left.5 The novel follows Ari, a young Greek Australian, over the course of a single day. It is an eventful one. Gay and happily unemployed, Ari goes on a hedonistic spree, taking an improbable amount of drugs and jumping between anonymous sex partners. While more established voices criticised the grunge moment as puerile and shallow—‘a fad … that exploits the hype around sex-and-violence in down-and-out settings’—Loaded was more deliberate than that. Ari’s lifestyle is a conscious rejection of the paths available to him, those ‘codified certainties’ of Australian life.6 None seems very appealing. Ari resists the idea of work and marriage, ‘two things in this world guaranteed to make you old and flabby’. His own family is strained and explosive; the gulf between parents and children, between generations of migrants, is too large. Walking through the suburbs, Ari feels like he’s in ‘the ugliest place on the planet’. As day turns to night, the book takes readers through the city’s subcultures—a share house near the university, a Greek bar in the northern suburbs, a gay club in the inner city. If Ari is repulsed by the conventional narratives of Australian life, he finds progressive alternatives just as disappointing. Identity in the Greek community is complex and hierarchical, ‘backstabbing, money-hungry, snobbish and self-righteous’. Wealthier white Australians might preach tolerance and multiculturalism, but secretly resent others moving into their leafy streets. In the gay community, things are equally stratified. An outwardly heterosexual man—who gets a ‘buzz’ out of people presuming he’s straight—he silently judges his more flamboyant peers, along a spectrum of masculinity. In one of the book’s most venomous passages, the idea of solidarity, of community among the downtrodden, is dismissed as a sham: There is another urban myth. It is about solidarity. The myth goes something like this: we may be poor, may be treated like scum, but we stick together, we are a community. The arrival of the ethnics put paid to that myth in Australia. In the working class suburbs of the West where communal solidarity is meant to flourish, the skip sticks with the skip, the wog with the wog, the gook with the gook, and the abo with the abo. Solidarity, like love, is a crock of shit. 7 There’s something extreme, even theatrical about this anger and nihilism. It admits no ambivalence and concedes no nuance. If there’s a goal, it’s to scorch the earth, cleansing the ground for something better to follow. While Tsiolkas never lost touch with this anger or the desire to disturb middle-class readers, the publication of his second book, The Jesus Man (1999), showed early signs of an eventual shift in his writing. Moving away from Loaded’s first-person monologue, the book follows the Stefano family across two decades in Melbourne, foreshadowing The Slap’s intergenerational narrative. Perhaps his most neglected novel—the only one never adapted for television or film—it’s also his most explicitly political. Bookended by Gough Whitlam’s dismissal and John Howard’s first election, personal lives are actively shaped and defined by political currents and moments. Like other Tsiolkas books, it’s a difficult, often violent journey; but unlike Loaded, it’s more conflicted about the possibilities and demands of politics.

The heart of The Jesus Man is the story of Tommy Stefano, middle brother between Dom and Lou. Tommy is unambitious, but nonetheless holds a solid job. He dates a caring woman, Soo Ling, whose own discipline compensates for his instinctive inertia. It is a comfortable, if occasionally dull life. All this changes, however, with the economic crash of the early 1990s. Although his ageing colleagues are still union members—‘old school tradespeople, who had assumed the inevitability of unions’—the consultants brought in to restructure the firm are young and slick, with a different view of industrial relations. Membership is now seen as oldfashioned, a sign of sluggishness, even a bit embarrassing. Tommy loses his job, and without the energy or support needed to pull himself out of a depressive rut, he descends into reclusion, mental illness and eventually murder. Tommy’s final scene is a horror story of blood and madness. Tsiolkas’s point about economic rationalism and its human consequences seems clear: an indifferent system enacts violence on Tommy, who in turn unleashes it on the world. In an essay published in 1999, Tsiolkas admitted that his political beliefs had become ‘much more hesitant and exploratory’ over the previous few years.8 The Jesus Man is certainly more ambiguous about left politics than Ari’s blank rejection of solidarity (the preface even acknowledges the 1998 Maritime Union strike as an inspiration). Towards the end of the book, three characters attend a demonstration against Pauline Hanson, which turns violent. A fierce argument follows: two find it overbearing and counterproductive, but Soo Ling defends the rally, finding something cathartic in direct action’s physical confrontation. Protest is considered from both sides, not immediately discarded as futile. At other points, even the Labor Party receives a level of sympathy. Learning of Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975, Tommy’s mother is distraught (‘see what they do to people who like dagos in this country, see what they do to Whitlam because he cares about immigrants’). Twenty years later, Lou Stefano watches the demise of another Labor government at a party with university friends. It is the end of an era, and the atmosphere is heavy with guilt. Fashionable indifference now feels like an indulgent posture: It is, of course, the strangest of parties. In a matter of hours something has changed. There are people I glimpse from uni, from around the scenes. Yesterday they didn’t care. Politics, we’re over that. Tonight, the world is in shock. You can read it on everyone’s faces. The queers and hippies, the techno-heads and the goth revivalists. Even the politicos, the spitting anarchists getting drunk, they too seem confused. Don’t vote—it only encourages them. I wish I voted.9 Lou’s election night expresses a common Tsiolkas sentiment: of living between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ lefts, between loyalty to the working class and labour movement and a longing for something more radical and fresh. His characters can see the flaws in both, often with the clarity of lived experience, but cannot completely lose faith in either. Tsiolkas once described this as ‘contradictory politics’—simultaneously grasping the emotional appeal and deep limitation of an idea—and the same paradoxical scrutiny also drove his third novel, Dead Europe (2005).10 The son of Greek Australians, Tsiolkas fills his books with characters nostalgic for the

Europe they left behind. If Loaded was written to confront the certainties of Australian life, Dead Europe challenges the myths cultivated by these wistful migrants. In their diasporic lament, life in Australia is a shallow imitation of their previous existence; less vivid and passionate, more ignorant and provincial, a land without history or beauty. If Lou is born into the space between old and new lefts, older relatives exist between old and new worlds. Returning is a common dream, although not always a serious one. In Dead Europe the protagonist does go back. Isaac is the son of two Greek expatriates in Australia, both of whom feel the migrant’s ‘hunger for something else’. An aspiring photographer, Isaac flies to Athens to attend an exhibition of his pictures, depicting Greek men in migrant exile. Although disappointed by the meagre local interest, he then travels through various glittering cities—Venice, Prague, Paris and Cambridge—taking photos and staying with old Australian friends. Where a previous trip involved sightseeing, Isaac now strays from the usual tourist trail to dreary suburbs, grimy underground clubs, warehouses filled with rotting fruit and refugee workers. The continent he travels to is now ugly, both in appearance and spirit. People lust after Gucci and Prada, listen to the same globalised pop music and boast of their expensive sports cars. With the collapse of communism and wars in the Middle East, Europe is again filled with refugees—pushed to the margins of cities, unwelcome and ashamed. Prostitution and pornography are everywhere. ‘This is hell’, Isaac tells himself. Dead Europe is a confronting book. For Tsiolkas, it was partly an attempt to reckon with the racism of his ancestors and their civilisation: ‘the anti-Semitism of my world and the complexity of how we deal with it and what it means for our sense of self’.11 When Australian Greeks recalled the romance of staunch national cultures, of people tied by generations to land and its customs, this was the dark underside: a profound suspicion of those deemed roaming and ‘rootless’. In Dead Europe, the anti-Semitic poison continues to infect the continent, fifty years after the Holocaust. As Isaac travels from city to city, and his sense of doom and delirium escalates, his multicultural tolerance is increasingly overwhelmed by an atavistic malice. In Venice he confronts an older man who misunderstands his own ethnicity. ‘You fucking Jew!’ Isaac spits. He’s thrilled by the incident, feeling as if he ‘had been yearning to utter this since the beginning of time’. As Tsiolkas saw it, this kind of anti-Semitism ‘was central to the way the nineteenth and twentieth century nation states of Europe came to understand their identity’, and fundamental to the fascism that destroyed millions of European lives in previous generations.12 Throughout Dead Europe, Isaac’s hateful descent runs parallel to another story—almost a fairy tale—told in a peasant town during World War II, which alternates with the contemporary chapters. Under German occupation, a Jewish man approaches a Greek couple with an urgent request: hide their son from the Nazis, in exchange for what remains of his worldly possessions. Although initially apprehensive, the husband agrees to the deal. But after a cold and hungry winter, the arrangement ends in a burst of sex, birth, hatred and death. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the two stories are connected, symbolically and perhaps directly. In Dead Europe, anti-Semitism is Europe’s curse—maybe even a literal one, at least according to the novel’s peasant myths. Dead Europe felt like the culmination of Tsiolkas’s first act as a writer. He suggested that

‘you can read [the first three books] as a trilogy about the loss of faith: from the young boy at the centre of Loaded to the world of family in The Jesus Man and then the whole of European history’.13 The novels were a response to the collapse of socialism, ‘the collapse of the very idea of liberation’, and directly exposed the contradictions implicit in any new progressive project. Inspired by Pasolini’s mission, they sought to put ‘codified certainties into crisis’, in brutal and deliberately uncomfortable ways. Although the books did involve more ambivalent threads—exploring the limits and possibilities of political action, the thrill and consequences of sexual revolution, the security and insularity of racial solidarity—they were overwhelmed by the author’s tendency towards nihilism and his pessimism about the future of left politics.

The Slap Christos Tsiolkas’s first three books might have received appreciation in Australia, but it was his fourth that made him famous. The novel’s commercial success transformed his career, as well as his life. The Slap (2010) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. The windfall allowed him to leave his job as a veterinary assistant and become a full-time writer (when Tsiolkas told his colleagues about the Commonwealth Prize, ‘they were thrilled for me, they hugged me, we rejoiced … then my boss told me the kennels needed to be cleaned’).14 In 2011 the novel was adapted for an ABC miniseries, starring Melissa George, Jonathan LaPaglia and Essie Davis. The adaptation was both faithful and critically celebrated. In 2015, it was remade for an American audience, the book’s Melbourne setting replaced by a brownstone in Brooklyn. Success came, however, with its own anxieties. As Tsiolkas later confessed, ‘Self-doubt was still there and, in some moments, it was greater than before, that fear of—and it’s going to sound a little bit neurotic again—but have I sold out because it’s been so successful?’15 This concern was partly a product of the book’s style, a pivot that disappointed some readers. Where the first three novels were more or less transgressive—violent and confrontational, flirting with the gothic—The Slap displayed a more realist sensibility. In this it was less of a grunge statement, and more in line with other social novels of the era, like The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. One reason the book resonated with larger audiences was the way it observed everyday life in 2000s Australia. Some of this was superficial, but nonetheless vivid (the new popularity of Thai food, the ubiquity of Law and Order, the indie songs played at a high school party—each captured the moment). Some of it was more personal. Where characters in the first three books existed at the intersection of historical and political forces, characters in The Slap faced a different set of moral questions, involving family, marriage, sex and friendship. Certain critics resented this shift, detecting a softening in Tsiolkas’s writing.16 An early review, for instance, called it ‘tamer’ than his earlier books. Another described it as ‘relentlessly suburban in orientation’: ‘what we have here is a middle-class world so obsessed with the struggles of individuals—its characters, the figures in its foreground—that everything else seems to drop out of view’.17

The Slap begins on a Saturday morning with Hector and Aisha, husband and wife, preparing to host a barbecue in their Melbourne backyard. In Hector’s mind at least, the day promises more stress than relaxation; food, children, guests, all will need to be corralled and placated. Family is invited, but also friends and colleagues. As the day progresses and guests start to arrive, we get the familiar rituals of an Australian barbecue, with women working in the kitchen, making salad and dealing with hyperactive children, while men huddle around the grill. Although some guests are convivial, tensions are clear. Hector’s wife and mother clash silently over the food preparation, the latest skirmish in a long passive aggressive war. A group outside argues over the merits of private school: ‘you don’t have to tell me about government schools, mate’, Hector’s cousin Harry tells the party. ‘I went to the local tech. It was fine back then … [but] it’s a different time—no government, Liberal or Labor, cares a flying fuck about education’.18 After lunch, the children set up a game of backyard cricket. The feast has temporarily dulled any tension at the party, and parents watch on distractedly, digesting their food. After a few minutes, however, the game is interrupted by Hugo, the son of Rosie and Gary. Wailing, he swings the bat around, refusing to accept his dismissal. Unsure of how to act, everyone freezes but Harry, who pushes through the crowd. While Hector and the other guests watch, and the bat swings closer to the other kids, his cousin hits the hysterical child: He saw his cousin’s raised arm, it spliced the air, and then he saw the open palm descend and strike the boy. The slap seemed to echo. It cracked the twilight. The little boy looked up at the man in shock. There was a long silence. It was if he could not comprehend what had just occurred, how the man’s action and the pain he was beginning to feel coincided. The moment broke, the boy’s face crumpled, and this time there was no wail: when the tears began to fall, they fell silently.19 The Slap tracks eight characters present at the barbecue, as they each process the incident (each gets a chapter, the story shifting between their perspectives). The group is divided over the event, particularly after Gary and Rosie—a couple with their own marital issues—decide to pursue an assault charge. Harry is predictably furious, wild in his masculine rage, alert to the way it threatens his family and business. He hires an expensive lawyer and enjoys vicious fantasies of revenge. Hector’s father, Manolis, a first generation immigrant, is baffled by the drama and staunchly loyal to his nephew—a position that complicates his relationship with Aisha, who fears the latent violence she senses in Harry. Hector disagrees with his wife, and is secretly appalled by Hugo’s behaviour. Others guests are connected to the event more distantly, but nonetheless observe its reverberations. Anouk, a writer and friend of Rosie and Aisha, watches the unfolding court case with a bored irritation. Connie and Ritchie, two teenagers, view it through young and moralistic eyes, but are more occupied with their own new world of exams and relationships. Many reviews of The Slap focused on the title act, framing it as a kind of moral Rorschach test. The novel’s advertising certainly encouraged this interpretation (‘whose side are you on?’ it asked readers). For Tsiolkas, however, The Slap was less about solving a narrow ethical question—was it ever acceptable to strike an unruly child—and more about

exploring the different models of ‘selfhood and identity’ present in modern Australia. On one side are characters such as Manolis and Harry. Products of the migrant working class, their instincts are communitarian and hierarchical, valuing family over independence and social order over individual expression. They view Rosie and Gary with a barely repressed disdain. Tsiolkas, too, is ungenerous at times, veering into a caricature of permissive, new age progressivism. Throughout the day, Hugo runs amok, breaking toys and refusing to socialise. Neither parent does much to restrain him. While intellectually curious, Gary lacks discipline. He is also clearly an alcoholic. Hector’s mother, Koula, sneers in Greek, ‘Australezi, what do you expect? It’s in their blood!’. Perhaps most jarringly, Rosie continues to breastfeed Hugo, despite the child being only a year away from primary school. Manolis cannot understand their behaviour or lifestyle. Later on he tries to explain this to Aisha, after she refuses to attend family events whenever Harry is present: ‘Harry was very wrong. He make a mistake. He is very sorry.’ He held up his hand to stop her from interrupting him. ‘But your friend was also very wrong. Why she not look after her child?’ ‘Rosie loves Hugo.’ ‘Why she no stop her son when he was very bad?’ ‘Hugo is only a child. He doesn’t know better.’ Exactly. Exactly the damn problem. He doesn’t know better because he has not been taught to know better. ‘She is terrible, a terrible mother.’ He didn’t care anymore, he was no longer interested in cajoling Aisha, in being gentle. He marvelled at her blindness. She was a mad woman. Rosie should have disciplined the boy herself. And if not her, that fool alcoholic of a husband.20 The Slap presents two visions of social life. One is progressive, unrestrained and nurturing; the other traditionalist, culturally bounded and socially conservative. This gulf is partly philosophical, partly demographic. While not always the product of economic or cultural differences—a wealthy professional, Anouk still believes Australia is ‘raising a generation of children with no moral responsibility’; and Gary retains bohemian pretensions, although he grew up in public housing—the tendencies broadly correspond to ethnicity and class in the book. Manolis is left wing, a factory worker and unionist who drank to the end of Greece’s conservative junta, but still maintains a belief in patriarchal responsibility. Harry grew up in the same culture, and wonders why Aisha, someone with Indian heritage, doesn’t also feel the pull of familial loyalty. ‘She should be ashamed of herself’, he thinks. ‘She wasn’t a fucking witless Aussie: she was Indian, a wog. She should know about family.’ On the other side, Rosie and Gary are The Slap’s only solely Anglo-Saxon couple, and the only pair with a principled opposition to parental authority and discipline. For Harry, they are the epitome of ‘witless Aussies’; for Koula, simply ‘Australezi!’ While witnessed most dramatically at the barbecue, the tension between these world views continues throughout The Slap, propelling the narrative forward. It again combusts in

Rosie’s chapter, in perhaps the novel’s most powerful scene. After the trial—a surprisingly short hearing, exonerating Harry—Gary rushes off to the pub, distraught and reckless. As it gets late and Rosie becomes worried, she turns to her friend’s husband, Bilal, for help. Bilal is an Indigenous man who, after an angry and drunken youth, converted to Islam in middle age; finding a new peace in faith, commitment and paternal duty. Although clearly unhappy with the situation, Bilal agrees to Rosie’s request, and the two scour local pubs. After an uncomfortably long search, the two finally locate Gary, slurring and barely coherent. But when Rosie confronts her husband, he refuses to leave: ‘Rosie, just go home … I just want to get so drunk that I forget that you and Hugo even exist.’ Dropping Rosie off afterwards, Bilal offers her a warning. Tsiolkas later called this the novel’s true ‘slap’: I don’t want you or your husband or your son in my life. You remind me of a life I don’t ever want to go back to. I don’t want you to talk to my wife, I don’t want you to be her friend. I just want to be good, I just want to protect my family. I don’t think you’re any good, Rosie. Sorry, it’s just your mob. We’ve escaped your lot, me and Sammi. Don’t you get it?21 If moments like this suggest contempt for one set of characters, other parts of The Slap are more balanced. Throughout the book, identity is rarely simple, and almost always a mix of class, ethnicity, experience and temperament. In Rosie’s chapter, for instance, we get an insight into why she mothers Hugo as she does. The daughter of a cold, indifferent woman, Rosie rejects the austere distance that characterised most of her own childhood, hoping to provide Hugo with the nurture and love she never received. Gary, too, is granted context. His desire for freedom is not simply a juvenile urge or an expression of modern individualism, but a sincere drive to leave the world of his parents and its pull of desperation and poverty. As with his earlier books, Tsiolkas sits between these two worlds, aware of their appeal, but also troubled by their limitations. While sharing its disquiet about progressive decadence, The Slap equally acknowledges the dark side of working-class traditionalism, applying the same ‘contradictory’ scrutiny to the more conservative characters. Patriarchal hierarchy might seem more stable and disciplined, at least to its advocates, but it contains its own obvious cruelties and power imbalances. Harry, for instance, is a man in whom responsibility has curdled into entitlement, and worse. Although he provides for his wife and son, giving them a prosperous and comfortable life, he meets any challenge to his authority with a terrifying anger. He is a domineering, frequently violent character. At work, Harry’s internal monologue is filled with a black rage, directed at anyone deemed slovenly, unambitious or effeminate. At home, marital tenderness can easily slip into fury—particularly when his wife, Sandi, ever acts independently of him. Harry’s need for control reaches a shocking pinnacle in two acts of domestic violence. One assault occurs in the build up to Harry’s court case; the other, recalled from years before the barbecue, was so bad Sandi required hospitalisation. If Harry represents a form of masculinity, it is a toxic kind. Through Manolis, we witness the less violent, more mundane underside of a culture obsessed with domestic order at the expense of individual expression. Manolis is stoic, but

feels trapped in his life. He and his wife, Koula, suffer through a strained and inarticulate marriage (in their tight Greek community, divorce is not a serious option). As the couple bicker over coffee, Manolis notices an old friend’s obituary in the local newspaper. It is startling news, a reminder of a largely forgotten youth. The couple decide to attend his funeral and, following an awkward introduction, are invited to the wake. The afternoon fluctuates between stilted, boastful conversation—referencing lawyer children and successful relatives—and more honest reflections on the lives they have lived. Manolis experiences moments of liberation, free from the gossip and petty comparisons that constituted much of his marriage. Still, even with the shock of death, many at the wake cannot bring themselves to speak candidly. In Koula’s mind at least, admission of failure would amount to personal disgrace. Etiquette continues to supress genuine human connection: His head was beginning to ache. They were losing each other again, trapped in damned politeness and etiquette. Let’s just talk, let’s just spend time together, let’s make up for losing ourselves in the petty distractions and foolish pride that occupied so many decades of our lives. The rituals of being Greek; sometimes he hated it. Sometimes he wished he could be Aussie.22 One striking thing about The Slap, at least compared to earlier Tsiolkas novels, is the near absence of politics in the traditional sense. When formally present, it is usually a secondary concern, background noise to everyday life. In one telling scene, Connie and her aunt watch television, ‘channel surfing, going from Iraq to Big Brother to some American crime show’. Characters are generally politically literate, aware of current debates, but are not particularly invested or active in them. At the Greek funeral, guests break out into a debate over American foreign policy, before quickly returning to their own lives and memories; at an airport in Thailand, Aisha observes recent changes to airline security after September 11, but the thought is soon overwhelmed by her own marital problems. Politics exists for characters, but it is no longer defined by collective commitments—to Marxism or Labor or trade unions—but instead by personal morality and individual lifestyle choices. This is most obviously witnessed in the wide and passionate fallout from Harry’s slap, but the tendency continues throughout the book. Anouk’s chapter, for instance, revolves around an unexpected pregnancy. Does she want to be a mother; would it impede her writing dreams; should she get an abortion? As with other characters, Hector is aware of politics, but his inner world is mostly occupied by a developing affair with Connie, and his mental conflict over family, commitment and sex. This political indifference is partly a comment on the era in which The Slap is set. While never explicit in the novel, the author later suggested it occurred ‘within the space of two elections … the Tampa election of 2001 and the Latham election of 2004’.23 For Tsiolkas, this era was defined by a difficult paradox. On one hand, it was an undeniably prosperous moment, with low unemployment and growing disposal incomes. This economic growth was also broadly experienced, and the rising culture of material aspiration was ‘wog as much as it was Anglo-Celtic’, with ‘working class as well as bourgeois roots’.24 At the same time,

Australia was riven by a series of social conflicts, and a retreat to political insularity. If the ‘Tampa election’ was a touchstone for the book, it symbolised the Howard government’s increasingly harsh refugee regime—a development coinciding with Pauline Hanson’s rapid political success, panic over Muslim migration, and Howard’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge Indigenous history. According to Tsiolkas, these trends could only be understood together: ‘the years of affluence saw us become less generous, lose some of our so-called Australian egalitarianism’.25 In The Slap, this is expressed most obviously by Harry, a small businessman ‘riding the seemingly endless wave of economic boom’. A crass man, with few interests outside business, upward mobility has erased any residual feeling of solidarity he gained from his working-class youth. If considered at all, the outside world is a nuisance, an intrusion on his private kingdom. When Hector raises the topic of war in the Middle East during a conversation, he dismisses it quickly: ‘Jesus fucking Christ, cuz, you think too much.’ He placed an arm around his cousin’s shoulder. ‘Don’t think about all that shit, global warming and terrorism and the war and fucking Arabs and the fucking septics. Fuck them all … We got it good. Just think about how fucking good we’ve got it.26 Harry is a particularly dark character, and probably the book’s least redeemable. Alongside Rosie, he exposes the ‘complexity and violence’ of social differences in modern Australia, with conflicting ideas of propriety and freedom. But for all this tension, this interrogation of social contradiction at the extreme, The Slap does manage to promote its own, largely positive project. As one critic put it, ‘these are not the suburbs of a Patrick White novel or of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack’.27 They are certainly not the suburbs of Neighbours or Home and Away, ‘representing an affluent and almost exclusively Anglo-Celtic family life’.28 The book’s Melbourne is diverse, with a constellation of ethnicities and sexualities, unrecognisable from a monoculture like Ramsay Street. According to Tsiolkas, this was a deliberate choice, designed to challenge more ‘static’ representations of Australian suburbia: [When writing The Slap] I did think, I’m going to do the antithesis of Neighbours. I wanted to show the world I live in, a world I don’t see reflected in Australian literature or on screen. Australia has a big chip on its shoulder about being suburban and middle class … But the Australian middle class now is made up of second- or third-generation immigrants, like me.29 For characters in The Slap, multiculturalism is not an abstract government policy or an academic ideal, but the everyday reality of their communities. This diversity is not always dwelled upon, but it diverges significantly from the traditional model observed by Tsiolkas. Beginning with Hector and Aisha, families frequently share mixed heritages; so too do schoolyard romances and youthful crushes. Usually silent or peripheral groups are given dialogue and character (in its opening pages, the family’s Asian newsagent, Mr Ling, banters with Hector about his smoking habit). This extends to the city’s human geography. Inner-city suburbs might be in flux, becoming wealthier and losing their ethnic legacy,

but the scars of gentrification are acknowledged, not simply painted over. This mixed world provides the unspoken setting of The Slap, and Tsiolkas’s writing more broadly. And while the multicultural city is not without friction—older relatives often resent their children’s marriages; young men enjoy trading racial epithets—Tsiolkas does not necessarily presume hate or enmity in these interactions; if anything, the insults are proof of a cultural intimacy, a more vivid relationship than felt in polite and outwardly ‘progressive’ suburbs, where diversity is more theoretical than lived. As with all Tsiolkas novels, The Slap can be an antagonistic book. It revels in moments of cultural collision, where niggling differences explode into the foreground, and where unspoken resentments become articulated and public. But unlike his previous three novels, The Slap does end on a hopeful, even optimistic note. The book’s final chapter follows Ritchie, a friend of Connie, and a witness at the barbecue. Ritchie is eighteen and gay. He is also an anxious person, at a particularly anxious moment in life. If he has any idea about what to do next, it is to study geography and design maps for a living—hoping to impose order on the chaos he feels around him. Compared to the book’s older characters, however, Ritchie goes on a very different journey, coming of age in his chapter, while learning to accept the world’s uncertainty. The generational difference is stark. While the book’s younger characters live in the same multicultural world as their parents, they are not consumed by its resentments. Connie, for instance, starts a relationship with Ali, a deceptively sensitive Arab classmate; Ritchie is silently in love with his Yugoslavian friend Nick. The book finishes at a music festival, the evening after each receives their university entrance score. For Ritchie, it is ‘one of the best days of his life’. Described in a joyous stream of consciousness, the young group is united by music and dancing and drugs; free from the division and anger that cripples the older characters. After arriving to stay at Ali’s house, Ritchie feels transformed. For now at least, the very idea of the future seems less terrifying. ‘Soon, unexpectedly, like the future that had begun to creep up on him, sleep did come.’

Conclusion In some ways, The Slap confronted the same questions Christos Tsiolkas had been interrogating his entire career. From Loaded onwards, Tsiolkas’s novels shared a number of preoccupations: the political and personal divide between generations, particularly between different waves of migrants; the real, unvarnished nature of modern urban life, with its rich diversity and latent animosity; and the split between old and new left politics, between the organised working class he grew up in and the educated middle class he moved into. In other ways, however, The Slap responded more directly to the moment in which it was set. In the late 2000s Australia was comfortable, if not relaxed, at the end of a decade defined by economic growth and the persistent, seemingly immovable leadership of John Howard. The Slap hinted at possible explanations for this political dominance. One involved the effect of prosperity on any existing culture of Australian egalitarianism. Another involved a structural crack in the block of potential left voters. Harry’s slap animated the divide, with characters either repelled by Rosie and Gary’s permissive parenting or in silent agreement with Harry’s

action. In a recent series of essays for the Monthly, Tsiolkas discussed this cleavage more explicitly, while directly confronting some of the most painful questions facing the modern left: why are Australians seemingly indifferent to the plight of refugees in offshore detention; why is the radical right gaining ground across Europe; and why is the working class losing its identification with social democracy?30 For Tsiolkas, this was most painfully felt in refugee policy, still unsolved more than a decade after the ‘Tampa election’—and in some ways more brutal and intolerant. We’ll lock up asylum seekers in offshore detention centres, we’ll stand idly by as they slowly go crazy or harm themselves, we’ll refuse journalists the right to speak to them or to name them, we’ll redefine our borders to not let them in, we’ll farm them off to our impoverished, underdeveloped neighbours rather than construct a humane and efficient system to process their claims for asylum.31 Even if the search to explain this brutality exhausted Tsiolkas, he again returned to the tension between cosmopolitan progressives and more suspicious, traditionalist citizens: The reality is that there isn’t ‘one nation’ that makes up Australia, only competing notions of ‘nationhood’. There is the cosmopolitan, educated nation of the inner cities and the parochial, anxious communities of the urban fringes and the bush. Asylum seeker rights are easily understood and supported by cosmopolitan Australians. We are well travelled, we are not suspicious of multiculturalism and we are confident of processing and adjusting to change. At the same time, we rubbish their McMansions while gentrification makes the inner city unaffordable, and we castigate them for their cashed-up lack of generosity while it is in fact their kids mixing with the children of refugees.32 While less direct than his essays, The Slap was interested in the same essential dynamic, examining the points at which ‘competing notions of nationhood’ meet in modern Australia, in all their violence and complexity. In Tsiolkas’s depiction, the gulf between these groups is genuine, with dramatic implications for the future of social democratic politics: ‘the challenges facing parties of the left are serious, potentially terminal, and that smugness, obstinacy and purity when it comes to political beliefs are harmful’. As someone who migrated to the ‘cosmopolitan, educated professional class’ in his own life, Tsiolkas urged progressives to understand working-class experiences and perspectives. ‘Why has the traditional working class here and in Europe turned against social democratic parties?’ he asks. ‘Maybe because we haven’t been listening.’33

Notes 1 2

Christos Tsiolkas, ‘My Green Grandma’, Guardian, 20 July 2010, . Heather Taylor Johnson, ‘Me and My Country, Where to Now?’, Meanjin, vol. 72, no. 1, 2013, p. 182.

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Dad and Dave Go Skinhead’, Arena Magazine, February–March 1993, pp. 46–8; Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Pissing in the Face of the New Age’, Arena Magazine, June–July 1994, pp. 46–8; Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Raining on Your Parade’, Arena Magazine, December–January 1994–95, pp. 14–15. Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Salo and the Politics of Despair’, Arena Magazine, October–November 1993, pp. 52–3. Ian Tyson, ‘Smells Like Market Spirit’, Overland, vol. 142, pp. 21–6. Mark Davis, Ganglands: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p. 132. Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded, Vintage, Sydney, 1995, p. 142. Christos Tsiolkas, ‘A capitalist faggot at the end of the millennium: Musings on the disappointments of politics’, in Dennis Glover and Glen Patmore (eds), New Voices, Pluto Press, Sydney, p. 190. Christos Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man, Vintage, Sydney, 1999, p. 286. Christos Tsiolkas and Patricia Cornelius, ‘Christos Tsiolkas in Conversation with Patricia Cornelius: Politics, Faith & Sex’, Overland, no. 181, pp. 18–25. Catherine Padmore, ‘What Does Fiction Do?: On Dead Europe, Ethics and Aesthetics’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, p. 451. Padmore, ‘What Does Fiction Do?’, p. 450. Michael Williams, ‘Delivering a Punch: Michael Williams Talks to Christos Tsiolkas’, Meanjin, vol. 68, no. 2, 2009, p. 145. Dani Valent, ‘I Look Back and I Blush’, Melbourne Magazine (the Age), September 2011, . Jason Steger, ‘Christos Tsiolkas: Living with High Expectations’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 October 2013, . Rebecca Stafford, ‘Fading Irate Energy’, Antipodes, December 2008, pp. 171–2. Andrew McCann, Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of the Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity, Anthem Press, London, 2015, p. 88. Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008, p. 22. Tsiolkas, The Slap, p. 40. Tsiolkas, The Slap, p. 339. Tsiolkas, The Slap, p. 288. Tsiolkas, The Slap, p. 348. Belinda Monypenny and Jo Case, ‘Christos Tsiolkas’, Readings, . Monypenny and Case, ‘Christos Tsiolkas’. Monypenny and Case, ‘Christos Tsiolkas’. Tsiolkas, The Slap, p. 123. McCann, Christos Tsiolkas, p. 99. Nicholas Dunlop, ‘Suburban Space and Multicultural Identities in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap’, Antipodes, vol. 30, no. 1, 2016, pp. 5–16, p. 9. Elizabeth Day, ‘Interview: Christos Tsiolkas: There’s a tameness to the modern novel’, Guardian, 30 October 2011, . Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Strangers at the gate: Making sense of Australia’s fear of asylum seekers’, Monthly, September 2013, pp. 22–31. Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Whatever happened to the working class?’, Monthly, May 2014, . Tsiolkas, ‘Whatever happened to the working class?’. Tsiolkas, ‘Whatever happened to the working class?’. Tsiolkas, ‘Whatever happened to the working class?’.

Chapter 6

Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Taboo

In Kayang & Me (2013), Kim Scott combined personal memoir and family history to document the modern story of the Noongar people: the traditional Indigenous owners of south-western Australia, in the land near modern-day Albany. In the Noongar language, ‘Kayang’ roughly translates as ‘female elder’, and Scott co-wrote the book with Hazel Brown, a local woman and relative through his father. Where Kim Scott had spent much of his life outside Noongar country—moving to Perth for university, then teaching in the Kimberley region—‘Aunty Hazel’ was a custodian of local lore and family genealogy. Their collaboration revealed a dark but nonetheless complicated history of post-invasion Noongar life: with a bloody trail of dispossession, massacre and subjugation, but also moments of coexistence, agency and friendship. It also revealed Scott’s own winding journey of personal identity. As an Australian with a white mother and Noongar father, Scott admitted to often feeling ‘stranded on a fault line’ in his own country.1 This feeling was reinforced by the unavoidable cloud of racism surrounding his childhood. In a particularly memorable scene in the book, Scott relays a story about his father, a man with whom he otherwise ‘didn’t have a lot of conversations’. After Kim had come home from school one day, frustrated with other local Indigenous kids, his father cut him off: be ‘proud of your Aboriginal descent’, he told him. The event resonated deeply with Scott, partly because it was so rare. ‘In 1960s south-western Australia, it was hard to articulate pride in Aboriginality’, he writes. ‘I’d certainly heard no such thing anywhere else in my life, certainly not in my reading and schooling.’2 Kayang & Me tells the story of how, with Hazel’s assistance, Scott slowly learned his Noongar heritage, with its distinct social history, web of personal relationships and its body of art and literature. The most vital part of this process was his work with the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project—a group dedicated to preserving and revitalising the local Indigenous language, with the goal of telling Noongar stories in Noongar words.3 The project brought together archival material, recorded narratives in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and elders from surrounding areas to create a small library of original work. As of 2019, the group has published six books, each written in the Noongar language, with accompanying pictures and English translations. According to Scott, the construction of these stories was immensely emotional for everyone involved; sessions were often tearful. The process was both cathartic and empowering for the Indigenous participants.4 For Scott in particular, it showed just how potent language could be as a source of individual self-worth and group identity. It also suggested a range of other literary and political possibilities. In his

own experience, learning the Noongar language was fundamentally transformative: Sometimes it’s as if, learning to make the sounds, I remake myself from the inside out. As if, in making the sounds of the language of this land, I make myself an instrument of it. As if, in uttering such sounds and making such meanings, I not only introduce myself to ancestors … but beckon them closer to me.5 Alongside Kayang & Me, Kim Scott is the author of four novels. Most of these fictional works concern the Noongar people and their contemporary history. They cover the full timeline of Noongar experience since white arrival, from the first moment of British presence in That Deadman Dance, to government policies to assimilate and ultimately destroy Indigenous blood in Benang, to modern attempts to rebuild Indigenous structures splintered by colonisation in Taboo. One reviewer describes the books as ‘recovery narratives’, and they do share an underlying purpose with Scott’s linguistic activism: remembering the lives of people forgotten by invasion, but also reimagining and recapturing their sense of the world for modern audiences.6 There is often significant overlap in content between Scott’s historical writing, his Language and Stories Project, and his novels. Here literature and politics fuse in a very real and practical way. This chapter focuses on two of Scott’s novels, That Deadman Dance and Taboo, works that continue Scott’s fictional depiction of Noongar invasion, survival and regeneration. Each thrusts Indigenous perspectives into significant moments in Australian history, suggesting new ways of understanding familiar stories. In Scott’s words, each observes the ‘intimate butting up of difference, with black and white characters … [But] from a strong Noongar centre’.7

That Deadman Dance Before That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott had published two full-length novels, True Country (1993) and Benang (1999), both focusing on twentieth-century Noongar experience. His third novel—and his second to win the Miles Franklin Award, after Benang a decade earlier— traced the history of local colonisation back further, to its origin in Australia.8 In terms of setting, That Deadman Dance is Scott’s earliest book, depicting the moment when British people first arrived on one part of the continent. It is a story of initial encounters, of worlds meeting and then colliding—of colonisation and the slow collapse of Indigenous sovereignty. In this, the book sits in a long literary lineage of early contact, in novels such as The Timeless Land (1941) by Eleanor Dark and The Secret River (2005) by Kate Grenville, and the nonfiction work Dancing with Strangers (2003) by Inga Clendinnen.9 As a nation arising from colonial conquest, these meetings carry an enduring fascination for Australian writers, both as an insight into contemporary Australian politics and identity, and also as a moment of extreme human drama, tense with the violence and transformation soon to come. That Deadman Dance observes this event in a specific part of Australia. The book is set on the continent’s south-west corner—named ‘King George’s Town’ in the novel—in the early years of the nineteenth century. Here the British established a colonial outpost, directly

on top of Noongar land, with the goal of developing industries in sheep and whaling. The book was inspired by Scott’s research into local history, and certain characters find parallels in the area’s story, both documented and oral (these associations are particularly clear when read alongside Kayang & Me). That Deadman Dance presents a gradual story of colonisation, over a number of decades: from initial signs of cooperation and mutual curiosity, which some historians describe as the ‘friendly frontier’, to the progressive breakdown of coexistence and the establishment of British domination over the land and its people.10 The novel’s broad arc is tragic; we know its brutal ending, even as we are encouraged by its hopeful beginning. Scott tells this story with a large cast of characters, black and white, whose alternating internal monologues structure the narrative. Of all these figures, the most central is Bobby Wabalanginy, an Indigenous man who comes of age in these years. He alone endures from the novel’s beginning to its end. With courage and generosity, the young Bobby explores the possibilities of British culture and technology, even as the desire to coexist crumbles around him—and as the colonisers gradually turn against the Noongar. In its ultimate trajectory, Bobby’s life traces the story of the Noongar people. From his introduction in the narrative, Bobby is precocious and clearly destined for leadership, ‘a character who is so confident in himself and his heritage that he’ll willingly and readily appropriate new cultural products, new ways of doing things’.11 He is handsome and physically strong, with a hint of swagger; he is linguistically dextrous, grasping the outlines of the English language; he is brave and adventurous, joining the whaling expeditions on their foreign boats; and he is open to new people and their different ways, accepting the friendship of British people in good faith. Bobby Wabalanginy’s indefatigable energy, amid the threat posed by white arrival, reflects one of Scott’s central themes: that Indigenous people were not simply passive witnesses to their own dispossession. Many Noongar people approached the British with a spirit of hospitability and exchange, at least at first. In his nonfiction writing, Scott has discussed these traits in the context of historical Noongar figures, particular a man named Mokare. Present at white arrival, Mokare had French and British friends, and would often sing English songs with an Indigenous twist. The author found motivation in his ‘confidence, inclusiveness and a sense of play’: I find inspiration in the attitude of certain historical individuals … They include people such as Mokare who, around the time the colony was proclaimed, learned one of the songs of the new arrivals and utilised it in what seems to me a witty, even ‘postcolonial’ way. It was an act of cultural exchange, and I suggest that Mokare was motivated by one of the truths of his own cultural background: that you know people by their songs, by their sound. He and his people also exchanged goods with the newcomers, guided them, slept and ate with them, appreciated their guns and boats.12 In That Deadman Dance, this sense of personal agency is matched by tentative signs of cooperation, from both sides of the ‘friendly frontier’. Scott said he designed the novel with ‘no strong baddies’, and the first British governor of the colony, Dr Cross, approaches the

Noongar people and their traditions with a humble generosity.13 Cross is a gentle and cultivated man, interested in the physical landscape and the people who occupy it. His goals extend beyond domination and geographic expansion, although these become more prominent with later leaders of King George’s Town. Cross dreams of ‘building a new kind of society’ free from the old world’s stiff traditions. As the guardian of this mission, he manages to defuse the rage and entitlement of the colonials, at least up to a point. Early in the settlement, in an act of radical cultural understanding, he forbids further reprisals after an Indigenous party spears a British convict in the leg, itself an act of vengeance after white men have kidnapped an Indigenous woman. Cross attempts, however quixotically, to keep the whole thing together. Of all the signs of cooperation in the early years, perhaps most poignant is the close friendship between Cross and Wunyeran, a Noongar elder. Wunyeran joins Cross on his expeditions inland, teaching the doctor some of the Indigenous knowledge required to survive and flourish in Australia. According to Bobby, the two are ‘like brothers’. Sometimes they communicate in a ‘glad-bag bastard language’, blending each other’s native tongue; at other times they communicate through song. The two men often sleep under the same roof, an act of intimacy that unsettles some of Cross’s British followers. In their friendship, the doctor perceives the seeds of something revolutionary: ‘we are two men of such different backgrounds … and attempting to fuse them, we are preparing for the birth of a new world’.14 This relationship and its political mission lasts until the very end of Cross’s life. Midway through the novel, the doctor succumbs to a disease sweeping through the colony, producing an endless coughing fit. His final wish is to be buried in the same grave as his Noongar friend—a parting monument to the possibility of coexistence between the two groups, and perhaps even love. Other relationships in That Deadman Dance are more romantic in nature, including those crossing racial barriers. Two pairs in particular experiment with intercultural love, even as each is dragged down by misapprehension, philosophical differences and the permanent shadow of racism. The first—and more traditional of the two—involves Jak Tar and Binyan, an absconded sailor and Indigenous woman. The pair are wed in a relatively traditional Noongar ceremony with Binyan’s family, where the two groups exchange gifts and various commitments. While the arrangement begins as largely transactional, Binyan and Jak Tar are, perhaps against the odds, able to build something resembling tenderness. The two live together in the same hut, with a cow to milk and sheep to herd. They form the beginnings of a domestic routine, with each excelling in different tasks. Still, in spite of this early success, the relationship inevitably suffers under some profound differences. In Jak Tar’s mind, marriage is about ‘possessing [Binyan] completely’. Deep down, he expects a nuclear family and the observation of European customs, particularly those involving female modesty. For her part, Binyan has no desire to leave her tribal life. She frequently returns to her family for days on end, often without notice, a practice that confuses and frustrates Jak Tar. The novel’s other romantic connection involves Bobby and Christine, the daughter of Geordie Chaine, the colony’s most successful merchant. This relationship follows a different path to that of Binyan and Jak Tar. A tale of flirtation and discovery, it is never ultimately

acted on, even as it pulses with youthful energy. As teenagers, Bobby and Christine attend language classes together, while playing games and exploring the local area in their spare time. Christine is curious about Noongar culture, and their mutual attraction is clear, if rarely articulated. As an older teenager, Christine observes Bobby, ‘lean limbed and broad shouldered, [his] white and open necked linen shirt showed the strong tendons of his neck and the hollow at the base of his throat. His skin shone with health … She marvelled at how much he had grown and changed. Oh, if only they were still children and alone together …’15 Yet, as this final thought suggests, like other relationships on the frontier, the years drive Bobby and Christine apart—as do the colony’s expectations and prejudices. Christine instead marries Hugh, son of the new governor, Spendor, whom the Chaines consider a socially equal match. As a young white woman, sitting at the apex of the colony’s burgeoning power structure, Christine now finds it unthinkable to marry a Noongar man. Bobby observes this changing sentiment with a combination of confusion and hurt, expressed through his pained internal monologue: ‘When Bobby was a child, he had Christine … They were together, and they shared. But not now. Christine came close then run away, went back and forward ever since they could be man and woman together. Why? Because he was with the black people? Because he was black?’16 Each of these intimate relationships is deeply conflicted, hinting at the possibility of black and white love, while recognising the strict limits imposed on it by culture and political taboo. The story of Bobby and Christine is particularly tragic, as we see childhood innocence transform into unthinking racial superiority. Compared to these doomed romances, That Deadman Dance finds its most solid, material and ultimately hopeful expression of cultural engagement in the whaling industry surrounding King George’s Town. As one reviewer put it, for much of the nineteenth century whaling ships ‘lit the world and played a significant role in the great movement and intermingling of populations’.17 In That Deadman Dance, the boats are crewed by a multicultural mix of sailors, ‘black and white and a Chinaman, too … Yankees and convicts and frogees and sailors’. Among these shipmates are Bobby and other Noongar men, who lend their local knowledge and physical bravery to the seasonal hunts. While the cultural relationship on land is regularly uneasy, despite Cross’s good intentions, the whaling ships exhibit real camaraderie between races (when the ship’s cook refuses to serve the Indigenous men, the other sailors ‘round on him like sheep dogs’). It is a rough solidarity, unmannered but genuine, born out of shared danger and struggle. Towards the end of the novel, Bobby articulates this sense of common purpose through a song he composes. He sings it at night on the boat, an ode to his companions and their perilous mission. Like much of Bobby’s life, the song blends traditions: combining Indigenous storytelling with whaling jargon and the crew’s polyglot dialect. While it initially confuses the other shipmates, they soon identify its lyrics and message, and sing along:‘all joined voices with Bobby as the melody grabbed them, held them, hauled them along behind … and they called out, putting their voice beside the singer, trusting him and themselves to get to the end’.18 Like Bobby, That Deadman Dance is alert to the role language and narrative play in dispossession, as well as their potential use in any challenge to colonial hegemony. In his

nonfiction, Kim Scott often quotes the work of British linguist David Crystal, who argues that language ‘represents the distillation of the thoughts and communication of a people over their entire history’.19 In this definition, language is not simply a vehicle for expressing universal ideas; it also shapes and conveys distinct ways of thinking and being. This is the essential premise of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, and the same sentiment guides the author’s conception of postcolonial writing in Australia. In parallel with his practical work with the Noongar language, Scott has interrogated the nation’s literary tradition, arguing that a more mature Australian literature would value the history that preceded invasion. This means acknowledging Indigenous narrative as its own body of work. According to Scott, such a pivot would open up new possibilities for local writing, allowing authors to ‘graft’ contemporary themes onto ‘the strong, nurturing roots of Aboriginal Australia’s storytelling traditions’.20 That Deadman Dance exemplifies this idea in a number of ways, blurring the line between Indigenous literature and the Western tradition. At important points, Scott borrows directly from the Language and Stories Project—particularly Mamang (2011), its first publication.21 The novel begins with a variation of this Noongar story, an old tale of adventure and home, which Scott uses to frame the narrative’s more linear chapters. We learn of the story when we first meet Bobby, staring out to sea, remembering the tales passed down to him by elders. One of these involves a whale, which Scott later paraphrased: A young man—scarcely more than a boy—stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can’t say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his life he’s watched families of them travel along this coast. Recently, he learned the words of one such journey. The boy doesn’t retreat from the rocky edge; he doesn’t step away from the whale. Instead, he dances out onto the whale’s back and dives into its spout. Inside the whale is like a cave, and its heart is a fire. Leaping with excitement, the boy prods and pokes that pulsing heart and sings the song he’s so newly learned: the song of the whale. And the whale, resonating with song in its skull. Well, in English we use the word ‘sounds’ for what it does. The whale dives, the song goes deep. Boy and whale are one; and the boy’s voice sings on as darkness closes around and the last silver bubbles slide away.22 On one level, this is an example of Scott’s deliberate fusion of Indigenous and Western storytelling. Bobby translates part of the tale through English sounds, a further testament to its hybrid potential (up ‘arose a wail’, he writes, playing with the phrase’s dual meaning). On another level, the story is a metaphor for Bobby himself. More than any other character in the novel, Bobby embraces the risky possibilities of British arrival, ‘riding the whale’ of colonial technology and culture. Kim Scott describes this process as ‘orbiting’: heading out in the world, gaining new skills and understanding, with the ultimate goal of returning home. The other side of the frontier, it must be said, did not generally approach interactions in the same inquisitive spirit. The novel’s title hints at a similar dynamic. That Deadman Dance refers to a particular

performance, inspired by a historical event recounted in Matthew Flinders’ journals. As the explorer tells it, after the British landed on Noongar country in 1801, their troops conducted a series of formal military drills, which an Indigenous man in turn transformed into a dance.23 One hundred years later, observers noted that Noongar people were still performing a variation of it. For Scott, this was a remarkably bold act of cultural confidence, at odds with images of Indigenous passivity. It was also a metaphor for how Indigenous people could approach writing in the English language. ‘When I think about that, I think, wow, what a powerful thing to do, to turn a violent drill into a dance—appropriating cultural products of the other. And perhaps one can do that with a novel?’24 Structurally, the narrative shifts between the unfolding years of invasion and King George’s Town decades after white arrival. These later chapters follow Bobby in the aftermath of conquest, with most Noongar people scattered from their country. Without his position in Noongar society, Bobby’s status is now fundamentally altered; he is more a figure of fun than of authority. In order to survive he performs a kind of vaudeville routine, telling stories of the frontier to British visitors. It is a sad sight. This coda makes it clear that, even if some white figures sought cooperation, colonialism was premised on expansion—a logic ultimately indifferent to the claims and lives of Noongar people. While intrigued by the concept of the ‘friendly frontier’—especially the space it opens for Indigenous agency— Scott is clear not to whitewash British intentions or behaviour. Indeed, the seeds of colonial hegemony are present from the beginning of That Deadman Dance, as the first arrivals seek land on which to graze their livestock. This exploration inevitably leads to cultural collision, with most colonists never quite able to overcome their contempt for Noongar culture. The kidnapping of Indigenous women is one early and violent sign of this attitude, reflecting a sense of white entitlement and a belief in the disposability of local people. On a deeper level, the colonial forces understand their mission as permanent, divined by God and justified by material progress. Even at the group’s most benevolent end, Dr Cross still conceptualises his role as fundamentally expansionist: ‘the land awaits development’, he reminds himself. As with The Timeless Land, Eleanor Dark’s classic novel of British arrival, That Deadman Dance attempts to convey the outlook of invaders and invaded alike, using shifting viewpoints.25 These alternating passages reveal distinct voices among individuals, but also between Noongar and British people as groups—suggesting two different sets of philosophy, two rhythms of thought, and two notions of cultural purpose. Stylistically, Scott writes the Indigenous chapters in their own cadence, with long fluid sentences connecting various impressions and feelings. Like much of his writing, here language and world view are intimately connected. The narrative grounds Bobby’s experience of the world—his observations, his movement through physical space—in his immediate surroundings, conveying an attentiveness to the presence of flora and fauna around him. Scott compares this sensitivity to Cross’s relationship with the natural world, which is primarily expressed through his hobby of preserving botanic samples for scientific enquiry. While Bobby is curious about this kind of knowledge, he ultimately finds it foreign and disappointing, ‘[missing] much that you can’t collect and press, that won’t slip through a sheet of paper’. Bobby is more attuned to flux and impermanence, ‘the sandy floor of the

shallow ocean with its shape of water’s movement made solid enough to look and study—but the sand could no more record his passing than the water, the air or the clouds’.26 In a similar spirit, Noongar society is governed by a different temporal logic to the colonial forces, which is another source of tension and miscomprehension between the two groups. The Noongar people do not slice time along standardised hours and their attendant duties, but rather the seasonal passage of weather, land and animals. The British find this way of life confusing and frequently infuriating. As one bitter convict thinks, ‘they think they have a better life, the blacks … not that they’re slow to appreciate what we offer’. In That Deadman Dance, these differing world views have concrete economic and political implications. More than anything else, British mercantile impulses are incompatible with existing patterns of Indigenous sovereignty and social organisation. No amount of good faith can overcome this fundamental clash of interests; the structural forces are too powerful. The slow establishment of British dominance over Noongar land is tragic because it feels so inexorable, crushing all resistance in its path. Of all the characters in the novel, this process is embodied most obviously in Geordie Chaine, an entrepreneur who gains increasing authority in the years following Cross’s death. Chaine is not necessarily a cruel man, but he ‘knows what he wants: profits not prophets’. His growing power in the colony helps expand the local whaling trade, but it also accelerates its oncoming capitalist spirit, driven by Chaine’s belief in progress and property. These principles are largely alien to the Noongar people, at least as primary foundations on which to build society. They also function to exclude Indigenous people from their traditional land. While the British had previously shared food with Indigenous hunters during their early, more desperate years in Australia, growing prosperity leads to harsher lines of private property. Fences and locks soon become law. When Noongar people come to King George’s Town in search of surplus food, the colonials treat them with disdain. Such requests are now considered charity, not reciprocal obligations—and any attempt to circumvent white law is prosecuted as theft. Bobby tries to explain the Noongar position, to little sympathy from Chaine. It seems to him built on an obvious hypocrisy. ‘My people needs their share of this sheep, too. We share the whales, you camp on our land and kill our kangaroos and tear up our trees and dirty our water and we forgive, but you will not share your sheep and my people are hungry.’27 What makes this economic expansion possible—premised as it is on a disregard for Noongar claims over the land—is an essential lack of reciprocity between the groups. Aside from Dr Cross, few British people take Indigenous culture seriously, even as they often depend on it for survival in the early years. While Wunyeran and Bobby meet the British forces halfway, expressing fascination with their ships and customs, most colonists are reluctant to learn anything from the allegedly ‘primitive’ people. In a common justification for colonial seizure, most assume Noongar civilisation to be inferior, uncultivated and backward, destined to die from stronger competition. It is an attitude that Bobby comes to lament, as part of his message to a British visitor: Me and my people … are not so good traders as we thought. We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar

and tea and blankets we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.28 If the British show little interest in Noongar ‘words and songs and stories’, That Deadman Dance’s final pages offer a dramatic depiction of this disrespect, as well as the violence that often accompanied it. The novel’s conclusion is set amid the consolidation of British power, after colonial forces jail a number of Noongar elders for crimes against property. Anxious to bring the two groups together, and still maintaining faith in his relationships with white people, Bobby formulates a plan to ease tensions with ‘his dance, his speech, and of course his usual tricks’. As Noongar people had done for countless generations, Bobby performs a dance for the British dignitaries, including Christine and Geordie Chaine. Accompanying it is a generous message to his audience: ‘this is my land, given to me by Kongk Menak [a Noongar elder]. We will share it with you—and share what you bring.’29 Yet as Bobby grows in confidence, imagining the vibrant and cohesive future to come, his performance is cut off. Gunshots are heard outside, and people flee the room. However vibrant and skilful his dance might be, it possesses little currency in this new world of military and economic might. British law does not acknowledge its power or legitimacy. It is possible to view Bobby’s actions as naive and apolitical, as with other acts of Noongar hospitality in the face of naked British expansionism. Why treat invaders like welcome guests? For Scott, however, this was not the message he was trying to convey with That Deadman Dance. He designed the novel as a ‘positive story … about Noongar people as very impressive’.30 Bobby and Wunyeran’s openness to radically new experience was not a weakness, but a profound personal strength. According to the author, their confidence and curiosity—their acceptance of difference and its enriching possibilities—was a model for a better, more mature country. White Australia in particular could learn much from their example. To scorn their innocence was to scorn the possibility of cultural growth. As Scott wrote in Kayang & Me, ‘it was Noongar people who created society here, and their reactions to “first contact” … offer mostly sound values upon which to build, and within which “white” society could be accommodated’.31

Taboo If That Deadman Dance depicted British arrival on the Australian continent, in all its drama and slow-moving tragedy, Scott’s fourth novel, Taboo (2017), examines its enduring consequences.32 Taboo is set at the opposite end of contemporary Noongar experience, in the twenty-first century, as Indigenous people attempt to restore and reimagine a culture fundamentally wounded by colonisation. As Scott showed in his third novel, Benang, the damage of invasion was only reinforced by later government policies of forced assimilation.33 Although portraying two different, almost unrecognisable historical moments, both novels share Scott’s essential political and literary project, as well as his central intellectual preoccupations: how to maintain and revive Indigenous cultural practices, particularly when the social structures that sustained them have been systematically

deconstructed; how to utilise language and narrative as political tools in this regenerative process; and how black and white people can ultimately live together in Australia, when power and authority are so unevenly distributed. Taboo is set in the long shadow of colonisation’s most brutal face: the frontier massacre. The novel begins with a group of modern Noongar people—a few dozen in number—as they consider returning to their traditional lands, near the town of Kepalup. Up until now, the group has been reluctant to visit the area, particularly the Kokanarup farm, which was a defining site of Noongar murder and dispossession. More than a century before the period in which the novel is set, the white settlers of the land, the Horton family, shot and killed more than a dozen Noongar people, after a Horton was accused of rape and then speared to death by Indigenous men. According to the group’s lore, these brutal acts left a ‘taboo’ hanging over the area. As told by Aunty Hazel in Kayang & Me, the novel’s massacre reflects a lightly fictionalised version of Scott’s own family history; the massacre site was at the similarly named Cocanarup farm.34 The novel’s main plot begins when the property’s occupant, Dan Horton, invites the traditional owners back to Kokanarup, with the optimistic goal of reconciliation. Horton’s invitation coincides with the opening of a Peace Park in town, organised by the local historical society to commemorate the massacre—at which the Noongar have also been asked to speak and perform. While many are reluctant to accept, weary of the area’s curse, the majority of the group eventually says yes. Indeed, next to Horton’s dream of reconciliation, the Noongar people have their own ambitions for the trip. While the pain and consequences of invasion still reverberate through the group— individuals struggle with addiction, anger and violence—many have come to believe in a path to healing through cultural revival. Like the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, the fictional group has begun to organise language classes for young people, while teaching them some of the practical Indigenous skills forgotten in the modern world. The trip to Kepalup is part of this project: re-establishing Noongar identity on Noongar land. Taboo is held together by these dual moral quests. Dan Horton and the Noongar both seek answers to the problems raised by the history and violence of Australia’s frontier wars. If Scott’s stated literary purpose is to place ‘Noongar culture at the very centre of things’, Taboo consistently emphasises the Indigenous cultural journey.35 This plays out in a set of Noongar characters, each at different stages of personal discovery. All have a connection to Jim Coolman, a Noongar man who initiated a program of language classes while serving time in jail. These include Gerald and Gerrard, identical twins who learned under Jim; Aunty Nita, an Indigenous elder, now largely blind; and Jim’s estranged daughter, Tilly Coolman, only now, as a teenager, learning of her Indigenous blood. Through these diverse perspectives, Scott depicts the difficult, uneven, but often exhilarating process of reclaiming heritage. Many of these stories echo the author’s nonfiction writing about his own experience (certain phrases occasionally recur in different works, such as feeling reshaped ‘from the inside out’ by language). For someone like Gerald, who earnestly seeks revelation through learning, culture offers the chance for personal rehabilitation. When contemplating the future, Gerald’s monologue offers a romantic glimpse into its radical possibilities:

There was no need to rush. Old people, they used to walk. Eat only good food. Be together around a fire under the same old sky he was under now and he could be right in their world—be right inside and among and part of, like breathing the air or a fish swimming in water or a child beginning to dream in their mother’s tongue and the world springing more to life each day … He could live and find himself in the language, in the stories, the songs and all that. Not in books. His land was his book. These were the very thoughts he’d entertained and cultivated in his prison cell.36 While clearly sympathetic to these dreams, Scott is also honest about the profound barriers to realising them in the modern world. For contemporary Noongar, one of the central challenges to reclamation is the sheer amount of time standing between Taboo’s characters and the precolonial form of Indigenous life. Contemporary Australia offers little space for their cultural mission. As Aunty Nita puts it, while surveying the area, ‘not so much bush tucker, not so much bush either. We can’t go to all the places never again.’ This shows up in a range of unremarkable ways throughout the novel, yet each conveys the same message: this is not the same country inhabited by Mokare and his people. The group’s attempt to explore the land of their ‘old people’ is consistently blocked by the physical institutions of white Australia. Property owners view them with suspicion, clearly uncomfortable with their movement over now private land. A café occupies one notable landmark; another path is covered by a holiday resort. Other barriers are subtler than fences, drawing individuals away from their purpose, and back to their contemporary lives and more everyday imperatives. As the week goes on, people feel antsy ‘when [they] are missing the familiar rubbery structure and brittle bones of their everyday existence’. Another set is more mundane, yet still poses significant impediments to genuine mental transformation. The campsite, for instance, permits the Noongar group a fire, but in other ways resembles a conventional holiday facility, with microwaves, rusty barbecues and picnic tables. It is hard to escape the logic of modernity when living in its material presence. Another impediment to the group’s mission is creeping white discomfort with its essential goal. While Dan Horton extends his invitation in good faith, partly in memory of his wellmeaning and recently deceased wife, his thinking is still limited by a set of interlocking emotions and beliefs. He finds it hard to accept that his ancestors, people who ‘settled’ the land and established his home, could be guilty of such outrage. Horton feels uneasy about the language Noongar people use to understand the area’s history: ‘Personally, I hate the word “massacre”,’ he tells Gerald and Tilly, ‘it hurts me.’37 He is also less clear about what happened at Kokanarup. Horton questions the narrative of mass slaughter and poisoned water holes: ‘there are many different stories about what happened here’, he insists. Perhaps most importantly, the question of true ownership over the land—and the Noongar’s underlying charge of theft—challenges Horton’s sense of self. Over generations, his family had poured time and energy into ‘taming’ the soil; this has been the primary story of his life. As he tells the Noongar group who visits the farm, a theme he repeats throughout the novel, ‘this place, it’s very special because it’s my whole life since I was a baby … it’s a special place for us, too’.38 Even with good intentions, Horton struggles to reconcile his love for the land with the fact of invasion.

Most troubling is the spectre of colonial exploitation and racist malice lingering in the narrative. If Dan Horton’s conflicted caution represents one white response to Indigenous demands, there are other, more vicious reactions. In Taboo, these are most evident in the character of Doug Horton, Dan’s estranged son, who uses various positions of authority to control Indigenous people, often in violent and dehumanising ways. Doug works in parole in Jim’s prison, a position he weaponises against certain people in the system—and as a perpetual threat hanging over those released. Doug is also a drug dealer, in the prison and in the outside world, which offers him a similar potential for control. With these two roles he makes himself indispensable to a number of Noongar people, a dominance in which he revels. The darkest chapters of Taboo involve Doug’s relationship with Tilly, told in flashbacks set before the trip. In a series of remarkable coincidences—which we gradually learn were deliberate—Doug ingratiates himself into Tilly’s life, after meeting her one day while she visited her father in jail. Offering her a glamorous new world, with money and friends and gifts, Doug then slowly separates her from her mother and family, while fostering in her a dependence on drugs. In some ways this is a classic case of manipulation and abuse, but Doug’s particular pathology is also heavily racialised—deliberately targeting Indigenous people, enjoying the power relations granted him by white Australia. Doug expresses this in violent and brutal ways. In the novel’s most difficult scene, he places a collar around Tilly’s neck when she is heavily sedated, before making her sleep outside with his guard dogs. Doug then rapes Tilly repeatedly. While the threat and residual effect of white violence hangs over everything in Taboo, other problems come from within the Noongar community itself. Some of this is common human weakness, made worse by social dislocation. The novel is open about these issues—as well as the role of certain individuals in perpetuating them. Drug and alcohol addiction is common, as is the sincere pursuit of abstinence. The tension between these impulses reaches a violent conclusion in the narrative’s final act. Although most of the trip’s participants are in various stages of personal rehabilitation, their commitment wavers on their last night before the Peace Park’s opening. Many in the group attend a wild party, overflowing with alcohol and drugs. Even Gerald attends, a man otherwise deeply committed to his journey of transformation. Although he feels he is letting the town down, he also understands his other desire to ‘submit, to have his will taken away, to be obliterated’—particularly after an intense day at Kokanarup. As the night goes on, spiralling further out of control, the sharper edge of social dysfunction becomes apparent. We glimpse this most brutally in Gerrard, Gerald’s twin brother, who works with Doug in an attempt to recapture Tilly—using his position as an identical twin to lure her away from the campsite. Gerrard is less invested in the cultural program than his brother, and exhibits violent instincts, particularly when on drugs. Rather than challenging its source, he actively embraces the violence of his world, directing his pain towards others, usually women. Still, even with these immense barriers, internal and external, the process of cultural revival shows glimpses of genuine success. As Gerald acknowledges to himself, ‘the trip to Kokanarup had been very special’. While some of the cultural practices feel clumsy in the

modern world, they are held together by the power of language. As one of the elder characters tells Tilly, ‘it’s language bring things properly alive. Got power of their own, words … You’ll see, you’ll see proof soon enough.’39 For Gerald, relearning the Noongar tongue begins in jail, motivated by Jim and his new program. There he would ‘lie flat on his back on his cell bed, and let what they called a dead, extinct language roll through his skull. Move his lips and tongue, say the words out loud. Let them reshape him from the inside out.’40 As Scott wrote of his experience with the Language and Stories Project, ‘the satisfaction and strength articulated in these [groups] comes from being at the centre rather than the periphery of things—and seeing one’s identity and heritage validated and affirmed’.41 For the Noongar in Taboo, this feeling is especially powerful on the group’s traditional lands. Although their return to Kokanarup does not offer an immediate, collective transformation, it stirs potent emotions in the group. The connection between language and land is visceral. Gerald, for instance, feels this powerful sensation as he walks along the water: ‘the river was otherworldly in the dawn. The word for river in the old language was nearly the same as the word for navel. He liked that; it told you about connection. Words hold everything together … They were here, the old people. Gerald could feel them.’42 Tilly undergoes a similar process in her time in Kepalup. Before joining the group, Jim’s daughter had little knowledge of her Noongar heritage. She also carried serious trauma from her treatment at Doug’s hands. And while the time first spent with her father’s family featured its own shocking experiences, it triggered fresh thoughts in her developing mind; suggesting new forms of human relationships, and a different way of understanding her country. Taboo ends with an image of Tilly, set some undisclosed time in the future, remembering this first trip to ancestral lands. It is an optimistic note on which to finish the novel, suggesting the possibility of lasting change. While acknowledging the difficulty of promoting black culture in a white world, it hints at a new Tilly, and at new connection to the land of her ‘old people’: Many years later, as an old woman collecting wood to make a secret campfire as she rested on her drive back to the little property on the river, or anytime just staring at dappled light laid across a forest floor of branches and sticks, Tilly would see the timber limbs as our own, fallen and broken; would see pealing bark as an unrolled sleeve, a fringe of leaves like decoration. Would see not timber limbs but the bones of something both new and ancient, something recreated and invigorated, and would think of when she first heard a voice rumbling from a riverbed, and how something reached out to her.43

Conclusion In an essay published in 2007, Kim Scott questioned whether Australia could truly be classified as a ‘postcolonial’ nation. ‘Does post colonisation imply the emergence of hybrid societies that amalgamate characteristics of both precolonial and colonial cultures? If so, I don’t see that the cultures of Australia’s first societies have been allowed, let alone

encouraged, to contribute to contemporary Australian society.’44 One way of understanding Scott’s novels is as an extended challenge to this cultural and political setting; insisting on the centrality of Indigenous story to modern Australia, despite the best attempts of colonial institutions to suppress its voice. That Deadman Dance and Taboo are part of this overarching project, depicting the intersection of black and white Australia, but with an insistent Noongar gaze.45 Bobby Wabalanginy and Tilly Coolman live through different historical epochs, and possess very different personalities, yet they face the same underlying question in their lives. How can Indigenous people conceptualise and maintain their identity in the context of white domination and political violence? At the heart of Scott’s answer to this question are language and story. Outside his novels, Scott’s most significant form of activism—as chairman of the Language and Stories Project —is premised on the political power of narrative. Scott’s fictional work conveys this foundational belief, sometimes in direct ways, such as the insertion of project stories into the novels, but more powerfully in the lives and experiences of his characters. In That Deadman Dance and Taboo, Noongar people understand the urgency of language—either as a way to communicate across cultures, or as the connecting thread between modernity and older ways of being. One of Bobby’s greatest regrets is that ‘we learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours’. This refusal to listen made colonial expansion possible—a deliberate deafness that shaped white Australian indifference. In a similar way, Jim Coolman recognises the vital energy of his people’s old tongue. Neither Bobby nor Jim has it easy: both confront institutions and economic forces pushing against their mission. And yet, in glimpses, Scott’s novels show that a different way is possible, that a truly postcolonial culture is within reach —how a ‘relatively juvenile and shimmering nation-state might anchor itself to its continent’.46 We see this in Wunyeran and Dr Cross’s remarkable friendship, speaking a new composite language; we see it with Bobby on the whaling ship, singing his newly invented song; and we see it in Gerald in his prison cell, sounding out his people’s words and feeling born anew. Running through all these scenes is Scott’s most important assertion, and the heart of his politics: that through the transformative magic of language we might be able to understand ourselves, and maybe even each other.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Hazel Brown and Kim Scott, Kayang & Me, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 2005, p. 177. Brown and Scott, Kayang & Me, p. 13. Natalie Quinlivan, ‘Finding a Place in Story: Kim Scott’s Writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–12. Kim Scott, ‘Not so Easy: Language for a Shared History’, Griffith Review, no. 47, 2015, pp. 200–14, . Brown and Scott, Kayang & Me, p. 236. Sue Kossew, ‘Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance’, Cross/Cultures, no. 173, 2014, p. 170. Anne Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State via Regional Indigenous Roots? Kim Scott Talks to Anne Brewster about That Deadman Dance’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, p. 237. Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2010. Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1941; Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Text

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Publishing, Melbourne, 2003; Kate Grenville, The Secret River, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2005. Scott, ‘Author’s Note’, That Deadman Dance. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 230. Kim Scott, ‘Covered up with Sand’, Meanjin, vol. 66, no. 2, 2007, p. 122. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 231. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 129. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 324. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 362. Roseanne Kennedy, ‘Orbits, Mobilities, Scales: Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance as Transcultural Remembrance’, Australian Humanities Review, vol. 59, 2016, p. 114. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 317. Kim Scott, ‘From Drill to Dance’, Cross/Cultures, vol. 173, 2014, p. 10. Kennedy, ‘Orbits, Mobilities, Scales’, p. 4. Kim Scott, Mamang: An Old Story Retold by Kim Scott, Iris Woods and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, with artwork by Jeffrey Farmer, Helen Nelly and Roma Winmar (Yibiyung), UWA Publishing, 2011. Scott, ‘Not so Easy’. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 231. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 231. Dark, The Timeless Land. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 134. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 342. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 106. Scott, That Deadman Dance, p. 394. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 232. Brown and Scott, Kayang & Me, p. 207. Kim Scott, Taboo, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2017. Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 1999. Brown and Scott, Kayang & Me, pp. 70–3. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 237. Scott, Taboo, p. 17. Scott, Taboo, p. 57. Scott, Taboo, p. 226. Scott, Taboo, p. 98. Scott, Taboo, p. 15. Scott, ‘Not so Easy’. Scott, Taboo, p. 254. Scott, Taboo, pp. 280–1. Scott, ‘Covered up with Sand’, p. 121. Brewster, ‘Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State’, p. 237. Scott, ‘From Drill to Dance’, p. 19.

Conclusion: Literature and the Study of Politics

In examining the Australian novel, this book draws on a long and intersecting history of politics and literature. This can arguably be traced all the way back to the Politics, Aristotle’s foundational work of political philosophy. Here Aristotle examined the various sources of education necessary in a flourishing political society, anticipating some of this book’s central themes and concerns, with an often neglected recognition of literature’s role in political life. Noting the importance of what he called ‘music’ in this process—translators observe that the Greek term mousike has ‘a wider bearing than the familiar English word’, referring to ‘literary education’ as much as musical listening—the work’s final chapter moves from the conventional world of civic education, designed to perpetuate political regimes, to the more ambiguous world of liberal education, designed to deepen the moral and intellectual virtues of citizens.1 In many ways, Aristotle’s belief in the liberating effects of music reflects our own understanding of the role novels can play in developing Australia’s political community, in all their surprising, elusive and frequently challenging guises. It is in the last chapter of the Politics that Aristotle refers to another work, the Poetics, with its direct implications for students of literature and politics.2 An important concept here is what Aristotle defined as ‘the democratic character’, hinting at the distinct type of citizen required to populate these regimes, and the kinds of tutoring needed to produce them. Democratic regimes required citizens who could play their part as good democrats; but political education could go further still. For Aristotle, the instruments of civic education could reach beyond a safe culture of conformity, ‘with a view to virtue or with a view to the best way of life’. Compliant citizens could be educated not only as dutiful citizens, but also as human beings steeped in the wisdom needed to be ‘liberal and noble’.3 Literature could perform a similar role to Aristotle’s music, which the philosopher thought ‘capable of making the character of a certain quality’, contributing ‘to the character of the soul’. Followers of music, like readers of Australian political novels, could learn to enjoy ‘in correct fashion and feeling affection and hatred’—or be purified and renewed through pity and fear.4 Aristotle might be separated from this book’s set of Australian novelists by more than 2000 years, but his work nonetheless foreshadowed three fundamental qualities found in their fiction. First, their novels are important works of literary art that move us as readers. The six authors share considerable talent. As artists composing works with deep sympathetic resonance, each of the novels possess a core of pathos, evident in the lives of their fascinating characters. Any political study of their work should avoid the temptation to cut away wasteful or unnecessary parts, hoping to recover and polish the lost doctrines implanted within them. The novels are intended to affect their readers as good stories should. They work first and foremost as human stories, with the authors recognising how literary art can

draw us towards a better understanding of the sentiments and relationships embedded in Australian political society. Second, each work is concerned with the ethical implications of social life. The six authors write not only to entertain and move us readers, but also to inform and elevate our understanding of the deeper moral questions arising in their stories. True to their professional craft, none of the novelists preach. Instead, they let the ethics emerge gradually and often indirectly, as readers make sense of what their characters are doing, to themselves and also to others. Each of the authors brings out strengths and weaknesses in each of their leading characters, giving readers examples of people displaying admirable and lamentable qualities. Ethics here relates to politics in the ways that communities seek to define citizenship around preferred models of behaviour and relationships—and how these in turn shape the conduct of people living within them. Third, each novel reflects the intellectual or political philosophy projected by its author. The seven novels are logical as well as artistic works, each spelling out a logos according to their writer’s underlying sense of order and rationality. This third element is perhaps the most troublesome, because each author is aware of the perils of didacticism—performing more like the director of a play, which itself is carried out by the many characters dominating its pages. The characters do all the talking, with writers understanding that their job is to be as unobtrusive as possible. None of the authors come across as evangelists or instructors. Yet each understands themselves as something of an educator, using their novels to stimulate readers into thinking more constructively about the virtues and vices defining Australian citizenship. The relevance of these themes is not surprising. As Aristotle argued in the Rhetoric, pathos, ethos and logos form the core of political persuasion.5 This book’s six writers each present novels designed to nudge readers towards a more careful reflection on the nature of politics in Australia. It takes great skill to do this while balancing pathetic response, ethical interests and the logical minds of readers. Each is one of Australia’s finest writers encouraging people towards richer and deeper understandings of politics in this country.

Australian literary politics This book’s Introduction acknowledged a long line of Australian literary criticism, largely concerned with the nature and existence of a ‘national tradition’—mapping the themes, instincts and recurring preoccupations considered distinct to Australian writing. So where do the six novelists fit in these discussions? The Introduction expressed both curiosity and scepticism towards the earlier and influential claim—made by major novelists and critics such as Vance Palmer—that the Australian tradition was directly forged by the social democratic politics of egalitarianism, centred on figures such as Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy. The three pioneering female writers certainly saw the world through different eyes to these authors, writing novels often critical of their comfortable and potentially complacent assumptions about Australia’s democratic nationality. The three contemporary male writers have tended to go even further, questioning the very possibility of a coherent national tradition—emphasising the unsettling ways in which Australia is divided by politics,

experience and sentiment. In the same way, this book hopes to avoid certain scholarly tendencies in Australian literary politics. One is using Australian literature as a narrow ‘aid in sociological interpretation’, as Vincent Buckley put it. Another is to focus myopically on ‘what is typical rather than with what is distinctive, and with what is specifically Australian rather than with what is specifically human’, in the words of A.D. Hope.6 The book recalls the ways that earlier generations of critics broke from more traditionalist accounts of Australian writing. As the Preface acknowledged, two models foreshadow this project: T.I. Moore’s examination in Six Australian Poets, and Brian Kiernan’s reinterpretation of six Australian novelists, Images of Society and Nature. Both works challenged the reassuring but arguably naive idealism of critics such as Vance Palmer and A.A. Phillips, whose ‘socio-literary’ analysis both reflected and promoted the progressive nationalism of ‘democratic writing’—mirroring the broader project of left historians such as Russel Ward.7 As Kiernan argued, these earlier formulations could just as often act as ‘conservative’ weight on political thinking (particularly in the light of this book’s six diverse, provocative, but nonetheless progressive authors). Kiernan’s examination of Furphy’s Such is Life is instructive here. Addressing Furphy’s conventional reputation for ‘democratic optimism’, Kiernan unearthed a less direct but perhaps deeper radicalism buried within.8 Still, his conclusions could be pessimistic. As he saw it, Australian society had ‘never itself provided an adequate form for the expression of the whole experience of life that is sought’.9 The six novelists he studied all created work of both disappointment and imaginative possibility, whose characters tended to share—as did their authors—‘a search for life fulfilled at a deeper level than society can offer’.10 Because of this sentiment, many of the writers held themselves back from formal politics, maintaining their distance from the popular wisdoms embedded within its practice. Their novels remained stubbornly apart from norms of political responsibility; often hinting that politics fell short of expectations, and sometimes fell even further still. As Kiernan acknowledged, these intellectual tendencies were not confined to Australia. Images of Society and Nature also used international comparison to help clarify the outlines of Australian literary thought. He was particularly interested in debates over an ‘American tradition’, where the novel possesses a rich history, steeped in the country’s lore and politics.11 One of the leading figures in this debate is Catherine Zuckert, an American political philosopher concerned with the intersection between literature and national politics. In Natural Right and the American Imagination, Zuckert examined the country’s intellectual project as reflected through seven leading authors.12 Zuckert’s work emphasised the long philosophical shadow cast by the Declaration of Independence, which in her view acted as the nation’s foundational authority, with all its legal, philosophical and emotional power. The declaration rests on social contract theories, mainly from Locke and Rousseau, through which Zuckert told the story of two competing literary traditions—one based on Locke’s celebration of civil society and political order arranged around property; and another based on Rousseau’s description of the state of nature as a refuge from property and its many corruptions. The declaration thus facilitated a national dialogue between two competing

renditions of America’s core values. For many Americans, the declaration represents the country’s deepest articulation of political principle, as expressed by Thomas Jefferson when breaking ties with Great Britain during its War of Independence. The document identified the reasons for colonial rebellion against British rule, but also the underlying political philosophy used to justify the right of revolution. Jefferson formulated what is now a ‘political creed’, holding certain ‘truths’ to be self-evident: that ‘all men are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and that they have the right to alter or abolish any ‘form of government’ that is destructive of ‘these ends’ (the sincerity of these ‘truths’ has been subsequently challenged by later generations of critics: could they be considered truly inalienable if rationed according to ethnicity, gender and wealth?). Interestingly, this articulation of the new ‘regime’ was largely drawn from British political theory, borrowing from Locke’s arguments about popular sovereignty and the rights of revolution. It aspired to implement British liberalism more authentically than Britain itself. Zuckert’s book places American novels in the context of this national drama, using their narratives to reflect on the different paths made possible by Jefferson’s words. As she argued, American novelists offered their own accounts of these national debates. James Fenimore Cooper, for instance, used his novels to challenge the orthodoxy associated with John Locke, while affirming Rousseau’s alternative social contract: reinterpreting civic virtues away from self-interest and towards the revived virtues of compassion. The type of civil society illustrated by Cooper provides a challenge to the individualist lessons often drawn from the Declaration of Independence. In this fashion, Zuckert teases out two dominant traditions in American political novels. On one hand, there is Cooper’s tendency, grouped with Melville and Hemingway, interested in revisiting, indeed reviving, the state of nature. On the other side is the counter tradition of Hawthorne, Twain and Faulkner, warning against the false romanticism of Rousseau, which risks the precious security established by civil society. Cooper’s tradition is more optimistic, exploring America’s failure in meeting its progressive ideals; Hawthorne’s is more conservative and potentially pessimistic, justifying the kinds of authority needed to protect important social conventions.13 Running through this analysis is Zuckert’s recognition of novelists as significant political thinkers, capable of going ‘beyond the thinking of actors’ involved in formal politics—and raising fundamental questions about the American regime.14 These novelists were in many ways exceptions: sources of a deeper wisdom, or indeed a deeper debate about wisdom itself, located at a philosophical and professional distance from the political mainstream. Zuckert thus shows how fiction writers can reflect on politics, while resisting the desire to project their novels as sources of blunt ideological counsel. Novels could serve as a political education ‘of the sentiments and passions’.15

Recovering regimes In the absence of a declaration or cathartic war of independence, Australia emerges as something of an ‘agnostic’ political community—grafted from Britain’s Westminster

parliamentary tradition, existing as a self-governing member of another nation’s Commonwealth. The country’s origin story is further complicated by the violent dispossession of its conquest, and the ‘great silence’ that accompanied it. For some, this lack of national definition might make Australian’s literature less interesting than the kinds of urgent American debates mapped out by Zuckert. Or it might mean, counterintuitively, that more is at stake in the Australian national discussion—with the lines of political contestation shifting and fluid, open to new critiques and images of what Australia might be. What sort of political education do the six Australian novelists provide? Historically, Australia has remained closely tied—too closely, some suggest—to Great Britain; which has prompted many literary critics to argue that a republican reaction came to define the national literary tradition. Of course, other literary critics construct alternative traditions, adhering to British ideals of responsible parliamentary government and its social hierarchies. Australia stands open to both readings, and the two major political parties have tended to gravitate towards different interpretations: Labor sympathising with images of independence and political equality, the Liberal Party maintaining respect for the British Commonwealth and its more enduring—some would say stubborn—social institutions. While not associated with the sharp moments of change found in many other countries, Australia’s prevailing political culture has nonetheless been reshaped by waves of thinkers, activists and social forces. One of Zuckert’s most important insights is how novelists evaluated what political scientists have called ‘regimes’: defined simply as the ‘way of doing things, a way of life’.16 A related concept is what Charles Taylor described as the ‘social imaginary’ (‘regime’ might have sounded too worldly and empirical to the Canadian political philosopher—not quite capturing the social ideal as imagined by a political community pursuing progressive change). If ‘regime’ is the useful term to describe the ends of politics, then a ‘social imaginary’ is also useful in describing the transformative means of politics: a political community’s imaginative regeneration from old to new ways of acting and living together.17 Perhaps the best historic example of this kind of thinking, attempting to capture the essence of specific national ‘regimes’, is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which embedded the country’s legal institutions within the wider political culture that supported it. Tocqueville explicitly discussed the concept of ‘regime’ in his historical writing, most notably when examining ‘the ancien régime’ in The Old Regime and the Revolution.18 Tocqueville’s point was that systems of democracy vary according to their context. American democracy will not perfectly match English or French democracy, given that all three nations possess their own distinctive political cultures. If democracy means the role of ‘the demos’, contemporary democratic regimes can and do differ, even when they share a common political doctrine—conferring political authority on different types of people, and applying different conditions to the conduct of that rule. The great Australian historian Manning Clark wrote his Masters thesis on Tocqueville, with ‘obvious and profound’ debts to the political philosopher, of whose intellectual framework Clark became an ‘exciting expounder’.19 There are clear connections between Clark’s monumental six-volume opus and his apprenticeship in Tocqueville’s regime politics.

Clark’s account of political developments in colonial Australia emphasised the struggle between three powerful intellectual forces: Protestantism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment. Clark understood his own project as that of writing ‘history, literary history’.20 This helps explain why he also wrote an entire book on Henry Lawson, who features as a consistent and influential character in his historical work: ‘Australia is Lawson writ-large,’ Clark once claimed.21 The same intellectual logic can be observed in Clark’s own fiction writing, which produced two volumes of short stories investigating the complexities of characters who are largely shaped by the social regimes they inhabit. In this body of work, The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville is an important historical document, marking Clark’s early scrutiny of Australian political culture, acknowledging the regime as a fundamental category of social and political analysis. According to the historian, national regimes could be illustrated by ‘the esprit’ of their governing class—and the ‘state of manners and morals’ guiding their ambitions.22 While some critics dismiss Clark’s history as a ‘work of fiction’, concerned with narrative and spiritual message rather than detail, in many ways this reflects his adherence to the kind of analysis pioneered by Tocqueville, where regimes are represented by distinctive social characters, driven by a blend of idealism, spiritual purpose and indelible personal flaws. Australia was a comparatively early experiment in democracy. It also pursued a number of progressive social and economic innovations, as a so-called ‘laboratory’ for the world. Yet the nation still reflected the particular circumstances of its colonial history—with a violent disrespect towards the continent’s Indigenous people and culture, racial intolerance towards working immigrants from Asia and the Pacific, and only half-hearted support for female empowerment, even if women were soon granted the vote. Such a social world—open to progressive reform, but still burdened by prejudice and hierarchy—underpinned the nation’s political and artistic debate. To a large degree it still does. After Australia was legally federated through its written constitution in 1901, the literary editor of the Bulletin described the nation as ‘a suburb of Cosmopolis’—implying that its culture derived from an internationalist ethos.23 Over the years, that view has faced plenty of rivals. Vance Palmer, for instance, argued in 1905 that ‘an Australian national art’ required ‘not so much cultured writers as ardent nationalists’, of the type he later celebrated in The Legend of the Nineties.24 During the inter-war years, alternative doctrines included the ‘vitalists’ who drew on Nietzsche,25 Stephensen’s ‘Antipodean’ nationalist culture and Rex Ingamells’ ‘conditional culture’, with white Australians appropriating Indigenous cosmology and ritual.26 In Vincent Buckley’s words, each of these reflected a different ‘myth of Australia’—presenting the kinds of prosaic doctrines at the heart of the nation’s ‘literary politics’.27

Four larger lessons As a work produced by political scientists, this book is careful not to confuse its approach with conventional literary studies, nor to disrespect the work being conducted by more traditional literary critics. No doubt many literary scholars will smile at its naive simplicity—

or its stubborn insistence on political subtext—convinced that, by filtering literature through the dull and deadening lens of political philosophy, it inevitably serves to reduce works of supple creativity. But the project’s inspiration comes more from a group of international political science colleagues who have opened up literature to fresh political analysis— themselves inspired by a set of political philosophers who have opened up philosophical texts, revealing their new literary forms and their even deeper and frequently surprising ideas.28 Australian literature is full of politically innovative thought. This book’s seven novels all work within a tradition of fictional political reflection. All seek to say something about Australia’s ‘way of doing things, [its] way of life’, to use Zuckert’s phrase. While separated by a century of social and intellectual change, the two sets of writers can help trace Australia’s ‘social imaginary’—outlining its enduring and its shifting features. When viewed together, certain common themes begin to emerge. Some of these arise most powerfully out of the early female novelists; some emerge from the contemporary male writers. In Taylor’s words, the ‘social imaginary’ is ‘carried in images, stories, and legends’, providing one way of understanding the path from old to new regimes.29 Given the uncomfortable ambiguity of the birth of the Australian nation, and the lack of authoritative philosophical doctrines to circumscribe it, Australian writers have had little alternative but to imagine the nature of its political regime, based on the type of political and civic relationships tolerated or encouraged in the evolving Australian social order. The six Australian novelists offer some of the country’s most incisive insights into these national narratives—examining the forces holding ‘Australia’ together as a political community, defined as it is in different and often conflicting ways. Today Spence, Praed and Martin all enjoy high reputations among a small group of literary specialists. Their names appear often enough in political histories of female social reformers who agitated for the rights of women in a potentially liberal new nation. But as novelists, none features prominently in contemporary bookstores. They wrote as publicists, intent on attracting public attention, which now seems to have waned. While the three were not part of any coherent or formal literary movement, despite their similar interests in the political power of feminism and the novel, their work was nonetheless united by a set of themes and concerns. Some of these arose out of their politics; others arose naturally out of their position as women inserting themselves into national and international political debates, well before Federation and the establishment of Australia as a nation. A contemporary reader is more likely to find the novels of Winton, Tsiolkas and Scott in bookstores (they are often the most prominent names on Australian fiction shelves). Each has won prestigious literary awards; each has enjoyed their share of critical respect. All three have also engaged in the public sphere, touching on environmentalism, socialist politics and Indigenous cultural revival. It is difficult to compare these writers with the three female authors without being glib and simplistic. Much time has passed; the continent has changed, both physically and culturally. Nonetheless, many of the concerns driving Spence, Praed and Martin also find expression in the modern novel. A comparison of these thematic preoccupations can tell us much about what unites generations of writers—and also what has changed since people began writing books in Australia.

First, the environment stands out as a primary theme in the Australian political imagination. Each of the three female writers sets stories beyond the nation’s cities and towns, and often beyond the farm land assumed by settlers and grazers. Many nineteenthcentury Australian novels celebrated this ‘bush’, through the journeys of stockmen and their cattle. These were pioneering tales, with rugged men conquering a rugged and hostile landscape. But Spence, Praed and Martin largely departed from this world view, often celebrating the natural environment outside the logic and requirements of white settlement. The mode of appreciation differs across the three novels, illustrating tendencies of environmental insight developing between the 1850s and the 1890s. For Spence in Clara Morison, ‘the bush’ is first a source of wealth for South Australians, the foundation of pastoralism and mining. Yet the land also possesses values of its own. Some white settlers use their time in the colony to work hard in ‘the bush’—seen as a source of raw materials for economic exploitation—in order to return home to England financially independent. Others, however, slowly learn to cherish and appreciate the new and distinct landscape as a source of economic enrichment, but also carrying with it certain custodial responsibilities. As the first of the three female writers, Spence begins their colonial engagement with Australia’s landscape, in part through her criticism of the ‘gold fever’ disorienting communities with feverish dreams of unearthing the landscape for treasure and wealth. Praed and Martin write as more considered lovers of nature. Writing about the landscape often dispassionately dismissed as ‘the bush’, each includes startling and fresh descriptions of natural beauty. Praed presents the subtropical environment of Queensland as an exotic offering to white settlers unused to untamed landscapes—so unlike the parks cultivated back home yet inviting wonder and a sense of romance from the newly arriving settlers. Martin takes particular care in describing the grandeur and majesty of southern Australia’s native plants. Martin writes like a naturalist or botanist, naming the wide range of flora that delight the ‘Australian girl’ as unrivalled natural beauties. The suggestion from all three early novelists is that the Australian environment deserves higher praise than usually given by colonials, because there is so much more than simply ‘the bushes’ enriching the natural landscape. As we move from Spence through Praed to Martin, these Australian writers open their eyes to animals and birds in and around ‘the bushes’, as well as to the spectacular flowering plants at home in the Australian landscape. This natural spectacle inspires pride in those making Australia their home. In the century since these authors wrote, the landscape has maintained its hold over Australian thought. Binaries in the European mind still linger in the local literature—framing the landscape as either a unique and enlivening companion or a rough and hostile antagonist. Some things, however, have changed. Political debate in Australia is now generally more aware of two difficult facts underpinning the nation’s relationship to its land. The first is Indigenous culture’s profound connection to the continent—and the way colonisation brutally disrupted pre-existing patterns of being and thinking. The second is the modern world’s largely destructive impact on the local and global environment. In Kim Scott’s fiction, we observe the former, particular in That Deadman Dance and its tragic story of Bobby Wabalanginy. Bobby is present at British arrival in Western Australia, with all its seismic consequences for the region’s Noongar people. While the colonisers

mostly carry an unthinking superiority towards the land’s Indigenous inhabitants—buoyed by their technological strength—Bobby’s knowledge of the local environment is both unparalleled and valuable. This is itself a form of traditional scientific knowledge. The British rely on Bobby’s assistance to survive in their early years of settlement. With his help, they learn to thrive as whalers—that is, until the creatures stop arriving at the harbour, scared off by overfishing. Throughout the novel, Scott attempts to capture something of the Indigenous world view and relationship to the Australian land (even as he acknowledged the difficulty of translating them into the colonial language). In alternating between colonial and Indigenous perspectives, it becomes clear that Bobby experiences the physical world in a different way to the British—with a different attitude to its essential worth, beyond the logic of extraction. Tim Winton writes from the other side of Australia’s colonial frontier. In fact, many of his books are set on the same stretch of coastline depicted in That Deadman Dance. But while Winton’s work comes from a different racial and cultural setting to Scott—indeed, two worlds pulled into territorial conflict by British invasion—his novels share a certain ecological consciousness with his fellow Western Australian. In Winton’s literature, the natural world is also vibrant and alive, the pulsating heart of the continent. Nature is ‘a subject [of his fiction], not just an object; a character, a living thing and not simply backdrop’.30 Winton’s sentiment is deeply conservationist, in the author’s own idiosyncratic and practical way. His protagonists have little desire to tame and domesticate the natural world, breaking with much European thought and sentiment. They swim in its oceans, walk through its deserts, and surf in its waves; they enjoy sensually. Moreover, Winton is aware of the natural world’s fragility, and the consequences of human indifference and arrogance. In many of his novels, including Dirt Music, the clash between attitudes to the natural world—between the ‘settler ethos’ and the idea that ‘nature has value in its own right’—drives the narrative forward. Like Bobby’s observation of the early whaling industry, voracious extraction is a constant threat to the continent’s viability. The peopling of Australia is a second consistent theme across the novels. The Australian polity builds on—or more usually over—Indigenous peoples, and then through waves of convicts, free British settlers, then generations of migrants, such as the German Lutherans who contributed much to the South Australia described in Martin’s An Australian Girl. Each of the three early novels devotes special attention to Indigenous issues. Praed’s Queensland narrative probably makes most of the close association between white settlers and Indigenous peoples, yet Martin’s novel also acknowledges the place of first Australians as the original occupiers and custodians of the land. Martin’s later novel of the 1920s, The Incredible Journey, is a historical experiment of unusual interest, attempting to tell its story from an Aboriginal point of view of a black mother’s search for her stolen child. The author’s unusual and lengthy ‘Introduction’ says much more about Martin’s own views of Indigenous issues in Australian society.31 In the novel, the child is stolen by white people, mirroring some of Martin’s earlier interest in An Australian Girl about the inabilities of white missionaries to ‘capture’ or make sense of Aboriginal beliefs and myths. The lead character Stella is pained by this cultural insensitivity.

These are among the strongest elements of Martin’s openness to ‘Aboriginality’ as a core element of the peopling of Australia. After the initial invasion, the subject of ‘peopling’ continued through patterns of immigration in the twentieth century.32 The three female writers all anticipated this to some degree, each presenting colonial Australia as a composite of cultures. Spence’s Clara Morison maps the political culture of South Australia around white settlers moving into land originally held by Indigenous peoples. It also notes the political importance of South Australia as a non-convict and therefore ‘free’ colony. This colonial community begins with a system of self-government, without the kind of military authority defining older colonies such as New South Wales. British settlers in Spence’s novel come as male workers or working families—not as rulers or military defenders. The early arrival of German Lutheran migrants, seeking freedom from religious persecution, extends the peopling beyond its sole reliance on Britain, but it also deepens the political culture of religious freedom away from its established church. The arrival of republican Americans during the gold rush also helps to enrich the blend away from its monarchical origins. In Praed and Martin, the complexity of the peopling of Australia continues, with Praed marking the many differences between Australian and British political norms, and Martin reinforcing the German influence on South Australia, through her protagonist’s encouragement of fresh migration by politically active but threatened socialists —as well as new British immigration by disadvantaged East Enders facing very few hopes at home of employment or family security. These waves of migration only became more complex in the generations after Spence, Praed and Martin, with people coming to Australia from southern Europe, Asia and Africa. The kind of society these movements created—and the social differences running through it —is a constant theme in Christos Tsiolkas’s writing. As the son of Greek migrants, growing up in a family with one cultural foot still firmly in Europe, these themes emerged from Tsiolkas’s own experiences. His books are full of ethnically diverse characters, offering a deliberate break from more homogenous images found in much popular Australian art (The Slap was designed to be ‘the antithesis of Neighbours’). People from different backgrounds marry, have children and share the same suburban space. City life here is defined by its diversity, with all the vibrancy, colour and conflict that comes with it. While deeply anti-racist, Tsiolkas’s novels do not offer simple odes to multiculturalism. They are also fixated on the points where these worlds collide—and the questions they pose for a supposedly tolerant nation. We see this in The Slap, when Harry hits young Hugo at a suburban barbecue, after the child spends the afternoon in a perpetual tantrum. On the surface, the barbecue is a picture of multicultural coexistence. But it is also riven by philosophical and political differences—split between Hugo’s liberal mother, Rosie, who is opposed to parental discipline, and Harry’s Greek uncle Manolis, bewildered by her light touch. Multicultural life is presented here as enriching, vital and unavoidable—but it is also fundamentally divided. Kim Scott’s perspective on the peopling in Australia is understandably longer. That Deadman Dance depicts perhaps its most significant moment, at least as it occurred in Western Australia, when the Noongar people first confronted British invasion. As Scott

shows, this involved the collision of two profoundly different cultures, separated by cosmology, notions of family, and material ambition. Yet in Scott’s depiction, their early interactions approach something resembling cooperation. The earliest leader of the colonial expedition, Dr Cross, possesses a curiosity about Indigenous culture and language, becoming friends with local elders. In turn, the Noongar people offer Cross their assistance and hospitality—a remarkably generous act considering the circumstances. But if this offers a model for coexistence, we gradually learn that it is not a sustainable one. The novel’s second half, presenting the progressive British subjugation of Noongar land, is as inexorable as it is tragic; conquest is built into the logic of colonialism. After Dr Cross dies—buried alongside his Noongar friend Wunyeran—the British desire to profit from the land overwhelms any residual feelings of gratitude to its owners. The colonists expand their sheep stations blithely over Noongar land, and fortify their coastal town; memories of cooperation, like Wunyeran’s grave, are destroyed. Military authority is then used to crush Indigenous resistance. Here Scott’s novel traces the broader process of colonial expansion on the continent, just as his later books showed its lasting consequences. As Scott indicates, Australia’s defining act of peopling continues to both shape and trouble its national story. Progressive social thinking is a third feature in both sets of writers. Spence, for instance, has rightly received the praise of critics for her role in promoting advanced social policies (this was not confined to Australia—she also conducted lecturing and speaking tours in the United States).33 That project began many years earlier with the publication of Clara Morison, which illustrates and advocates a new agenda of social thinking about female equality, minority political representation and political education, built around Spence’s belief in civics and self-government. All three early novels approach their political stories through the lens of citizenship rather than rulership: self-government here means government by rather than of the people, who take their civic responsibility as electors seriously. This type of civic republicanism contrasts the potential civic equality of Australia with the decadent hierarchy of the British establishment. The three female writers say little directly about the British monarchy. Yet they are deeply critical of the pretensions of elites in colonial Australia—mimicking as they do ‘the mother country’—who compete for recognition as favourites of those who do rule. The implication is that Australia can and should imagine a more progressive model of politics, premised on bottom-up norms of civic republicanism, and not top-down imitations of a distant monarchy. As progressives, each of the three writers features prominently in historical accounts of feminism in Australia—and each of three novels examined in this book presents readers with remarkable ‘new women’, helping to define the Australian model of feminine citizenship, even before the legal model of national citizen had emerged. The writers each present feminist readings of the strengths and weaknesses of politics in Australia, framed around prominent women coping with unrewarding social and political circumstances. The lead characters of Spence’s Clara Morison and Praed’s Policy and Passion both withstand demeaning male suitors until a worthier choice emerges. The larger point is that each author uses her leading female character to hint at a more daring feminist perspective—most forcefully staged in Martin’s An Australian Girl, where the leading lady sadly marries the

wrong man, and possibly even embraces too much Christianity to work productively with her passionate socialism. The type of feminism captured in each of these three novels is certainly promoting the interests of ‘the new woman’; but each author nonetheless has a tendency to resist ‘feminising’ their leading female character. Spence, for example, draws another female character who seems to represent a fuller picture of feminised citizenship than is illustrated in the otherwise vivid portrait of Clara. So too Praed’s gripping description of the spirited Honoria promotes women’s interests, while letting readers begin to learn what else could have been achieved if this promising young woman had more of the cagy sobriety of her eventual partner Dyson. Martin’s novel is a feminist achievement, even though Stella wavers and temporises, despite possessing mental capacities well beyond most, if not all, of her male companions. Winton, Tsiolkas and Scott have all involved themselves in progressive causes. These political positions have also tended to find expression in their novels. Readers can observe Winton’s conservationism, for instance, through the inner lives of his characters. These figures value nature intrinsically—with the same motivations that have led Winton to campaign against environmental degradation in his own life. Kim Scott’s active involvement in the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, designed to preserve and revive Indigenous language and narrative, parallels the ideas driving his novels (That Deadman Dance, for instance, begins with a story borrowed from the project). Taboo animates this process more directly. The novel follows a group of Indigenous people returning to their traditional land, confronting both the massacre that occurred there and the daunting prospect of revitalising their connection to it. We see a similar union of political commitment and literary preoccupation in Christos Tsiolkas’s work. Tsiolkas is perhaps the most vocally left wing of the three writers, even if he is conscious of his political project’s internal contradictions. In his own words, the young Tsiolkas wanted to ‘reconcile Marxism with the liberationist politics of feminism, sexual politics and what I guess is post-colonial politics’. Having in his own mind ‘failed’ in this challenge, with the old and new lefts still coexisting uncomfortably, Tsiolkas’s novels went on to explore the ‘complexity and violence of this tension’. Novels such as The Slap and Barracuda are progressive not because of any advocacy, but because of their underlying sympathies—and their desire properly to understand the conflict festering within the leftist project. A fourth imagined theme is the relationship between nationalism and internationalism. Many literary critics have pointed to an exclusionist sense of ‘Australianity’ as a core feature in the nation’s literary narrative, particularly in the period before Federation. Accordingly, it is no surprise that the three female novelists tend to be ignored by scholarly curators of this so-called national tradition. Spence, Praed and Martin all tell a different tale about political nationality. Spence’s Clara Morison, for instance, contrasts the emerging civic culture of colonial Australia with the pretence of privileged rule in Britain—which is as close as the three books get to the standard story of ‘Australianity’. Praed and Martin share a similar contrast between Australia and Britain, but both cases still share an underlying internationalist theme, centred on the image of Australian self-

government. In these books, Australia has not necessarily turned away from Britain—instead it offers itself as a land of renewal for those lacking faith in the established customs remaining in ‘the mother country’. With Martin, the theme of internationalism strikes its highest mark as readers learn about the character of European philosophy and socialist politics, with Australia as a fitting place in which to relocate or even revise their doctrines. A practical component of this internationalist theme is that all three novelists sought and secured publication in London. While the authors managed to gain publishing deals in Australia at other times, they each preferred to maintain an established London publisher, at least in their early works. One reason, certainly for Spence, was that no Australian firm could carry out the task of producing such a complex novel. But another implication is that all three writers looked internationally: first to find a publisher, but second to persuade readers to take a closer interest in Australian ways of thinking and acting politically. For the three modern authors, internationalism means something different, beyond the British empire. Tsiolkas’s heritage largely exists outside the Commonwealth; Scott’s predated its arrival on the continent. Republicanism is no longer a particularly bold stance (nor, in the past few decades, a very effective one). Debates about Australian nationalism are rarely defined in relation to the country’s British past. In fact, Australian identity is often questioned within Australia itself. The kind of postcolonial literature presented by Kim Scott offers a profound challenge to Australia’s origin stories—and the kinds of heroes and villains who traditionally accompanied it. When damage was done, it was not conducted by an external force; it was conducted by Australians. Those crimes were essential parts of the national project. Other critical novelists such as Tsiolkas, not without affection for modern Australia, similarly question Australia’s images of itself. Tsiolkas does this with deliberate provocation, showing a different vision of Australian life—prosperous but unequal, successful but discontent, diverse but stubbornly hierarchical. Tsiolkas’s Melbourne has no definable core, no dominant national image. Instead, people carry around their own ambitions and resentments, sometimes arising out of their own personalities and desires, sometimes originating in foreign countries. This is not the white Australia of racial purity and impregnable borders; the world has well and truly seeped in. It is not the Australia of Henry Lawson or Joseph Furphy. Things have changed.

Conclusion Novel Politics is a political study of Australian literature. The novels examined in this book are examples of the high literary craft of six Australian authors interested in politics. These authors have been selected because each of them takes seriously an unusual political role often ignored by literary commentators. This role is more than that of a storyteller: it is the role of an educator who can use stories to help readers reflect on the many political relationships we encounter in social life: as citizens, as voters and as representatives holding power over others. Despite their many differences, the six novelists tended to agree about several features that helped to define Australian ways of encountering politics. What we have termed ‘the social imaginary’ suggests that readers of these six Australian novelists will find

themselves questioning the nation’s political imagination about the environment, the peopling, the progressive thinking, nationality and indeed internationality of this country called Australia. The many differences among the six Australian novelists need to be balanced by our recognition of their agreement that this kind of ‘social imaginary’ can be a source for fundamental reflection on what politics can mean for the many communities living in Australia.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

Aristotle’s Politics, trans. and with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary by Carnes Lord, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, p. 225 n. 6. See also Carnes Lord, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle, Cornell University Press 1982; and Thomas L. Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, especially pp. 257–67. Aristotle’s Politics, Lord edition, book 8, chap. 7, p. 236. Aristotle’s Politics, Lord edition, book 8, chaps 2 and 3, pp. 224, 226. Aristotle’s Politics, Lord edition, book 8, chap. 5, pp. 228, 231. See also Aristotle, On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis, St Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana, 2002, section 6, pp. 17–24, section 9, p. 28, and section 14, pp. 35–7. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, book 1, chap. 2, pp. 37–9. Vincent Buckley, ‘Towards an Australian Literature’, in Clement Semmler (ed.), 20th Century Australian Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1967, p. 84; A.D. Hope, ‘Standards in Australian Literature’, in Grahame Johnston (ed.), Australian Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962, p. 7. Brian Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature: Seven Essays on Australian Novels, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 159–60. Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature, pp. 163–4, 173. Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature, pp. 167–72. Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature, p. 178. A similar, useful work was Radical Cousins, which mapped out the many connections between progressive American and Australian writers in the nineteenth century: Joseph Jones, Radical Cousins: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Writers, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1976. For a crisp statement on Australian– American differences, see Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1965, pp. xxi–xxii. Catherine H. Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form, Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination, pp. 1–9, 241–9. Michael Zuckert, ‘Catherine Zuckert on Politics and Literature’, Review of Politics, vol. 80, 2018, pp. 301–7. Michael Zuckert, ‘Catherine Zuckert’, pp. 303–4. Paul A. Cantor, ‘Literature and Politics: Understanding the Regime’, PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 28, no. 2, June 1995, p. 192. Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 91–124. Two examples of Taylor’s commentary on Australian politics are ‘Irreducibly Social Goods’, in G. Brennan and C. Walsh (eds), Rationality, Individualism and Public Policy, Federalism Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1990; and Ruth Abbey and Charles Taylor, ‘Communitarianism: Taylor-Made: An Interview with Charles Taylor’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 1, Autumn 1996, pp. 1–10. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Anchor Books, New York, 1955. Quotations from G.P. Shaw and Peter Craven in Carl Bridge (ed.), Manning Clark: Essays on His Place in History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 38, 171. Clark’s Master’s thesis was published as The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Dymphna Clark, David Headon and John Williams, University of Melbourne Press, Melbourne, 2000. Manning Clark, ‘What Newman Means to Me’, in Clark, Speaking Out of Turn: Lectures and Speeches 1940–1991, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 200.

21 Manning Clark, Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend, Sun Books, Sydney, 1985, p. vi. See also Manning Clark, ‘Henry Lawson’, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), The Literature of Australia, rev. edn, Penguin, 1976, pp. 322–36. 22 Clark, The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 103, 128; for other references by Clark to Tocqueville’s method of regime analysis, see for example pp. 59, 86, 91, 98, 106, 111–12, 126–7, 142. 23 A.G. Stephens, ‘Introduction to The Bulletin Story Book’ (1901), in John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1856– 1964, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969, p. 107. 24 Quoted in Barnes, The Writer in Australia, p. 169. For a critical account of the legend of the 1890s, see G.A. Wilkes, Australian Literature: A Conspectus, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1969, pp. 28–46; and Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature, Heinemann, London, 1960, pp. 286–7. 25 See e.g. John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne, Angus & Robertson, 1974, pp. 22–41. On Nietzsche’s impact on Australian literature, see e.g. Manning Clark, ‘Fyodor Dostoevsky’, Speaking Out of Turn, pp. 164–5; and James McAuley, ‘Literature and the Arts’, in Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, especially pp. 124–6. 26 Sources can be found in Barnes, The Writer in Australia, pp. 204–65. 27 Quoted in Barnes, The Writer in Australia, p. 292. 28 A good introduction is Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2014. 29 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, p. 106. Note the important ‘patterns’ in the ten social elements of Australian literature devised by T. Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson , Sydney, 1971, pp. 19–22. 30 Alice Vidussi, ‘In Conversation with Tim Winton’, Le Simplegadi, no. 13, November 2014, p. 118. 31 Catherine Martin, ‘Author’s Introduction’, The Incredible Journey, ed. Margaret Allen, Pandora, London, 1987, pp. 1– 14. 32 See e.g. P.D. Phillips and G.L. Wood (eds), The Peopling of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1928; F.W. Eggleston (ed.), The Peopling of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1933; and David Pope, ‘Modelling the Peopling of Australia: 1900–1930’, Australian Economic Papers, vol. 20, no. 37, December 1981. 33 Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, 2019, pp. 74–105.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to note pages Adams, Francis, 5 Adelaide, Debra, 11 Aitkin, Don, 8 Altman, Dennis, 9 American Political Science Association, 10 Aristotle the Poetics, 147 the Politics, 147–8 the Rhetoric, 149 Austen, Jane, 2 Australia cultural landscape, vii, viii, xii, 9, 12, 95, 153–4; public figures and interest in literature, 7 environment, 155–6; and destruction, 156; and European alienation from the land, 90, 91–5, 96, 107, 108; and Indigenous culture, 95–6, 156 European exploration, 91 gold rushes, 37; Eureka stockade rebellion, 23–4, 25 history, xi, 5–6; centenary of white settlement, 71; Federation, 25, 26, 153; as penal colony, 91, 157; pre-Federation, 5, 14, 65, 153 peoples of, xi, 11, 91, 157; convicts, 23, 25, 26, 93, 94, 157; Indigenous Australians, x, 6, 8, 15, 16, 95, 156, 157, 159; migrants, 12, 23, 30, 36, 157, 158–9 political system, xi, 151–2; political developments, 153; racial intolerance, 153; responsible government, 26 settlers and Indigenous peoples, 51–2, 152, 153, 162; fear, 95 South Australia: migration scheme, 23, 157; as new colony without convicts or religious authority guiding government, 23, 25 women: and civic rights, 11, 12, 14, 35, 38, 153 see also Indigenous Australians An Australian Girl (Martin), viii, 11 characters: Anselm Langdale, 67, 71, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81–2; Caloona, 75; Cuthbert Courtland, 71, 74, 77, 78, 79; Laurette, 67, 76, 79, 81; the ‘Signorina’, 80; Stella Courtland, 66, 70, 71, 73, 74–5, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 82–3; Ted Ritchie, 67, 70, 73, 76, 77, 80 debut novel, 13 publication history, 19, 43, 65, 66, 70, 71, 84, 161; and censorship/cuts, 66, 70, 71, 73, 78; Martin reluctant to accept cuts, 71; scholarly edition, 70, 84 qualities: bookishness, 67; comedy, 67, 79 reception, 66–7, 78–9, 82, 83 setting, 71 themes, 13–14, 15; Australian social life, society, 67, 73, 79, 83, (Indigenous issues), 74–5, 157–8; German (and disadvantaged English) immigrants to Australia, 30, 79, 80, 83, 157, 158, 161; landscape, 156; love triangle, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 77, 81, 160; modern European/German philosophy, 68, 71, 73, 77, 78, 79–80, 81–2, 83; the new (Australian) woman, 65, 66, 71, 73, 75–6, 77, 82, 83, 160; political (socialist) themes, 66, 67, 71, 76, 77, 78, 80–1, 83, 158, 161, (feminist perspective), 160; social conscience/responsibility, 67, 69, 76, 78, 82 Australian literature contact literature, 130 Gothic, 92, 93, 94–5, 96, 105 history, xi, xii, 2, 3–4, 149; pre-Federation, 51, 92, 155, 161; of literary culture, xii, 9, 12, 14; revolts against philistinism, xii; staple themes, 6

Indigenous culture and literature, 134; impact of colonialism, ix literary criticism, xii, 3–5, 6–7, 9, 11, 19, 43, 51, 86, 94, 149; and ‘Australianity’, 161; the Gothic in literature, 94–5; and grunge, 112; poetry, 96; political themes in, 7, 9–10, 13, 149–50, 152; and promoting Australian literature, 6, 7, 67 poetry, 3, 4, 96; the Jindyworobaks, 95–6 and the political culture, vii, ix, xii, 7, 147, 152; competing images of society, culture, vii, viii, xii, 152 and pre-invasion history, 134 qualities, 14, 148 women writers, colonial, 10, 155, 160; edited collections, 10, 11; and ‘the making of Australia’, 14 writers and nation-building, 7, 10, 14, 66 see also political novels Authority and Influence (Bird, Dixon, Lee), 10 Banks, Joseph, 91 Barker, Ernest Political Thought in England, 10 Barnard Eldershaw, M. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 4 Barnes, John, 12, 13 Bellamy, Edward, 9 Bentley, George as publisher, 46, 47, 66, 70, 71, 73, 78, 79, 82 Bismarck, Otto von, 81 Blainey, Geoffrey, 40 Bode, Katherine, 66, 67–8, 70 Brown, Hazel Kayang & Me (co-author), 128, 129, 139 Buckley, Vincent, 149, 154 Campbell, Rosemary, 70 Carey, Peter, 9 Clara Morison (Spence), viii, 13, 28 characters, 25, 30, 36; Bantam (Mr), 34, 38; ‘Black Mary’, 24; Charles Reginald, 24, 28, 30–1, 32, 34–5; Clara, x, 24, 28, 29–30, 31, 33, 160; Gilbert Elliot, 28, 34, 35, 36, 37; Julia Marston, 24, 30, 31–2, 33; Margaret Elliot, 29, 30, 32, 33–4, 35, 36; Minnie Bantam, 32, 34, 36; Robert Dent, 31, 32, 33; Withering (Miss), 32, 34, 38 praised, 12, 13, 24, 25 publication, 23, 26–7, 43, 161 setting, 12, 13, 24, 30, 32, 33, 43 technique: humour, 37, 38; letters, 35, 36; range of narrative levels, 28 themes: environment, 155, 156; gold rushes, 24, 25, 35–7, 156; ideas of community, 24, 161; life in South Australia, 23, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, (comparison with the mother country), 32, 33, 158, 160, 161; love interest, 28, 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 160; migration, 29, (German), 30; politics, 25, 31–2, 33–5, 37–8, (feminist perspective), 159, 160; religion, 26; settlers and Indigenous Australians, 24, 157 Clark, Manning, xi, xii, 93, 153 The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville, 153 Clarke, Marcus, 50, 92, 93, 96 Clendinnen, Inga Dancing with Strangers, 130 Clunies Ross, Bruce, 4 Cole, G.D.H. Politics and Literature, 10 Coleman, Peter Australian Civilization (ed.), 9 Cook, Kenneth Wake in Fright, 94 Cooper, James Fenimore, 151

Crick, Bernard Essays on Politics and Literature, 10 Crystal, David, 134 Dampier, William, 91, 107, 108 Dark, Eleanor A Timeless Land, 16, 130, 136 Deakin, Alfred, 7 de Kretser, Michelle, 6 Deniehy, D.H., 3–4, 14 Dirt Music (Winton), viii, 89 characters, 14; Georgie Jutland, 14, 15, 102, 105, 107; Jim Buckridge, 14–15, 102–3, 105, 106; Lu Fox, 15, 103–4, 105, 106–7 setting, 102, 106 themes: environment, 14–15, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 157; European– Indigenous relationship, 105; love triangle, 14–15, 103, 104, 106, 107; masculinity, 103, 105; self-sufficiency, 105 Docker, John, 4 Dodson, Mick, 8 Dodson, Patrick, 8 Drewe, Robert, 96 Eldershaw, Flora The Peaceful Army, (ed.) 10 Eliot, George, 2, 12, 27, 28, 32, 72 Encel, Sol, 9 Faulkner, William, 151 Flanagan, Richard, 6 Flinders, Matthew, xi, 135 Franklin, Miles, x, 37, 40, 83 Franzen, Jonathan The Corrections, 117 Fukuyama, Francis, 112 Furphy, Joseph, 149, 162 Such is Life (writing as Tom Collins), 7, 150 Gallop, Geoff, 90 Garrett, Peter, 14 Gilding, Kevin, 71, 81 Green, H.M., 67 Glass, Devlin, 4 Grattan, C. Hartley, xii, 6, 7 Australia (ed.), 7 Australian Literature, 6 Introducing Australia, 7 Grenville, Kate The Secret River, 130 Griffith, Samuel, 7 Hadgraft, Cecil, 13 Hanson, Pauline, 122 Harpur, Charles, 3, 4, 44 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 151 Hemingway, Ernest, 151 Higgins, Henry Bournes, 7 Howard, John, 113, 122, 124

Hope, A.D., 96, 149 Horne, Donald, 8 Howe, Irving, 7 Politics and the Novel, 1–2 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House, 72, 75 Indigenous Australians, 157 age-old culture of, 95 connection to land, 156 demands, 8 European settlement, 95; and dispossession, murder, 6, 8, 15, 105, 152, 156, 162; excluded from political community, xi, 16 Indigenous writing: and politics, 7–8 storytelling since colonialism, ix Ingamells, Rex, 95–6, 154 Jefferson, Thomas, 150, 151 Jones, Joseph Radical Cousins, 163 Joyce, James Ulysses, 99 Jupp, James, 9 Kant, Immanuel, 71, 77, 78 Critique of Pure Reason, 79 Keneally, Thomas Cut-Throat Kingdom, 3, 4 Kiernan, Brian Images of Society and Nature, xii, 149, 150 Kinsella, John, 96 Lake, Marilyn, 27 Lalor, Peter, 23 Langton, Marcia, 8 Lawrence, D.H., 7, 92 Kangaroo, vii, viii, 92, 96; misinterpreted, vii, xiii Lawson, Henry, 7, 50, 101, 149, 153, 162 Lee, Christopher, 82 Lindsay, Joan Picnic at Hanging Rock, 94 Locke, John, 150, 151 McCallum, Douglas, 9 McCarthy, Justin, 13, 44 McLaren, John, 10 Macquarie, Lachlan, xi Magarey, Susan, 27–8, 38 Martin, Catherine, viii, 5 life: lives, travels abroad, 66, 83; marriage, 65; migrates as child to South Australia, 10, 43, 65; as public intellectual, 11; as public servant, 13, 65; as school teacher, 65; as a socialist, 14, 66, 68 and Spence, 13, 43, 65, 66–7 as writer, 13, 65, 72, 74; The Explorers (poetry) 65; The Incredible Journey (novel), 11, 66, 73–4, 157; Indigenous issues, 74–5, 157–8; journalism, 66; The Old Roof Tree (travel letters), 66; praise, 19; under pseudonyms, 66; remains little known, 67; reputation, 155; stories, 66, (political themes), 67, 68–9 see also An Australian Girl Meanjin, 7

Melville, Herman, 151 Moby Dick, 7 Meredith, George, 46 Mill, John Stuart, 12, 27, 28, 32 On Liberty, 72 links to Australian literary community, 72 and rights of women, 72–3 The Subjection of Women, 72, 73 Mokare (Noongar man), 131, 140 Moore, Tom Inglis, 13, 94 Six Australian Poets, xii, 149 Social Patterns in Australian Literature, xii, 9, 164 Murray, Les, 96 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 77, 78 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 154 Nile, Richard, 10 Australian Civilisation (ed.), 9 Overland, 7 Palmer, Nettie, 6, 7 Modern Australian Literature, 6, 19 Palmer, Vance, 6, 7, 149, 153–4 The Legend of the Nineties, 154 Palmer government, 45 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 112, 116 Phillip, Arthur, 71 Phillips, A.A., 94, 149 Policy and Passion (Praed), viii characters: Angela Ferris, 52, 58, 59; Cobra Ball, 52–3; Dyson Maddocks, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 160; Ferris (Mr), 51, 55, 57, 58–9, 61; Hardress Barrington, 47, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59–60, 61; Honoria Longleat, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59–60, 61, 160; Thomas Longleat, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 53, 54–5, 56–7, 60–1; Middleton (Mr), 45, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60; Vallancy (Mr), 53, 54, 58, 59, 60; Vallancy (Mrs), 46, 47, 54, 55, 58 literary quality, 9, 13, 19, 47; reviews, 47; views of, 42 as political novel, 42, 44, 60 publication history (in London), 44, 161; criticism from potential publishers, 46, 47; revision of manuscript, 46, 47 themes: dishonesty, disgrace, 48, 50, 55, 56, 57–8, 59, 60; environment/land, 47, 49, 50–1, 156; Indigenous people, 44, 52–3, 157; policy and the political stage, x, 44, 45–6, 48, 49, 53–4, 55, 56, 60, 61, (feminist perspective), 160; political morality, 53–5, 57; political norms, Australian and British, 158, 160, 161; private passions, 45, 46, 47, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 setting, 13, 44, 47, 49 political novels, 9, 12, 13 and activism of novelists, 3, 6, 8, 155, 160 authors’ approaches to politics, x, xi–xii, 2, 3, 5, 12, 151; differences in political understanding, xi, 1; skill, creativity of writers, x–xi, 4, 148 cultural diversity and political identity, xi distinct from ‘social’ novels, 1–2 and form and substance of institutional politics in Australia, 2, 4 and novelists as social philosophers, 3, 4, 5, 9; contribution to political thought, 3, 10, 11, 148, 149, 154 political imaginations in, ix–x, 2; and the environment, 155–7, 162; nationalism and internationalism, 161–2; and the peopling of Australia, 157–9, 162; and progressive social thinking, 159–61, 162; and the social imaginary, 5, 152, 154, 162, 163 the political and the personal, 1, 4; and ethics, 148 and relationship between character and community, x, 2 women writers (pre-Federation), 23, 149, 154, 155; and civic rights, 5, 11, 12, 60; and emergent ‘masculinist’ nationality,

xi political science and Australian literature, x, 8–9, 10, 154 course in, vii, ix Praed, Rosa (nee Murray-Prior), viii, 5 life: born Qld, 10, 13, 43; association with Aboriginal communities, 44, 52; on a cattle station, 44; father in colonial politics, 13, 44; lives in Brisbane, 13; married, 43; moves to England, 1, 13, 43; as public intellectual, 11 as novelist, writer, 10, 11, 13, 65; environment/land as theme in Australian novels, 44, 49; Fugitive Anne, 44; The Ladies Gallery (co-author), 44; memoirs, 44; Outlaw and Lawmaker, 44; political fiction after Policy and Passion, 13, 43; prolific, 13, 43; reputation, 42, 43, 44, 60, 155; The Right Honourable (co-author), 13, 44 see also Policy and Passion Quadrant, 7 Richardson, Henry Handel The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, 6–7 Roderick, Colin, 40, 86 In Mortal Bondage, 19 Romper Stomper (Wright), 112 Rooney, Brigid, 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 150, 151 Rowse, Tim Australian Liberalism and National Character, 9 Salo (Pasolini), 112 Schaffer, Kay Women and the Bush, 18 Scott, Kim, viii, 5, 6 focus: black–white relations, 8, 128, 139; cultural sovereignty, 8; work with Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, 6, 11, 15–16, 129, 134, 139, 140, 143, 144, 160 life: early years, 15; and family history, 139; Noongar heritage, 6, 11, 15, 128, 129, 162; as public intellectual, 11; study in Perth, 128 as novelist, writer, 11, 129, 143–4; awards, 11, 16, 130; Benang, 16, 129, 130, 139; Kayang & Me (co-author), 128, 129, 130, 138; Noongar: the other side of invasion, 15, 16, 128, 129–30, 134, 138, 139, 140, 144, 159, 160–1, 162; and politics, 129; True Country, 130 reception of work, 129 see also Taboo; That Deadman Dance Serle, Geoffrey, 10, 13 From Deserts the Prophets Come, 9, 12 Sinnett, Frederick, 12, 24, 25, 29 Slap, The (Tsiolkas), viii, 111 characters: Aisha, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123; Anouk, 118, 119, 122; Bilal, 119–20; Connie, 118, 121, 124; diversity, 15, 119, 123; Gary, 117, 118, 119, 120; Harry, 117, 118, 119, 120–1, 122, 124, 159; Hector, 117, 118, 122, 123; Hugo, 117, 118, 159; Koula, 118, 119, 121; Manolis, 118–19, 121, 159; Ritchie, 118, 123–4; Rosie, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 159 critical reception, 117, 118, 122–3 plot, 15, 111, 117–18, 159 setting, 122, 123, 124 success of, 15, 111, 116 themes: community and diversity, 11, 120, 121, 123, 124, 158–9; everyday life, 117, 121; family, 111, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123; fractured visions, tensions, 15, 111, 117, 118–19, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 159, 161; masculinity, 120–1; morality, 117–18, 121–2; politics, 122, 124; selfhood, identity, 118, 120, 123 Smith, Zadie On Beauty, 117 Spence, Catherine Helen, viii, 5 life: as civic activist, 3, 12, 13, 23, 26, 27, 28, 37; mentors, 12, 27, 32, 72; political involvement, 23, 27, 28, 37, 159; as public intellectual, 11, 13, 27, 37, 38, 72; and religion, 10, 26; settles, lives in Adelaide, 10, 13, 27, 43, 65; as single woman, 73; travel, 26, 32, 43, 159

as novelist, writer, 10–11, 12, 23, 43, 72; An Agnostic’s Progress, 26, 27; Autobiography, 26, 27, 43, 67; journalism, 26, 27, 35; The Laws We Live Under, 27; Mr Hogarth’s Will, 27; neglected, 37; A Plea for Pure Democracy, 27, 37, 72; A Week in the Future, 5, 27; political novels, 26–7; reputation, 155; reviews An Australian Girl, 66, 82 see also Clara Morison Spender, Lynne, 11 Stephensen, P.R., 154 Stokes, Geoff, 9 Australian Political Ideas (ed.), 9 Taboo (Scott), viii characters: Dan Horton, 139, 141; Doug Horton, 141, 143; Gerald, 140, 142–3, 144; Gerrard, 140, 142; Jim Coolman, 140, 142, 144; Nita (Aunty), 140; Tilly Coolman, 140, 141–2, 143, 144 themes, 16; black–white relations, 141–2, 143; consequences of invasion for Noongar, 138, 139, 141, 144, (social problems), 142; frontier massacre, 139, 141, 161; land ownership, 141; language and narrative, 139, 144; rebuilding Indigenous culture, language, 129, 138–9, 140, 142–3, 144, (obstacles), 140–1, 142; reconciliation? 139, 141 setting, 138–9 Taylor, Charles, 152, 154, 163 That Deadman Dance (Scott), viii, 161 characters: Binyan, 132; Bobby Wabalanginy, 16, 130–1, 132, 133, 134–5, 136, 137–8, 144, 156; Christine, 133, 138; Cross, 131–2, 133, 136, 137, 144, 159; Geordie Chaine, 133, 137, 138; Jak Tar, 132; large cast, 130; Wunyeran, 132, 137, 138, 144, 159 setting, 16, 130 style, 136 themes: black–white relationships, 132–3, 138, 144, 156, 159, (cultural/racial barriers), 133, 136, 137–8; clash of interests, 137, 159; colonisation, 130–2, 133, 135–6, 137, 138, 144, 159; cultural curiosity, exchange, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 159, (whaling industry), 133–4, 156; different cosmologies, philosophies, 16, 132, 136–7, 157, 159; language and narrative, 134–5, 144; Noongar experience, 129, 131, 136, 138, (dispossession), 135–6, 137, 138, 156, 159, (and relationship to land), 156–7, (whaling), 133–4; personal agency, 131, 135; sense of white entitlement, 136 Thompson, Elaine, 9 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 153 Democracy in America, 152 The Old Regime and the Revolution, 152 Trollope, Anthony, 7 Palliser series, 47 Tsiolkas, Christos, viii, 6 life: background, 11, 110, 115, 158, 162; class tensions, 110–11, 125; employment, 116; as full-time writer, 116; as public intellectual, 11, 111; sexuality, 15; university, 15, 110 as novelist, writer, 111; anxieties, 116–17; awards, 11, 116; Barracuda, 161; critical support, 111, 116; Dead Europe, 15, 115–16; The Jesus Man, 113–14, 116; Loaded, 15, 111, 112–13, 115, 116, 124; (political) preoccupations, 112–14, 115–16, 122, 124–5, 158, 161; political tensions, 15, 110, 111, 114, 125, 161, 162; reviews, nonfiction, 111–12, 124–5 political commitment, 15; as Marxist, 15, 111, 112, 161; and nostalgia, 115; old and new lefts, 6, 15, 111, 114, 124, 161 see also Slap, The Tullock, Graham, 70 Turner, Ian, 4–5 Twain, Mark, 43, 92 Unaipon, David, 8 United States American literary tradition, 150; literature and politics, 150, 151 Declaration of Independence, 150–1 Walter, James, 9 Ward, Russel, 149 The Australian Legend, 94 Webby, Elizabeth, 14, 70, 71

Colonial Voices (ed.), 10 White, Patrick, viii on the Australian novel, viii as engaged public intellectual, 3; Patrick White Speaks, 3 Winton, Tim, viii, 5, 6 life: early years, 15, 97; on WA coastline, 98 as novelist, writer, 11, 14, 102; awards, 11, 14, 89, 97, 102; Blueback, 102, 103; Breath, 90, 98; career, 96–7, 102, 104; Cloudstreet, 14, 90, 99–100, 101, 106, 106, 107; Eyrie, 107; Island Home, 107; ‘Lockie Leonard’ series, 98; The Open Swimmer, 14, 90, 97, 107; The Riders, 99, 101–2; Shallows, 90, 97–8, 107; The Shepherd’s Hut, 14, 97, 107; The Turning, 98 political commitment to environmentalism, 6, 14, 107; acknowledges differing views, 98, 104; ecological vision, 90, 97; joins environmental campaigns, 89, 90, 102, 104, 160; literary preoccupation, 14, 89, 90, 93, 97–9, 100–2, 104, 105, 107–8, 157, 160 as public intellectual, 11 reception of work, 99, 100, 101, 106; reputation as writer about landscapes, 14, 89–90, 97 supports Aboriginal causes, 105, 106 see also Dirt Music Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, 6, 11, 15–16, 129, 134, 139 publications: Mamang, 134 see also Scott Wolfsohn, Hugo, 9 women and rights, 71–2 and the ‘new woman’, 71–2, 73 Wright, Alexis, 6 and Australian storytelling, ix Wright, Judith, 96 and ‘Australia’s double aspect’, viii–ix, 93, 94, 95, 105 as environmentalist, 93, 104 Young, Jeanne, 43 Zuckert, Catherine Natural Right and the American Imagination, 150, 151, 152, 154