The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature the Metropolis Or the Bush?

This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 01 Oct 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature Jessica Gildersleeve The Metropolis Or The Bush? Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781003124160-5 Megan Brown Published online on: 23 Dec 2020 How to cite :- Megan Brown. 23 Dec 2020, The Metropolis Or The Bush? from: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature Routledge Accessed on: 01 Oct 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781003124160-5 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 THE METROPOLIS OR THE BUSH? Megan Brown ‘The city or the bush’ is, as Graeme Davison suggests, one of ‘the great themes of Australian history’ (‘The Exodists’ 1), and a range of critical perspectives and historical analysis have been devoted to consideration of it.1 Recent scholars generally concur with the view that the dichotomy, which remains a staple of popular culture, is in many ways false. For example, the literary figures who are associated with the debate usually had connections with both country and city, moved between them, and wrote in and about both places. The binary approach also ignores those spaces that are neither, like country towns and suburbs – the places where most Australians live, and which are also central to the literary (see Rooney). The tenacity of the opposition between metropolis and rural therefore demands explanation: perhaps it is because ‘the bush’ remains primarily a place created by the imagination, its voices unheard except as quaint or comic detail. For in popular and literary representations the definitive element of ‘the bush’ is, counter-intuitively, not so much place as time: in the twentieth century and beyond ‘the bush’ is never modern, although this was not the case in the nineteenth century.2 While it was the masculine voices of writers such as Henry Lawson and A.B. Paterson that were used to create the literary representations with which we often identify, earlier female voices such as Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Rachel Henning, Mary Fortune, and Louisa Atkinson tell us of the connection and movement between the metropolis and the bush and acknowledge that attitudes towards one or both can change over time. One early scholar of Australian literature who was famously identified with the rural envi- ronment where she grew up, Judith Wright, argues that colonial writers represented Australia as a place both of ‘exile,’ and of ‘newness and freedom’ (xi). For some colonists, all of Australia was ‘the bush,’ a terrifying place to be escaped by returning home; in this sense, the invader’s country of origin remained ‘the metropolis.’ For others, the new place provided challenges they were willing to embrace. Fascinated by its flora and fauna, they studied, wrote about, drew, and photographed the natural world. Richard Waterhouse, in The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (2005), found that the colonial press represented a wide range of views of the bush in fiction and non-fiction, a range that was broadly reflective of the diverse backgrounds and opinions of its readers. By mid- century, two-thirds of these lived outside the metropolis, a ratio that would be reversed during the twentieth century. As the proportion of people living in cities increased and federation approached, the Bulletin magazine began an ideological crusade: under the banner ‘Australia for the Australian’ and then ‘Australia for the white man’ it promoted a nationalist agenda, lamenting the disappearance 25 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 21:38 01 Oct 2021; For: 9781003124160, chapter3, 10.4324/9781003124160-5 Megan Brown of opportunity that had been provided by living on the land. The weekly magazine published articles and fiction that fuelled the myth of a distinctive Australian ethos, male and egalitarian, that was being built on the archetype of the lone bushman whose masculinity and Australianness were created by his battle against the land. One notable exemplar of the Bulletin’s active role is in its publication in 1892 of poems by two of the colonial period’s most popular writers, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, on the theme of ‘Sydney or the Bush.’ In his poem ‘Borderland’ Lawson opens the debate with the line ‘I’m back from up the country – very sorry that I went’ (1) and goes on to describe the bush as a ‘Land where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men’ (33). Lawson, who had been born and spent his early life in the bush before moving to Sydney in his mid- teens, took the side of the metropolis. Paterson replied a fortnight later with ‘In Defence of the Bush,’ telling Lawson ‘You better stick to Sydney and make merry with the ‘push’/For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush’ (40). Other writers joined the fray, leading to a well-subscribed following of the good-humoured debate (see Paterson, ‘A Reply to Various Bards’). It is a measure of the complexity of even this most stereotypical and probably staged debate about the complete opposition of bush and city that, in the same issue of Paterson’s first reply, Lawson published perhaps the best-known and most sentimental of all paeons to life in the bush, his short story ‘The Drover’s Wife.’3 Paterson, too, had contributed a crucial element of the myth with his poems ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ (1889) and ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890), the latter about the chase of brumbies down a mountainside that, after spawning three films, a television series, and a musical, would help to make the wild horses of the Australian alpine region the focus of debate more than a century later (see Chan). Other writers who helped in the creation of an idealised image of the bush and its people were C.E.W. Bean, in his descriptions of Australian soldiers in the First World War ‘as [a] unique Australian type, utilitarian, egalitarian, pragmatic and anti-authoritarian’ (qtd in Waterhouse 192), and literary nationalist Vance Palmer, who claimed that the gold ‘diggers of the 1850s’ had ‘an ethos that centred on mateship, democracy and nationalism’ (193). Although Russel Ward sought to scrutinise what he termed The Australian Legend (1966), the title of his book served only to further ensconce the notion that ‘the real Australia’ is to be found ‘in the bush,’ a place where an authentic and distinctive ‘type’ is cultivated who can lay claim to embody ‘the truth’ about Australia and its people. As Lawson’s own story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (among many others) demonstrates, however, ‘the bush’ was always home to a variety of people, whose voices can be heard in the vast body of writing that is constituted by the colonial periodical press. Periodicals – journals, magazines, and newspapers – were published in almost every town and city. They are the major source for Australian literary culture in the colonial period, and modern investigations are rewriting Australian literary history (see Bode). Very few colonial writers achieved book publication, which was expensive and usually came at a cost to the writer – it is believed the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon committed suicide in part at least over a debt he owed to the publishers Clarson and Massina in Melbourne for his second book of poetry (see Kramer). Other than the exceptional Louisa Lawson, who edited the feminist journal The Dawn, periodicals were usually curated by men but anyone could contribute to a periodical, and they did … in droves. Richard Waterhouse argues that there was no ‘dominant popular image of the Bush and its in- habitants’ over the century from 1813 to 1913. Instead, there is ‘a series of such images,’ ‘constantly changing and reforming as a result of transformations in rural and urban Australia,’ each affecting the other so that there was ‘a complex and ever-evolving interchange between urban and rural culture’ (193). This exchange, this diversity, and changes over time, however, are often lost. It is much easier to portray the bush as an unchanging place where only one kind of person lives, all 26 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 21:38 01 Oct 2021; For: 9781003124160, chapter3, 10.4324/9781003124160-5 The Metropolis or the Bush? ‘“hardy pioneers,” sturdy members of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” united in their quest for progress, prosperity and a united nation.’ As Waterhouse goes on to observe, this simpler version …was also reflected in the reinterpretation of the European occupation of the interior as a peaceful process, with Aborigines [sic] becoming more or less invisible. Originally represented as fierce opponents of European occupation, and later in nostalgic terms as a ‘dying race,’ now they had virtually vanished from the European version of history. (192) Henry Reynolds and others have brought this more complex and conflictual history back into view (see Clark and Macintyre; Reynolds; Ryan et al.), while others have emphasised the signifi- cance of continuing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence (see Langton; Pascoe; Wright, Tracker).

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