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AUSTRALI IMAGEI) THE LITERARY HERITAGE

H. P. HESELTINE

'So much horror in the clear Australian sunlight!'DOUGLAS STEWART: Ned K elly

THAT AUSTRALIANS have a literary heritage is a proposition which, Iimagine, few critics of our culture would seriously deny. The generalfunction of that heritage, too, would probably be a matter of commonagreement. It is the continuing definition of ourselves to ourselvesthrough the fOIII1S of literature; it is the monuments of the used andusable past which can still enforce their relevance upon us; it is thatelement in our most accomplished literary works which makes knowntheir Australianness. But the specific forces which have controlled thedevelopment of our literature, the special attitudes which reveal theAustralianness of Australian writing these are matters on which finality has by no means been reached. It must be said, indeed, that someof the prevailing interpretations of our literary heritage are not adequateeither to its particular exhibits or to its accumulated quality.

The view of our literature which has acquired perhaps the widestauthority is that which sees it as a contest between an exclusive and aninclusive culture, in which the latter has consistently marshalled thesuperior forces; it is the democratic theme which is at the heart of ourliterature. This very plausible view has been argued powerfully andfrequently, nowhere with more critical tact that in A. A. Phillips's TheAustralian Tradition. 'The Currency Lad,' he writes in the essay on 'TheDemocratic Theme', 'could be defined, almost, as the man who did nottouch his hat' (p. 35 ) . And the Currency Lad stands as the most compelling image of man presented in our writing. Nobody could deny the

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enormous force of the drive towards egalitarian democracy in Australianwriting, or ignore some of the concomitant attitudes it has establishedin our literature the suspicion of heroes, for instance, or the tendencytowards left-wing political conunitments.

Belief in the primacy of the democratic theme, with all its attendantconsequences for personal and public action, naturally enough placesHenry Lawson fairly and squarely at the centre of our literary heritage.It is no accident that Phillips's book is distinguished by sympatheticand sensitive essays on Lawson and Furphy. The democratic themeclearly does occupy and occupy significantly the minds of many ofour earlier writers. I do not question its importance or value; I dowonder if it is at the very centre of the Australian imagination. Is itthe grain of sand which irritates the oyster into protective action? Oris it the pearl which makes the grain of sand bearable and (incidentallyfor the oyster) beautiful? If, in the past, the democratic theme hasbeen the secret stimulant to our artistic creation, then certain quite realdifficulties are posed for us. In an article, 'Winds of Change in theAustralian Novel' (The Australian Quarterly, XXXII, no. 4, 1960), Norman Bartlett has stated quite flatly that 'The national billy tea literarytradition the gum leaves make all the difference no longer satisfiesus' (p. 75 ). And again: 'Those who still march under that once grandold banner, "Temper democratic, bias Australian," are merely marchingin circles' (p. 80 ). With these words Bartlett voices an attitude that isincreasingly felt abroad among writers and critics. I f all that Lawsonand his tribe can offer is outback mateship and proletarian protest, theymust regretfully, even painfully, be relegated to the past historicalmonuments from which the life of relevance has departed. I do nothappen to believe that we need so completely to turn our backs on Lawson: yet the difficulty remains. I f our literary heritage offers us nothingbut the simple virtues appropriate to a simple frontier society, what canwe do but reject it? We are left with a heritage which is an empty inheritance.

The cultural historian will not for long be left at a loss by Lawson'squalities and by Bartlett's rejection of them. He will soon go to work,fitting them into a larger pattern which will comprehend them both.The sub-title of Phillips's book is 'Studies in a Colonial Culture'. Andit requires no great flexibility of the imagination to understand bothLawson and Bartlett as representing inevitable stages in the passage ofwhat was once a colonial culture to national independence and maturity.The American scholars have long since marked out the pattern of theprogress of their own civilization and literature; and in its general out-36 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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lines the pattern seems to be a necessary one in any situation where aEuropean culture has been grafted onto through colonization and conquest some less advanced society. First of all there is likely to be aperiod of imitation of the models provided by the parent civilization;this is likely to be followed by a period of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate between the forces of nationalism and those which continue to pay homage to the imperial source; for a time nationalism willappear to be triumphant; but as pre-condition of full maturity, nation-alism must suffer rejection and be replaced by a sense of nationhoodwhich is assured and un-selfconscious.

It is easy enough to translate this pattern to Australian literature.Harpur, Kendall, and Gordon, the imitators, are followed by the nationalists of the 'nineties and the tum of the century nationalists who didnot have things so much their own way as we sometimes think, whohad to contest their right to assert their Australianness. The force ofnationalism carries it with some abatement through the first World Warand into the 'twenties; in the 'thirties it experiences a revival of enthusiasm and vigour through the Jindyworobak movement. More balanced views, evident from the beginning of the century, are progressivelygiven more and more weight; though, that the issue is by no meanssettled yet is suggested by the curious ambivalence of Ray Lawler'ssecond play, The Piccadilly Bushman, and by the even more ambivalentreception it was accorded.

Australian's literary heritage as the record of her gradual liberationfrom the restraints of a colonial culture: the interpretation has as muchvalidity as the democratic theme, and leaves us with the same uneasy sense of incompleteness. An interpretation which can be so widelyapplied to the United States, to Canada, to South Africa, as well asto our own country has its very considerable uses. It equally has itslimitations. It holds out the seductive possibility of viewing the entireliterature of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia asone single and inseparable mass or mess. Which they aren't, if for noother reason than that the settlers of each land had to face and overcome enormously different physical environments. So, it might beargued, the finding of a true relation to the land, the very earth, hasbeen the particular concern of every Australian poet from Charles Har-pur to David Campbell. Not the bush workers, or the bush virtues, butthe bush itself has been their one true subject. The peculiar ancientharshness of the Australian bush has demanded from our writers thelive with it was to image it forth as the backdrop to the heroic achievements of the pioneers. Lawson accepted its harshness in bitter surrenderMEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962 37


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to its power to hold him. Brennan, so far as he could and as an act ofthe will, chose to ignore it. Bernard O'Dowd hymned it as the spirit ofAustralia. The Jindyworobaks gloried in its primeval indifference to thecondition of man. Now our younger poets are able to select fromamong its many features, and treat them for what they are.

Clearly we must include landscape as a component in our literaryheritage. But when we have said landscape, have we said all? And ifso, is that enough? Is it enough? This seems to be the question students of Australian culture are driven to again and again. Is our tradition, after all, to be summed up in this or that single word Mateship?Landscape? Nationalism? Is what we have received from our literarypast so thin that the simple labels do, in fact, suffice? Most of us wouldfind it difficult to believe that the literature of any nation could bereduced to such direct and formulary clarity; most of us would not liketo believe that our own literature could be so reduced. Using the samematerials which have always been available, is it possible to construct aversion of our literary heritage which will do justice to whatever discoverable complexity and force are latent in it, and at the same timewill not disavow its Australianness?

The means of carrying out such an enterprise are, I believe, at hand.They can be usefully indicated by resorting to another formulation, buta formulation richer in overtones and implications than any thus farinvoked. In an article entitled 'The Background of Romantic Thought'(Quadrant, II, no. 1), Herbert Piper asserts that 'there are still manyRomantic elements in Australian culture, often unrecognised and unquestioned and yet serving to mark Australian literature off from themodem European literature which rejected Romanticism at least a generation ago' (p. 49). Professor Piper is here, I think, half right andhalf wrong. He is right in stressing the importance of the Romanticsensibility in Australian literature; he is wrong in those aspects of theRomantic sensibility which he selects as particularly important in ourculture; and he is wrong in suggesting a kind of backwardness in ourAustralian engagement with the Romantic response to life. What Iwish to propose as a fundamental element in Australia's literary heritagemay be stated something like this. Australian literature is historically aRomantic and post-Romantic phenomenon. Due to certain circumstances of history and geography, it came much earlier than Europeanliterature to deal with a number of key themes of late Romantic awareness. Although these dealings were very much disguispo by colonialnecessities, Australian literature, in fact, early took as its central subjectwhat is still one of the inescapable concerns of all modem literatures.Such a proposition may well seem to be gratuitously grotesque; it cer-38 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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tainly requires the kind of defence afforded only by the display of manyitems of evidence. Some such items, from within the mainstream ofAustralian writing, I will provide here; many more could readily beassembled. But first I must isolate that peculiarly modem element inmodem literature which, it is my contention, Australian literature soearly laid hold on.

I can most conveniently do so by referring to an article by an American critic, Lionel Trilling 'On The Modem Element in Modem Literature' (Partisan Review, XXVIII, no. 1). Towards the end of his articleTrilling is driven to speaking of 'the subversive tendency of modemliterature' (p. 31). I t subverts not through this or that political action,not through its Leftism or its Fascism, but in its alienation from anykind of politics, men organized into rational communities. Behind muchmodem literature, Trilling argues, lies the German Nietzsche. And'Nietzsche's theory of the social order dismisses all ethical impulse fromits origins the basis of society is to be found in the rationalization ofcruelty: as simple as that' (p. 28 ) . A rationalized cruelty is perhaps notlikely to recommend itself to the creative artist as an object worthy ofhis sustained attention. So he becomes an outsider. He becomesDiderot's Nephew of Rameau; or, like Dostoevsky, he sends back Notesfrom the Underground, brutally destroying all our humanist pieties. Thewriter, then, is likely to reject society because it is founded on crueltyand sustained by petty rationalistic rules: also, because there are kindsof experience which are positively much more interesting to him. Trilling comments: 'Nothing is more characteristic of modem literaturethan its discovery and canonization of the primal non-ethical energies[po 25]. . . . I venture to say that the idea of losing oneself up to thepoint of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience withoutregard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly fromthe social bonds is an "element" somewhere in the mind of every modemperson who dares to think of what Arnold in his unaffected Victorianway called "the fulness of spiritual perfection'" (p. 35). In exploringthe primal energies, the artist is likely to discover that they can command horror as well as delight, yet he will continue his exploration withunabated fascination. 'Is this not the essence of the modem beliefabout the nature of the artist,' asks Trilling, 'the man who goes downinto that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul, a beginning not outgrown but established in humanity as we know it now,preferring the reality of this hell to the bland lies of the civilization thathas overlaid it?' (p. 26).

It is my contention that Australian literature is signalized by its earlyMEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962 39


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recognition of the nature of the social contract and by its long-standingawareness of the primal energies of mankind, an awareness which has

known little of the sweetening and freshness of early RomantIc optImIsm.Australia's literary heritage is based on a unique combination of glancesinto the pit and the erection of safety fences to prevent any toppling in.

'Australian literature,' writes NOIman Bartlett in the article previouslycited, 'so far as I have read it, utterly fails to grapple with the life ofpolitics' (p. 82). To be sure, we have not yet produced a C. P. Snow.Yet is it surprising that the creative minds in a country founded in convictism should have early learned to mistrust the political life? Whatbetter illustration than the first half century of British occupation ofAustralia of Nietzsche's notion that the basis of society is the rationalization of cruelty? When our authors turned to the convict system asviable material for their imaginations, its all-pervading sadism is whatstruck them most forcibly. The dreadfully enforced rules of the Ring,the absolute viciousness of characters like John Price: this is what wecarry away most vividly from Price Warung's Convict Days. MarcusClarke's For the Term of His Natural Life is crowded with incident, andsaturated with pain, which affects all members and both sides of thesystem. It is small wonder that our literature has little to tell us aboutthe life of politics except its cruelty. Even comparatively recent novelslike Dal Stivens's Jimmy Brockett and Frank Hardy's Power withoutGlory are centred in individuals who perceive the essential nature ofpolitical power and who achieve it by the imposition of their owncruel will on the lives of others.

Yet Australian literature is not without its genial elements. Indeed,Su ch Is Life, one of the great monuments of our fiction, is not only amajor social document; it is downright sociable. Tom Collins, thenarrator, is 'a Government official, of the ninth class,' and thereforesomething of an outcast; but the basis of the book rests in talk talk forits own sake, talk round the campfire, talk on the track. Yet all thetime shaping and controlling the talk, the meandering meditations, is anironic intelligence, powerfully aware of the importance of artistic form.Arthur Phillips's essay in The Australian Tradition is a first-rate demonstration of the carefully designed structure of Such Is Life. Yet thisbrilliant exposition of Furphy's craftsmanship is curiously deficient. T h ~ only use to which Phillips can see that craftsmanship being put is 'topresent a complete and significant picture of Riverina life' (p. 19) : Suchis Life as an especially well-organized and thorough historical document.In fairness, it should be said that Phillips goes Of, to add that below theaim of giving a complete account of the Riverina 'lay another layer ofpurpose: an impulsion to give the sense of Life, the feel of how things40 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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happen' (p. 22). But here Phillips stops he has little or nothing tosay on what was Furphy's sense of Life, how he felt things happeningto him. In spite of his sure grasp on the conduct of the n a r r a t l ~ e , Phillips overlooks the important hint offered by the title Such Is Lxfe.Legend has it that these were the last words of Ned Kelly before heswung a nihilistic summation of the meaning of his existence. Andit is worth refreshing our memories as to the last words of Tom Collins'long recollections:Now I had to enact the Cynic philosopher to Moriarty and Butler, and the aristocratic man with a 'past' to Mrs. Beaudesart; with the satisfaction of knowingthat each of these was acting a part to me. Such is life, my fellow-mummers,just like a poor player, that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and thencheapens down to mere nonentity. But le t me not hear any small witticism tothe further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang andblanky, signifying nothing.Such Is Life is, in effect, concerned with the discrepancy between whatwe are and what we appear to be, and with the futility of human endeavour. Nosey Alf appears to be a boundary rider, and proves in factto be Warrigal Alf's forsaken love. Tom Collins pretends to a certaincynicism; he is, in truth, overflowing with a kindness (a kindness whichcan have tragic consequences). Mrs. Beaudesart, insisting on her wellbred airs, is for all that a decayed and snobbish gentlewoman. All thecharacters of the novel are preparing faces for the faces that they meet,and are continually thwarted in the purposes of their lives. And this isthe point of the sociability of Such Is Life: it enables its characters toescape from the unbearable reality of being themselves. Society is anact, a decent bluff, which makes bearable the final emptiness, the nothingness of the honestly experienced inner life.

'Nothing' is the last word of one of the central classics of our literaryheritage; and it is a word which echoes and re-echoes throughout ourliterature. In the nineteenth century a persistent and single-mindedinvestigation of the horror of primal experience simply could not betolerated. The first duty of a frontier society is physical survival; henceevolved that most famous of all Australian survival techniques, the concept of mateship. In our literature, mateship is especially the propertyof Henry Lawson. And one does not have to go far in his Prose Works(Angus & Robertson, 1948 ) to understand its value for him. I t wasa necessary defence against the kind of experience which most powerfully laid hold on his imagination. I f mateship bulks so large in thecanon of Lawson's writing (as indeed it does), it was because behindand beneath it was an even more compelling awareness of horror, ofpanic and emptiness. Here, for instance, is a passage from one ofMEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962 41


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Lawson's best known tales, 'The Union Buries Its Dead', often citedas an example of Lawson's left-wing solidarity. That it may be; it issomething else as well. This is Lawson's description of the actual burialof the unidentified corpse:The gllive looked very narrow under the coffin, and I drew a breath of reliefwhen the box slid easily down. I saw a coffin get stuck once, at Rookwood,and it had to be yanked out with difficulty, and laid on the sods at the feet ofthe heartbroken relations , who howled dismally while the grave-diggers widenedthe hole. But they don't cut contracts so fine in the West. Our grave-diggerwas not altogether bowelless, and, out of respect for that human quality desscribed as "feelin's," he scraped up some light and dusty soil and threw it downto deaden the fall of the clay lumps on th e coffin. He also tried to steer thefirst few shovelfuls gently down against the end of the grave with the back ofthe shovel turned outwards, but th e hard dry Darling River clods reboundedand knocked all the same. I t didn't matter much nothing does. The fall ofthe lumps of clay on a stranger's coffin doesn't sound any different from the fallof the same thing on an ordinary wooden box at least I didn't notice anythingawesome or unusual in the sound; but, perhaps, one of us the most sensitiveemight have been impressed by being reminded of a burial long ago, when thethump of every sod jolted his heart (p . 47).'It didn't matter much nothing does.' The assertion is shocking in itsfinality, but it is the (sometimes unacknowledged) burden of much ofLawson's best writing. I f some of Lawson's stories seem rather thin,it is not because they were without content. Rather, they could notafford to face up to their true subject nothing. They had to takerefuge in sociability, they had to create some kind of face or personalitywhich would make shift in the world; in short, they had to opt formateship.

But mateship has its corollary in Lawson's work madness. Hisstories do take cognizance of those who choose to live for and intothemselves. The typical fate of such characters is suggested in a sto!),called 'Rats'. Some itinerant shearers come across what they take to betwo men struggling in the road. It proves to be a mad traveller wrestling with his swag:They reached the scene of the trouble and there stood a little withered old manby the track, with his arms folded l o s e up under his chin; he was d r e s ~ e d I . b' f trlngmost y i l l calIco patches; and half a dozen corks, suspended on Its 0 sfrom the brim of his hat dangled from his bleared optics to scare away thefii ' . . the~ s . He was scowling malignantly at a stout, dumpy swag whIch lay Inrruddle of the track (p. 112).At the end of the story the old man is still there, but he has taken ~ o fishing in the dust. Though a lonely old figure, he is not alone i l lLawson's bush. Indeed, it is peopled by a remarkably high percentage42 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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of hatters, of eccentrics, of people who are plain out of their mind.They have been driven mad partly by their election out of human

society, partly by the nature of the Australian outback. It may be, asPhillips maintains in 'The Democratic Theme', that one of the earlyexaltations experienced by the Australian Common Man was 'the know-ledge that life and victory over a harsh nature could be won only by thestrength of the individual's quality as a man' (p. 48). But for the Aus-tralian Uncommon Man, for the artist, the bush seems to have servedfrom a quite early date a somewhat different function. For manyAustralian writers there has been an intimate connection between thenature of the Australian landscape and the quality of the inner lifewhich they actually knew or which they embodied in their writing.Kenneth Slessor, in the first section of Five Visions of Captain Cook,has a moment of superb insight when he dates this connection from thebeginnings of our history; he ascribes the very discovery of Australiaand its subsequent cultural development to an act of madness:

How many mariners had made that choicePaused on the brink of mystery! "Choose now!"The winds roared, blowing home, blowing home,Over the Coral Sea. "Choose now!" the tradesCried once to Tasman, throwing him for choiceTheir teeth or shoulders, and the Dutchman choseThe wind's way, turning north. "Choose, Bougainville!"The wind cried once, and Bougainville had heardThe voice of God, calling him prudentlyOut of the dead lee shore, and chose the north,The wind's way. So, too, Cook made choice,Over the brink, into the devil's mouth,With four months' food, and sailors wild with dreamsOf English beer, the smoking barns of home.So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout,So men write poems in Australia.

(Poems, pp. 57-58).Cook sailed over the brink to a continent which, for our nineteenth

century writers, was literally capable of driving its inhabitants insane.Lawson and the other writers of the 'nineties were aware of the bushas a physical fact, inescapably present to their immediate lives. For themthe insane horror of bush life was perhaps most powerfully projectedinto one of their recurring themes the child lost in the bush; not thechild lost and found dead, but the child lost, simply swallowed up inall that emptiness. With the possibility of such a fate constantly closeto them, it is little wonder that our nineteenth century writers skirtedround what they instinctively guessed to be their true subject, the indi-vidual human being confronting the primal energies at the centre of hisMEANJIN QUARTERLY, 1I1arch, 1962 43


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being on the stage of the Australian continent. Instead, they took refuge in the defence of sociable yarning with a group of mates. Whenthey did confront the primeval heart of the matter, it was usually in theform of an attempt to physically subdue the bush and so control itspower to subvert the mind.

The first Australian poet directly to confront the heart of his ownexistence without the mediation of landscape was Christopher Brennan.The disintegration of Brennan's personal life is legendary in the Australian literary consciousness. He is our supreme myth figure of theRomantic artist. It is equally important to realize that in his verse heencountered and recorded just as much horror as in his living. Morethan any other Australian artist, Brennan suffered the paradox of thelate-Romantic experience of love. By love possessed, the poet is drivento ever-increasing intensity of passion at the same time as he comes toever-increasing knowledge of its final emptiness and capacity to destroy.Foreseeing the end, he yet will not, cannot, forsake his loving until it hasaccomplished its bitter fulfilment. In Brennan's work, this pattern isrendered with all the ambiguous fascination of its darkness. To besure, Brennan writes with rare felicity of the brief Paradisal happinessat the beginning of love. But his perception soon shifts to the monstrousness of Lilith and her relation to Adam. In the Lilith sequencefrom 'The Forest of Night', Lilith, the legendary other wife of Adam,representative of dark and powerful sexuality, addresses her final line toAdam with shuddering and characteristic completeness: 'Go forth: begreat, 0 nothing, I have said' (The Verse of Christopher Brennan, ed.Chisholm and Quinn, p. 140).

The first Australian novel to deal in depth with the relation betweena man and a woman was published at much the same time as Brennanwas writing some of his best and most characteristic verse HenryHandel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908). This fine book mightalmost serve as a text to Professor Trilling's account of 'The ModemElement in Modem Literature'. There is, for instance, Krafft's impassioned defence of the artist as the man who seeks his realities beneath the bland lies of civilisation, who gains his wisdom through personal suffering. More important and at the centre of the story isMaurice Guest's obsessed and self-destroying love of Louise Dufrayer.At one level, the novel is a splendidly objective and detailed account ofthe torments of sexual jealousy; at another, it is a fictional rendering ofthe Romantic myth of destructive passion. Maurice's life ends insuicide, and it is with these words that Richardson brings to a close heraccount of his existence:44 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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Then, as suddenly as the flame of a candle is puffed out by the wind, his lifewent from him. His right hand twitched, made as if to open, closed again, andstiffened round the iron of the handle. His jaw fell, and, like an inner lid, aglazed film rose over his eyes, which for hours afterwards continued to stare,with an expression of horror and amaze, at the naked branches of the tree.THROUGHOUT the course of our literary history, then, Australian writershave had deeply located in their imagination (either consciously or un-consciously) a sense of the horror of sheer existence. In the nineteenthcentury, writers sought to protect themselves through direct assaults ontheir physical environment and by erecting a structure of sociabilityappropriate to the conditions of their time and place. At about thetum of the century, two major writers emerged who were prepared toconfront the secret source of their inspiration directly and withoutflinching. Among our contemporary writers the strength of the basicstimulus remains unabated, but the honest virtues of the Lawson tra-dition no longer seem entirely adequate for containing its affronts totheir civilized integrity. Have our modem writers developed any techniques to make bearable the nihilism of their deepest experience? Itseems to me that they have, and that the most important of them havebeen generated within that range of activity which I have postulatedas Australia's literary heritage.

A. D. Hope, for instance, seeks his salvation in valuing for its ownsake the intensity of the experience which brings him to his knowledgeof emptiness. Hope's love poetry has been described as puritanic in thebitter disgust which is often implied in the very moment of recordinglove's sensuous splendour. I would not absolutely repudiate such aview, but I would further suggest that the fury of his love poetry alsoderives from his need to grasp all that love can offer in order to makebearable the horror and disillusion that follow. In 'The Dinner', thus,he imagines love as a cannibalistic feast, whose savage delights arerendered the more savage and delightful because it is themselves thenatives consume. This is how the poem ends:

Talking in deep, soft, grumbling undertonesThey gnaw and crack and suck the marrowy bones.The tit-bits and choice meats they pluck and pressEach on the other, with grave tenderness,And touch and laugh; their strange, fierce features moveWith the delight and confidence of love.I watch their loves, I see their human feastWith the doomed comprehension of the beast;I feel the sweat creep through my bristling hair;Hollow with rage and fear, I crouch and stare,And hear their great jaws strip and crunch and chew,And know the flesh they rend and tear is you. (Poems, p. 74)

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Poetry of this order is among the most intense being written in Australia today. It seeks to cope with the historic dilemma of the Australian writer by insisting on its personalness. But there are other writerswho have kept their eyes turned outwards and have developed a meansof using the Australian landscape which, while derived from the earlierwriters, has taken on a new sophistication. A feature of a good deal ofrecent Australian writing has been its willingness to use an explorationof the bush as an analogy for the exploration of the individual soul.The bush becomes a metaphor for the self. Just as at the heart of thecontinent is a burning, insane emptiness, so too at the heart of a manis the horror of his pre-history. James McAuley's poem, 'Terra Australis', for instance, makes quite explicit the analogical uses to whichthe Australian land can be put:

Voyage within you, on the fabled ocean,An d you will find that Southern Continent,Quiros' vision his hidalgo heartAnd mythical Australia, where resideAll things in their imagined counterpart.I t is your land of similes: the wattleScatters its pollen on the doubting heart;The flowers are wide-awake; the air gives ease.There you come home; the magpies call you JackAnd whistle like larrikins at you from the trees.There too the angophora preaches on the hillsidesWith the gestures of Moses; and the white cockatoo,Perched on his limbs, screams with demoniac pain;And who shall say on what errand the insolent emuWalks between morning and night on the edge of the plain?But northward in valleys of the fiery GoatWhere the sun like a centaur vertically shootsHis raging arrows with unerring aim,Stand the ecstatic solitary pyresOf unknown lovers, featureless with flame.

(Under Aldebaran, p. 51).Fiction, however, offers more extended opportunities for the land

s c a ~ ~ to. be used in this manner. A novel which accepts such opportUnItIes IS Randolph Stow's To the Islands. Set in the north-west of~ e s t e . r n Austral.ia, it tells of an ageing missionary, Heriot, who abjuresh:s f a l t h ~ commIts wh.at he believes to be murder, and deliberately loseshImself In the land ill order to find himself. He strikes out 'to thei ~ l a n d s ' , the phrase by which the local natives mean death. In thislIteral and metaphorical journey of self-discovery the word which recurs more than all others is 'nothing'. In a violent scene, before he46 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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flees from the mission, Heriot deliberately breaks a crucifix, symbolicallyshattering his old faith. 'I believe in nothing,' he says, 'I can pull downthe world' (p. 75 ) . And his thoughts are on nothingness until the ending of the book, when, with death approaching, his journey to the islandsalmost completed, he whispers to himself, 'My soul is a strange country'(p. 204) . In the strange emptiness of the land and of his being, Heriothas found a kind of strength.

One of the most celebrated of recent Australian novels uses, like Tothe Islands, the exploration of the continent as an extended metaphorfor the exploration of the soul. The richness of Voss can be accountedfor, in part, by the fact that it fuses almost all those aspects of Australia's literary heritage which define both its modernity and its Australianness. The genuinely subversive drift of White's thinking is brilliantly indicated in his earlier work, The Aunt's Story. The nature of this record of the progress of Theodora Goodman into insanity is set down withshattering clarity in the epigraphs which White appended to Sections IIand III of his novel. Section II, 'Jardin Exotique', is preceded by aquotation from the American, Henry Miller, which concludes with theenlightening phrase, 'the great fragmentat ion of maturity '. Section III,'Holstius', which chronicles the final and complete collapse of Theodora'sreason, is headed by a single sentence from Olive Schreiner: 'Whenyour life is most real, to me you are mad.' It might well stand as atext for many of the greatest achievements of Australian writing.

At the centre of Voss is the disturbing figure of the German explorer.White himself has indicated that this character was influenced by Hitler,'the arch-megalomaniac of the day'. And Voss imposes his will on thesmall community he leads by exactly that process which Nietzsche diagnosed as the foundation of political life the rationalization of cruelty.The distance between Patrick White and Price Warung may not be asgreat as we at first supposed. Voss lurches off into the fearful heart ofAustralia with his ill-assorted band of followers lurches off first intocontact with the land itself, ultimately with the continent's native race,those living representatives of humanity's pre-history. In the end, Vossis quite literally destroyed by the primal energies which he is obsessed tounderstand: the native boy Jacky severs his head from his body. WithVoss, 'losing oneself to the point of self-destruction' becomes more thanan idea, it is an actually achieved destiny. Before he reaches the endof his own life, he is responsible for the death of all his party save Judd,the tough commonsensical ex-convict who returns to civilization with hisdistorted account of the realities he has encountered beneath its blandsurface. Palfreyman, the professional sufferer, perishes by the spears ofMEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962 47


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the blacks; Le Mesurier, who has had faith both kindled and exun-guished by Voss, slits his own throat a curious descendant of MauneeGuest.

So Voss's mad detennination to subdue the continent leads him todestruction at its unrelenting heart. He, too, finally comes to nothing.But his journey has not been in vain. As with Heriot in To the Islands,the very recognition of his nothingness becomes a means of salvation.It purges him of his burning pride and cruelty. At the moment ofVoss's death, Laura Trevelyan, suffering in spiritual sympathy back inSydney, rises up in her bed and cries:How important it is to understand the three stages. Of God into Man. Man.And man returning into God. . .. When man is truly humbled, when he haslearnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to becoming so. In the end, hemay ascend (p. 411).Voss's journey from pridefering, humility, and love.not been in vain.

to the final void has taken him through sufIt has educated him into humanity. It has

I f the alien figure of Voss can fuse so many of the deeper forces whichhave gone to the making of our literature, one might expect that ournative myth hero, Ned Kelly, would elicit from Australian writers someof their most profoundly representative work. In Douglas Stewart'streatment of the outlaw, for instance, it is easy to point to many characteristic Australian traits the hatred of authority, the masculine vigourand toughness, the outback independence, the refusal to admit defeat.Phillips, in his essay in The Australian Tradition, has gone beyond theseobvious symptoms of nationality. 'Australian Romanticism and Stewart'sNed Kelly' (pp. 96-112) represents the playas a contest between theforces of Vitality and Respectability, or, as Phillips symbolizes thestruggle, between Ulysses and Telemachus. This is a reading whichclearly has much to recommend it; but also embodied in the very es-sence of the drama are some of those darker elements of Romanticismwhich, I suggest, have been so consistently present to the Australianliterary imagination.

Ned, Joe Byrne, and the rest of the gang may possess the vitality ofUlysses, the willingness to 'give-it-a-go' we traditionally expect of theAustralian. But in the end the energies which dominate Ned in particular are not so much vital as mortal. He strives towards death ratherthan life; and in this enterprise he is closely attended by the self-destructive irony of Joe Byrne. Their path to death leads through themadness of the Australian bush. For all Ned's talk of outback freedom,what emerges most strongly from the play is a sense of hatters baying48 MEANJIN QUARTERLY, March, 1962


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at the moon, of the subversion that the bush works on those who commit themselves to its primitive keeping. Ned's vision, a distortion of ourrational Australian values, becomes the nightmare of madness.

The dreams of freedom and power which bring Ned to death are notpresented as a purely personal affair. Throughout the play, the verseworks to make him not so much the representative Australian as therepresentative of Australia. He incarnates the spirit of the land. Andin this incarnation he does not stand in direct opposition to the Respectable (the Livings, the Tarletons, and the rest). It is not simply Ulyssesversus Telemachus. The Kelly gang and the men they rob are complementary, needing each other to complete a single image of the Australian spirit. Ned and his mates are betrayed by those they have loved(Aaron Sherritt) or those who profess to love them (Curnow) ; they aredestroyed by the men to whom they are tied by the indestructible bondsof hate. 'What happens is the people's doing,' ~ a y s Byrne; 'and if theyhang him,/They hang themselves' (Four Plays, p. 213 ) . In the wildshouts of the troopers who close in on Ned in the last scene there is thefierce joy of those who are destroying part of themselves. I t is the finalparadox of Ned KeUy that Ned's expansive dreams can be realized onlyin death; that those who, in self-protection, destroy him extinguish inso doing their own most vital spirit.

And in that paradox lies the clue to our literary tradition. The canonof our writing presents a fac;ade of mateship, egalitarian democracy,landscape, nationalism, realistic toughness. But always behind the fac;adelooms the fundamental concern of the Australian literary imagination.That concern, marked out by our national origins and given directionby geographic necessity, is to acknowledge the terror at the basis ofbeing, to explore its uses, and to build defences against its dangers. It isthat concern which gives Australia's literary heritage its special forceand distinction, which guarantees its continuing modernity.

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