Chapter Seven

183 CHAPTER SEVEN SHAPING NEW WORLDS WITH OLD IMAGES When John Richardson bought John Moores store and flour mill and moved to Armidale in 1872, he brought with him his wife, twenty years younger than he, and a young family consisting of seven surviving children. His eldest son, Robert, was 22 years of age. Although other sons would choose to join their father in his retailing business, Robert turned to writing childrens books, most of which were published in London and Edinburgh where he lived through the 1880s and early 1890s. His career was blighted by a lack of talent. Nonetheless an independent income kept that harsh reality at bay. But he was not so lacking in ability that he failed to see his own limitations. By the time he wrote Ad Musam, a poem which served as his obituary in the Bulletin, he was resigned to his critics opinions and addressed the Greek muse of poetry somewhat bitterly: Yet others get the gift and win thy love; They get the gift while I but stand and wait; They enter calmly through the enchanted gate That leads unto the mystic Dellian hill . And I but linger in the valleys chill, With timid groping feet, and as I pass Gather some withering leaves of wayside grass, And hear through the hushed twilight faintly falling The voices of my happier brothers calling, And watch afar with aching, dazzled eyes, Clear peaks that climb into the lucent skies By shining paths my feet will neer surprise. Robert Richardson died of gastric catarrh in Armidale in 1901 aged fifty. He was unmarried. Richardson set his stories in the Australian bush, which he described in English terms for his English readers — too full of wildflowers, rills and rivulets to ring true, a benign wilderness where children got lost. The bush was a counterpoise to the city. Man made the city but God made the bush. The bush was moral, the city slightly damned. There was always the hint of the bushman ethos in Richardsons writing. 1 Robert Richardson, Bulletin, 19 October, 1901, the Red Page. 1 8 4 Richardson wrote with moral intent. His characters were always worthy, in gender specific, class specific, and racially specific ways. Boys played practical jokes, contrived adventures with ghosts and treasures, and, when older and beyond the age of crying, always went into the bush armed. They encountered exotic animals, marvelled at them, described them, gave thought to Gods creation, then killed them. 2 Girls were often ill, which is what brought them to the bush in the first place — for the air. When confronted with the need to be heroic girls became selflessly devoted, risking their own well-being to protect younger brothers and sisters. They always took much longer to recover from their ordeals, going down the path of pitiful wasting before turning the corner towards robust good health. 3 Lost children ultimately owed their lives to the bush skills of gentle, civilised Aboriginal blacktrackers like Black Harry and Tommy Sundown. 4 Even bushrangers were prone, at times, to outbursts of decency.5 Everyone was basically good and did what goodness expected of him or her. Respectability ran amuck through Richardsons novels. Robert Richardson carried messages from one generation to another. He showed his young readers what life ought to be like. His novels encouraged girls to develop roots and boys to develop wings. He showed both boys and girls that the Empire was good; that civilisation was good; that a simple life in a simple setting was good; and that good boys and good girls grew up to be good men and women. He shaped ideals that were transportable across time and space, the ideals of a generation in love with righteousness. The medium for Richardsons message was childrens literature, but on his death certificate, his occupation was recorded as journalist. In a sense that Richardson appreciated, the author and the journalist were interchangeable. 6 Both dealt in moral messages. 2 Robert Richardson, The Hut in the Bush: A tale of Australian adventure, Edinburgh, Oliphant, Anderson Ferrier, 1883. 3 Robert Richardson, A Little Australian Girl; or, The Babes in the Bush, Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson Ferrier, n.d. 4 Loc. cit., and Robert Richardson, Black Harry; or, Lost in the Bush, Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson Ferrier, c. 1894. 5 Robert Richardson, Interview with a Bushranger in Mrs A Patchett Martin (ed.), Under the Gum Tree:Australian "bush" stories, London, Tischler Co., 1890, pp.183-196. 6 Robert Richardson, The Literary life, in Cosmos: An Illustrated Australian Magazine, 19 February, 1897, pp.290-291. 185 So too, of course, did the churches, the schools and the law courts. Education, religion, the press, popular literature and the law were the main purveyors of Victorian ideologies.? In the power imbalances of colonial society, ideologies were important. They were effective in legitimising the structures of power and the strategies of the powerful. At the same time, they provided those who needed to resist with a god and arbiter to whom they could appeal. Ideologies spoke of class and race, gender and marital status. They provided an embellished overlay for basic human interactions. Ideologies were also at the core of personal identity which has always been defined in terms of difference — of some sort of superiority. Ideologies provided a surplus of meaning to categories such as worker, wife, woman and whore. However, any analysis of ideologies is problematic. In the first place, ideologies did not coincide clearly with power structures. There was not, in colonial Armidale, an ideology for power and another ideology that ran counter to it. It would be wrong to assume that there were fixed interests on the one hand and definite discourses representing them on the other. 8 In fact, certain ideologies were employed by people with quite contradictory interests. From diaries, letters, newspapers and court transcripts it is clear that both men and women resorted to the discourse of respectability within the context of gender struggle. Men tried to assert their dominance, and women tried to control men through reference to notions of respectability. 7 Many writers seem to use ideology and discourse almost interchangeably. See, for instance, Scott Lash, Coercion as Ideology: The German case, in Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Dominant Ideologies, London, Unwin, Hyman, 1990, p.93. and Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S, Turner, T he Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, (second edition), London, Penguin, 1984, pp.118-119. However, Foucault himself, as well as some of his post- structuralist followers, sought to keep the terms quite separate because they had quite different agendas to those who wrote in the dominant ideology debate. See M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (C. Gordon ed.), Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980. Nonetheless my preferred term is ideology not in the sense of a carefully constructed system of rigid political and economic beliefs but an interlocking set of precepts and conditioned responses by which people bond together and exclude others in their daily interactions. 8 Stewart R. Clegg, Frameworks of Power, London, 1989, p.154. 1 8 Furthermore there was no clear dominant ideology where ruling ideas could be easily associated with ruling classes. Nor was it easy to accept a concept of hegemony with the powerful explanatory potential which Connell and Irving sought to realise.9 Such concepts leave little room for explaining change in social relationships over time. Such concepts also overemphasise the deliberate intent of the middle class and fail to recognise the uneasy impact of dominant ideologies on the supposed dominant class itself. That much said, there is no need to go to the opposite extreme of seeing ideologies as masses of floating discourses spontaneously combining and re-combining without reference to material constraints or structures of class, gender or race. 10 People were engaged in struggle. They formulated their interests according to those ideologies most readily acceptable to their condition in life. They bonded with people similarly positioned and excluded others. Many propertyless male workers valued displays of physical prowess and bush know-how and despised the new chum, the milksop, the city swell and the bookish pedant. In an entirely different lifestyle, Caroline Thomas drew strength from quasi- Christian respectability, admired skills in music and home decoration, and appreciated sensible conversation tinged with affability. She set herself against rough manners and moral turpitude and only tolerated those of her circle, like Dr West and the Marshes of Salisbury Court, whose conversation she found frequently stupid. Clearly ideologies were related to those social structures around which people built their lifestyles. Power imbalances and material inequalities were important contributing factors and it is quite easy to see their relationship to ideologies. To this extent it is possible to speak of predominant ideologies 11 while avoiding the more rigidly structuralist concept of a dominant ideology. 9 R.W. Connell, and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Melbourne, 1980, pp.22-24. 10 S. Hall, The Problem of Ideology: Marx without guarantees, in B. Matthews (ed.), Marx: A hundred years on, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1983, p.79 quoted in Clegg, op. cit., p .180 . 11 The word dominant suggests an overwhelming advantage based on power. It is synonymous with ruling. Predominant however, suggests a narrower advantage over other contenders, It suggests a recent ascendancy and recognises the existence of close challengers. 1 8 7 The rise and fall and the metamorphoses, of predominant ideologies were evident in colonial New England and can be related in part to demographic changes. If there was a noticeable gender imbalance in central New England throughout the late nineteenth century, then that imbalance was slight when compared to the gender profiles of the European population in the 1840s and 1850s.

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