Working men and women thrilled to such verses as:
That the curse of class distinctions from our shoulders shall be hurled.
An’ the sense of Human Kinship revolutionise the world;
There’ll be higher education for the toilin-starvin clown
An’ the rich an’ educated shall be educated down.
This vengefulness sprang directly from Lawson’s heart, for he had been a put-upon and ill-paid worker, had suffered social contempt for his drunkenness and his unsatisfactory performance as an employee and, above all, had suffered poverty.
Lawson, like his mother Louisa, was a republican too.
The Queen has lived for seventy years, for seventy years and three;
And few have lived a flatter life, more useless life than she;
She never said a clever thing or wrote a clever line,
She never did a noble deed, in coming times to shine;
And yet we read, and still we read, in every magazine,
The praises of that woman whom the English call ‘The Queen’.
Far different in tenor and politics from Lawson was John O’Brien (Monsignor John Hartigan, parish priest of Narranderra). In 1906 he would do for Irish Catholics what Paterson did for the community at large—he depicted the Irish-born or first-generation Irish cockie in all his contradictoriness, his amusing if excusable ignorance, and his capacity to endure. The famous Hanrahan, who complained in drought or flood that ‘we’ll all be rooned’, was his creation, as was the bush kid of Irish parentage who could not tell a visiting bishop the importance of Christmas but suddenly remembered, ‘It’s the day before the races out at Tangmalangmaroo.’
In fiction the Bulletin wanted a terse style. ‘Grit not gush’ was Archibald’s motto—it was certainly the attitude of literary editor A.G. Stephens, a Queensland journalist who, during his stint at the Bulletin up to 1906, was the comptroller of the magazine’s literary taste—with a dazzling record in that role. Other writers Stephens published included Edward Dyson, Ernest Favenc, E.J. Brady and Price Warung. Price Warung, whose real name was William Astley, did the Bulletin the service of depicting the convict days in a way that justified contempt for the British and provided ammunition for the supposedly coming republic. Louis Becke’s tales of blackbirding in the South Seas appeared there too.
In this atmosphere A.G. Stephens published a literary phenomenon, a good-natured book as strong as Lawson in its respect for the unlanded, the despised. It was Such is Life, written under the pseudonym Tom Collins by Joseph Furphy. In its gritty, eloquent bush discourses all human questions, including free will and predestination, class and democracy, are canvassed. It concerns itself with ‘the art of riding horses and the art of swapping them, the modes of spinning yarns and of telling whoppers, the varied crafts of the bushman and the formidable mnemonic power which they demand, the reticent loyalties of mate and dog, the eccentricities of bush-scholarship, the curiosities of bush-etiquette, and the firm pattern of bush-ethics’.
Joseph Furphy had been a drought-struck selector from the Riverina area of New South Wales who, finding the terms of Australian agriculture had defeated him, had to walk away from his farm. He became a bullock driver, but uncharacteristically of the stereotype of such a man, was a non-swearing practitioner of temperance. The drought of 1883 destroyed even the bullock-driving career. During the depression of the 1890s, he worked in his brother’s ironworks at Shepparton in Victoria, and had a little shed in which he read devoutly and prepared to write a book in which the ordinarily despised bullockies and swagmen would be depicted as possessing a certain voice, rough and democratic, the voice of the humble of the earth waiting to be exalted and worthy of it, while the finance men who had seized their marginal land from them were creatures of the devil.
At the head of his book Furphy promised that his rambling tale would be in ‘Temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian’. The bush made living a crude and rough existence. But the novel worked against the idea that the bush made utterly brutal, unthinking men. ‘Yet he has thoughts that glow, and words that burn, albeit with such sulphurous fumes that, when uttered in a public place, they frequently render him liable to fourteen days [imprisonment] without the option. Yet this futureless person is the man who pioneers all industries . . . whose heavy footprints mark the waterless mulga, the wind-swept plains, and the scorching sand.’
He was encouraged throughout the process of writing by a friend, Kate Baker, a County Waterford-born girl twenty years younger than him. (Furphy’s own people came from Northern Ireland.) Furphy, who was married but found his wife an inscrutable being, admired Kate Baker’s intellectual capacity, and there is no indication that the admiration went further than that. She was, he boasted of her, ‘the only girl in the Eastern Hemisphere who knew who Belisarius was’. Tom Collins, as he called himself for the purposes of publication, finished his book in March 1897, sent it to Alfred George Stephens of the Bulletin, and had it published in 1903 by that magazine.
Such is Life was not successful in its day, and Furphy, retiring from work, took his wife and sons and went and lived in Western Australia, where he died in September 1912. As he had written in his unsuccessful verse,
This dictum you may safely trust –
Growl you may, but Go you must.
Kate Baker then bought up the remaining print run of Such Is Life and republished it with a foreword by the Melbourne writer Vance Palmer. She would also publish Furphy’s poetry and, with Miles Franklin, a biography.
Miles Franklin, who at the age of sixteen wrote My Brilliant Career (1901), and Steele Rudd were others published by Stephens. Bernard O’Dowd, born in Melbourne in 1866, brought his powerful intellect and gifts to lay on the altar of the Bulletin tradition. For most of his life he was a Supreme Court librarian and parliamentary draftsman. Having renounced the Catholicism of his childhood, he was a socialist and founder of the left-wing magazine Tocsin. To him Australia was ‘the whole world’s legatee’, inheritor of the best aspects of humankind and its institutions, and rejecter of the worst. In other words, Australia was the last chance of humanity.
She is the scroll on which we are to write
Mythologies our own and epics new.
O’Dowd and the young Christopher Brennan in Sydney were the first poets of serious ideas. Brennan was only thirty when he wrote his great inconclusive poem ‘The Wanderer’. It was unique in that although it was written in a house full of children’s nappies, and with a disgruntled wife, German mother-in-law and mentally disturbed sister-in-law hanging over his endeavours, it was influenced not by shearers but by the French imagists as filtered by a young man with a classical education. All he shared with Lawson was a tragic thirst for liquor.
O’Dowd was Alfred Deakin’s favourite and one can see why: he thought that the poet’s work was central to society, in that it should deal with politics, religion, science and reform in general. There was a need for ‘the permeator poet, the projector of ideals, the poet militant . . . in this virgin and unhandicapped land of social experiments, embryonic democracy, and the Coming Race, Australia!’
He raised the famous question of whether Australia would be ‘a drift Sargasso where the West in Halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest’, or ‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?’ For all progressives of the time, and for Australians since, the question had resonance—were we to be citizens of not just another unjust little province but a utopia, a vision for the world to behold?
His vision, if not his belief in the central nature of poetry, was a very strong and common one amongst the Australians of his era. Every issue, from Federation to the unionism of shearers or seamen to the Empire and Boer War to suspicion of Jews and the abomination of Asians to the whimsy, misery or grandeur of the bush kept the pages of the Bulletin flowing with verse.
BANJO DOESN’T CARE FOR MATILDA
/> Australia’s national song derived from a man whose character was built equally by the experience of being the son of a pastoral manager, but as an adult was an urbane city dweller of a democratic temper. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney, yet began his education in a bush school at Binalong amongst the children of shearers and selectors. As a young balladist he used the name Banjo, after a family racehorse, and one of his own enthusiasms remained thoroughbred horses. He frequently rode them as an amateur jockey at Randwick and Rosehill racetracks in Sydney.
The story of the writing of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is a matter of Australian oral rather than documentary history, but the ABC’s research on the matter in the early 1960s received the imprimatur of Banjo’s son. A family known as the McPhersons were party to it—they had overlanded to Queensland after Victoria’s Berry government’s Land Acts, which they felt threatened by. They had entertained the bushranger Mad Dog Morgan on their property, and Mrs McPherson had played the piano for him.
At the time of the origin of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, young Robert McPherson and his brothers were managing Dagworth Station on the Diamantina River north-west of Winton, and in 1894 the widowed Ewan McPherson, the patriarch of the family, brought his daughters north to join his sons on the station. The story goes that before she left for Queensland young Christina McPherson attended the races in Warrnambool in April 1894 and heard the Warrnambool Militia Artillery Band playing an arrangement of an old Scottish tune named ‘The Bonnie Wood of Craigielea’. The tune stuck in her head. When Christina reached Winton she met an old school friend, Sarah Reilly, and invited her to come out and stay at Dagworth. Miss Reilly had a young male companion, however, a small, cock-sparrow sort of man, a solicitor from Sydney, Andrew Barton Paterson. Paterson was on sabbatical from his law practice. Bring Mr Paterson as well, said Christina.
Paterson came to Dagworth and delighted in going on long rides around the property with Robert McPherson. Christina took on the task of entertaining the company with music in the evenings, and though the homestead did not boast a piano, she was able to borrow an autoharp, a sort of zither, patented in the 1880s and popular in the new world, from the station bookkeeper. Young Andrew Paterson heard her play ‘The Bonnie Wood of Craigielea’ on that instrument. According to Paterson himself, he asked, ‘Why don’t you sing the words to that?’ Christina replied that it had no words.
Robert McPherson told a later researcher, Sydney May, perhaps a little too neatly, that as he and Banjo rode around Dagworth in the next few days, three disconnected events occurred. They came across a dead sheep with a forequarter missing, and McPherson explained that itinerants, swagmen, often took the forequarter for their meals. Then the two young men visited a waterhole on the western boundary and McPherson told Paterson that a man had drowned there once while attempting to escape from troopers. Then one of the jackaroos mentioned to McPherson and Paterson that he had seen ‘a couple of men waltzing matilda down in the billabong’. Paterson did not know what ‘waltzing matilda’ meant, and he was told that it meant carrying a swag. The usage delighted him.
A family named the Ramsays of Oondooroo Station now invited the McPhersons to come look at some new fire-fighting equipment they’d acquired. Paterson drove over from Dagworth with the family. At Oondooroo they found a piano and a Ramsay family member, Herbert, who had been trained as a baritone. Christina played ‘Craigielea’ on the piano and Paterson began writing down his lyrics for it in short bursts, passing them to Herbert Ramsay, who sang them. And so the offspring of station owners and managers assembled around a piano creating a song which one commentator would call ‘a treason song’ of stock theft by an itinerant worker.
A month later, in May 1885, the Winton Races were held. The McPhersons of Dagworth and the Ramsays of Oondooroo and their guests went along, where on pub pianos they performed their new song. Paterson then packed his copy of his lyrics in his luggage but seems to have forgotten it when he returned to Sydney. For some reason, perhaps involving his thwarted attraction to Christina McPherson, his memories of Dagworth were unhappy, and his regard for ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was coloured by that memory. He sold it with ‘a lot of old junk’, shorter bush poems, to Angus and Robertson in 1903, the year of his marriage to Alice Walker of Tenterfield. Between its creation and publication he had been away at the Boer War as a correspondent, and had become a famous figure for his ballad ‘The Man From Snowy River’. Angus and Robertson tried to sell the musical rights to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to Inglis and Company, the proprietors of Billy Tea, as a marketing tool, but the idea did not come to anything. Mrs Marie Cowan, however, wife of the general manager of Inglis and Company, set her hand to an arrangement of the music. Mr Cowan contacted Paterson with a copy of text and music and Paterson wrote back, ‘Your song received, very satisfactory. Marie Cowan has done a good job, good luck to her.’
‘Waltzing Matilda’, with minor textual variations, would in the end be fitted, as well as to ‘Craigielea’, to entirely different music altogether, the tune of another folk song. The two versions, the most popular and the more esoteric, exist to this day. What is certain is that the phenomenon developed, the text being spread, the song being performed, without any encouragement from Paterson himself. May, who wrote an early account of its genesis, recalled himself hearing the song sung far from Paterson or the McPhersons and Ramsays, on a station in New South Wales, in 1899. Banjo Paterson would survive his time as a field ambulance driver and re-mount officer in World War I and live until 1941, by which time the song had been—to say the least—popularly adopted.
FEDERATION, PROTECTION, DESTINY
It seems to the reader of nineteenth-century Australian politics that Free Trade and Protection, though seriously divided camps, were often flags of convenience for politicians. No more principled shift from one to the other was the case of the young lawyer-journalist Alfred Deakin. Deakin had made friends with the powerful but reclusive David Syme, editor of the Age, a liberal progressive like himself and a Protectionist, that is, one who chose to design society by making foreign exports too expensive to compete with local factories, whose owners in turn nurtured a sane society by paying appropriate wages.
Deakin remembered the night he was converted by Syme’s arguments to become a Protectionist, in line with the growing protectionist bent of Victoria, ‘as we crossed the old Prince’s Bridge one evening’. He was brought around by argument, not by workshop owners begging for such favours, especially not by those workshop owners who were fellow members of the Legislative Assembly. Syme brought him from Free Trade to Protection by holding out the concept that Deakin could do more to design society by Protection than Free Trade would permit him to do. It did happen that the Free Trade faction was always in the minority in Victoria and that to continue a Free Trader would have cramped his path in politics. Yet Deakin was genuinely pure-spirited enough to have a conversion like that of St Paul.
Federation became his other major dogma. Many colonial politicians paid lip service to Federation, like the people they represented, thinking it inevitable and not worth getting in a lather over. Along with Parkes and others, Deakin was one of those who tried to drive it. One of the few groups actively engaged in Federation in the early 1880s was the Australian Natives Association, a largely Victorian group of Australian-born, founded in 1871, largely from the children of the post-gold rush generation, many of them born in the canvas towns of Melbourne or the goldfields. Deakin was a member of the Prahran branch of the ANA.
In the matter of Federation, he was also influenced and was to an extent a follower of Premier James Service, another of those thoughtful but deft Scots who was a Free Trader but, unlike most free traders, a liberal. When Sydney and Melbourne were linked by train in 1883, Service said: ‘I decline to subscribe to the doctrine that I am to die before the grand Federation of the Australian colonies.’ (Sadly, he would die in 1899.)
Earlier th
at same year, 1883, the Queensland–German New Guinea crisis had occurred. In an attempt to prevent German expansion in the Pacific, the minute naval force at Queensland’s disposal was sent by Premier Mcllwraith to seize the southern half of Eastern New Guinea. Side by side with genuine concern that Australia and Britain were being trumped was a desire to keep for Queensland the trade across the Torres Strait and to blackbird in New Guinea if they wished. When, before ranks of sailors and a crowd of fascinated but bemused natives, the new colony was proclaimed in Port Moresby, Britain was embarrassed. It chastised Queensland for its presumption. It would, in fact, formally take over the area and its adjoining islands a year later, once it had cleared the business with its friend Bismarck, the German chancellor. But in the meantime there was a feeling in the Australian colonies that their interests in the Pacific were being betrayed by Whitehall. Service suggested a Convention of Colonies to consider the possibility of some form of federal action on both New Guinea and the future of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). ‘Federation and all the islands,’ he had cried. The convention met in Sydney in December 1883, and a Federal Council was created, a small body made up of two politicians (later four) from each of the colonies to frame laws on a few matters of common interest. But the New South Wales delegation refused to join the council because many thought it a Victorian plot to impose Victorian-style protectionist laws on them. Even Parkes, who was out of office and had no part to play in the convention but who had earlier suggested a similar council, now said it would delay Federation. He wanted faster, more definite action. He was willing to join a Federation, he said, but not ‘a pipsqueak council’. But as Deakin said, the very existence of the council gave him hope of better things.