AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE
AS I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various
books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are
Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to devote a chapter to
Australians in literature whom I have known, counting both people from
the Old Country who became Australians by residence, and those who were
born or educated in Australia, though their writing career has been in
England.
I never met either Gordon or Kendall—Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry
Clarence Kendall, the twin stars of Australian poetry, naturally come
first to one’s mind in writing of Australian literature, because poetry
in Australia, as usual, preceded prose as an art.
Gordon, whose nephew, Henry Ratti, living in London, had just placed
himself in communication with me in a couple of long letters, and
invited me to lunch when he died so prematurely, had been dead for
nearly ten years before I landed in Australia. But Kendall did not die
till I had been in Australia for nearly three years. I was in Victoria
when he died; I think I had actually been appointed to the Chair of
Modern History in the University of Sydney before it happened, so I
missed him by a very narrow margin. So little stir did his death cause
in Victoria that I never even heard of it, and imagined that he had been
dead for years, though he wrote lyrics only excelled in music by
Shelley’s, Swinburne’s and Poe’s in the whole of English literature. Yet
he had visited Melbourne, and was, in fact, there and in the company of
Gordon the very day before his rival died. Kendall, unlike Gordon, was
Australian born.
Far the greatest author born on Australian soil is, of course, Mrs.
Humphry Ward, a Tasmanian by birth, though Australia had long passed out
of her life before she wrote. “Tasma” was also a Tasmanian by birth, and
“George Egerton,” whose father, Captain Dunne, fought in the New Zealand
war, was born in Melbourne.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, on the other hand, was not only born in Queensland,
the daughter of a prominent Queensland politician, Thomas Lodge Murray
Prior, but has gone to her native land for the scene of her brilliant
novels. Ill-health kept her from coming often to Addison Mansions, where
she had a double claim to literary homage, for, apart from her own
eminence as a novelist, she has a matrimonial connection with William
Mackworth Praed, the brilliant novelist and father of Society Poetry.
Rolf Boldrewood, though born in London, has been so long in Australia
that he almost counts as a Colonial (Australian born) rather than a
Colonist (settler). He went to the old Sydney College in New South Wales
more than seventy years ago, and though he spent the greater part of his
life as a Police Magistrate and Warden of the gold-fields in New South
Wales, began life as one of the pioneer squatters of Victoria. His
experiences gave him a rich equipment for writing tales of wild life in
the old Colonial days, like _Robbery Under Arms_, with which he made
such a huge reputation in 1888. I remember him as a writer ten years
before that, when he used to send a weekly _causerie_ to the
_Australasian_, admirably written under his famous pseudonym. I believe
that he used to call it “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He had already
written and published the novel which he afterwards called _The
Squatter’s Dream_. It was a thin paper volume, a sort of cross between
our sixpennies and the French three francs fifty coverless novels, and
it was called in those days _Ups and Downs_. It was a true story; it
dealt with the ups and downs of the famous Mossgiel Station, which made
John Simson’s great fortune, and the ruin by drought of the De Salis
brothers who had the station before him. It was published anonymously.
Rolf Boldrewood’s real name is Thomas Alexander Browne. His mother was a
Miss Alexander. Both the Brownes and the Alexanders were huge men;
Rolf’s brother, Sylvester Browne, was the tallest man in Australia, a
couple of inches taller than my uncle, Sir Charles (who was just under
six foot six, and I think may have owed some of his influence in the
early days to his great stature). The Brownes were not only very tall,
but very strongly-built men. Their adventurousness took them to West
Australia, where they made large fortunes during the mining boom.
Guy Boothby and Louis Becke, on the other hand, both much younger men,
were real Colonials, Becke having been born at Port Macquarie, New South
Wales, and Boothby at Adelaide, where his father was a member of
Parliament and his grandfather a Judge. That did not prevent him from
leading the wildest life. At one time he was an explorer and crossed
Australia from north to south. At another time he was stoker on a tramp
steamer trading between Singapore and Borneo. He “struck oil” with the
detective stories of Dr. Nikola, which the _Windsor Magazine_ ran in
opposition to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the _Strand Magazine_,
and at one time was making nine thousand a year out of his writing. I
remember his chartering an eight hundred ton steam yacht, and he had
some wonderful prize dogs at the Manor House, close to the Kempton Park
racecourse, in which he lived.
Becke was never so fortunate in his earnings, though he was a far
superior writer. He acquired his wonderful knowledge of the Australian
coast and the South Sea Islands as supercargo of one of the schooners
which trade between the islands and Sydney. He was one of Fisher Unwin’s
discoveries, and came very near achieving a _Kidnapped_ and _Treasure
Island_ success, for which, as far as first-hand knowledge was
concerned, he was infinitely better equipped than Stevenson.
Frank Bullen, Becke’s rival in South Sea knowledge, was not an
Australian, but born in Paddington. Like Becke, he was in the Merchant
Service. I have more to say about him in another chapter.
Ada Cambridge, who was for a long time the best-known novel-writer in
Australia, was born in Norfolk, and spent all her time in East Anglia
till she married the Rev. J. F. Cross, and sailed with him to Australia
in 1870, the year of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death. She published her
first novel about seven years later. Cambridge was her maiden name.
Ethel Turner, Mrs. H. R. Curlewis, is another of the few Australian
authors living in Australia who have had large publics in England. As a
reviewer, I hailed with delight her first books, _Seven Little
Australians_ and _The Family at Mis-Rule_, and prophesied the wide and
continuous success which she has attained with her stories of child life
in Australia. Mrs. Curlewis was born in Yorkshire, but she has lived in
Sydney ever since I can remember.
Frances Campbell (Mrs. Howard Douglas Campbell), the author of _Love the
Atonement_, _The Two Queenslanders_, and other novels, married a cousin
of the late Duke of Argyll, who was out in Queensland, and commenced
writing at his Grace’s suggestion. In point of fact, she came to us with
a letter of introduction from him. Since then she has been an active and
successful journalist, doing several special journeys abroad as
correspondent for the great London dailies. She is not to be confused
with Mrs. Vere Douglas Campbell, the mother of Marjorie Bowen, who is
also a novelist. I made the mistake myself once.
Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, who under the pseudonym of “Iota” wrote the
famous _A Yellow Aster_, was a beautiful and spirited Irish girl, the
daughter of a country gentleman, who took to hospital nursing as a
profession, and married a doctor, whose ill-health drove him to
Australia. Her life there was full of hard experiences, but she did not
make a mark in literature till her return to England. Andrew Lang was
struck with the extraordinary ability of _A Yellow Aster_, and urged
with all his influence one of the old classical publishing houses to
bring it out, but in vain. Hutchinson saw his opportunity, accepted the
book, advertised it with genius, and made a colossal success of it.
Other successes followed, so real that she was able to send her growing
boys to a crack public school. Another novelist not born in Australia,
but resident there for some years, was “Rita,” who was educated in
Sydney.
The Countess von Arnim, author of a delightful series of books from
_Elizabeth and Her German Garden_ to _Fraulein Schmidt_ and _Mr.
Anstruther_, was an Australian born, the daughter of Mr. Herron
Beauchamp.
Haddon Chambers, one of my earliest literary friends in London, though I
have seen little of him for many years, I met because we came from
Australia at about the same time. He was born near Sydney, of Irish
parents, and was for a while in the New South Wales Civil Service, like
his father before him. Feeling, as I did, that Australia was no place
for a literary career, he visited England when he was twenty, and
returned to England for good when he was twenty-two, a handsome, alert,
indomitable Australian boy. He looked very boyish in those days.
Beginning life in England as a journalist and story-writer, he suddenly
took London by storm with his play, _Captain Swift_. Captain Swift was
one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm-Tree has created, and from that
time forward Chambers became one of the dramatists who count.
To my mind, the best author living in Australia at the present moment is
the Rev. William Henry Fitchett, President of the General Conference of
the Methodist Church of Australia, editor of a magazine and a weekly
newspaper, and Principal of a ladies’ college in Melbourne. He made his
name with a series of remarkable books about the exploits of the British
army—writing at first under the pseudonym of “Vedette.” Few men have
ever written so brilliantly or so sympathetically on the subject as the
author of _Fights for the Flag_ and _Deeds that Won the Empire_.
A. B. Paterson, the poet who wrote “The Man from Snowy River,” is an
Australian by birth and residence. He is another of the few Australian
authors who have a vogue in England without ever having lived there. He
is recognised not only as one of the chief poets of Australia, but as a
publicist. He is a solicitor by profession.
W. H. Ogilvy, the best living Australian poet, was not born in
Australia, nor does he live there now, but he spent many years in the
Australian bush, and caught its spirit better than any poet except Adam
Lindsay Gordon.
The Countess of Darnley, who wrote some fiction a few years ago, was the
beauty of Melbourne when I was there in the ’eighties. Lord Darnley met
her when he came out to Australia with one of the English cricket
elevens. He was then the Hon. Ivo Bligh, a name which will never be
forgotten in the history of sport.
The charming and elegant Eleanor Mordaunt, author of _Lu of the Ranges_,
the best novel ever written about hardships in Australia, is English by
birth.
“_Lu of the Ranges_,” says a _nil admirari_ Australian newspaper, whose
editor could not have known that she was born in England, “is a notable
contribution to Australian literature.... It is solidly constructed,
finely written, frank to the verge of brutality, and inherently
Australian. Lu, pictured on the cover by the fool illustrator as a
charming English maiden, is a drab and very human girl of the backwoods,
who, to the end of her life, could not speak grammatically. Her language
is the sort that looks neater printed with a dash; and she has a temper
of her own. A hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches
to take care of herself ‘on her own.’
“A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to heat and cold,
to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost incredible isolation.... For
the children of the bush are, above all things, old, like the primitive
forms of vegetation, the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are
with their fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the cities,
they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again quite leaves them;
or else, scared and bewildered, they creep back again to the wild places
whence they came. But to the irresponsible gaiety of childhood they are
for ever strangers.”
It was the outcome of the seven years of struggles, more than once
coming perilously near starvation, which she had in the colony of
Victoria. Some of her short stories are good enough for Rudyard Kipling.
That she has not assumed her place in the front rank of novelists is due
only to the immense barriers to recognition which have to be surmounted
owing to the mountains of fiction which are cast up every year, and
stand between the new writer and fame.
When I asked Eleanor Mordaunt about her life in Australia she said—
“In Australia I edited a woman’s paper, and made gardens, and blouses
for tea-room girls, and worked in an engineer’s shop at metal work, and
was four times carried into public hospitals for dying. I never had a
penny in the bank—and more than once not in the world. Once I lay in bed
for three days because I had nothing to eat. Then came thirty pounds for
a manuscript of essays from _Lothian_ of Melbourne (published 1909 under
the title of _Rosemary_), and seven pounds a woman owed me for painting
her a set of silk curtains, and two pounds for _The Garden of
Contentment_, and I got up and went out and bought a pound of chops, and
cooked and ate them all. I did all my housework at night, and all the
washing.
“In Leek this time I lived on fifteen shillings a week with the weavers,
and knew no one else except the two daughters of the Trade Union
secretary, and never had so much love and kindness in my life. The book
comes out next autumn, and is called _Bellamy_.”
Mary Gaunt, the novelist and traveller, was born and brought up in
Victoria. Her father was a well-known judge in the Colony. She had met
with considerable success in journalism before she left the Melbourne
University.
Dr. George Ernest Morrison, who made himself so famous as correspondent
of _The Times_ in Peking, was, as I have said elsewhere, a
fellow-student and friend of mine at the Melbourne University, and has
been a great friend ever since. It was I who persuaded Horace Cox to
publish his _An Australian in China_, the only book he has ever
published, though I myself conveyed to him an offer of a thousand pounds
on account for a book about China before the Allied Powers invaded it.
He was unwilling to enter into a contract, and the matter dropped. He
has since then resigned his position on _The Times_, and become English
adviser to the Government of China. His book on China, whenever it does
come, will be read all over the world, because no European has ever
understood Chinese politics as well as he has.
His knowledge of the country Chinese, the two hundred million toiling
agricultural poor, is just as extraordinary. His gigantic journeys
across China have given him a chance of seeing them as no other
Anglo-Saxon, and probably no other white man, ever has seen them. His
first journey was from Shanghai to Rangoon by land in 1894, which he
accomplished at a cost of eighteen pounds, and on which he went unarmed,
as usual. That is the journey described in _An Australian in China_. His
second was from Bangkok in Siam to Yunnan city in China and round
Tonquin in 1896; his third across Manchuria from Stretensk in Siberia to
Vladivostok; his fourth from Peking to the border of Tonquin; his fifth
from Honan city in Central China across Asia to Andijan in Russian
Turkestan, nearly four thousand miles.
Morrison, whenever he came back to England from the East, used to come
straight to Addison Mansions. One night he turned up about 10 p.m.
“How long have you been in London?” I asked.
“About two hours.”
The hero of so many striking adventures (in which most people would feel
inclined to include the siege of Peking, for he was badly wounded in it,
and without his leadership the city would have fallen) is, though his
bushy hair has turned snow-white, singularly youthful-looking. His
rounded clean-shaven face has not a line or a wrinkle from its long
sojourn under Eastern suns. His blue eye has a merry twinkle in it which
gives his face a humorous expression when it is not hardened for action.
Those who have seen him in a crisis, know how stern and resolute and
uncompromising it can be. He has a slim, active figure.
Just before he was appointed _Times_ correspondent in China, I
approached Sir Henry Norman, who was at that time one of the editors of
the _Daily Chronicle_, and whom I knew, to try and get the proprietors
of that paper to give him a similar appointment in China, or in some
country where Spanish is spoken, for Morrison speaks Spanish fluently. I
enumerated all the qualifications which immediately afterwards led _The
Times_ to make the best appointment they made since De Blowitz. At the
end of it Norman just said with a cold smile, “Oh, all your geese are
swans,” and changed the subject. I wondered if he ever let the
proprietors of the _Chronicle_ know what a goose they had lost, and whom
they could have secured for quite a moderate salary. To his honour be it
known, that Moberly Bell, of _The Times_, recognised Morrison’s value
the moment the young doctor approached him.
Morrison’s middle fame was of a quite unusual sort. His walk across
Australia without money and without arms had been a nine days’ wonder.
His gallant explorations in New Guinea, culminating in his being brought
home with a barbed wooden spear-head inside him, and being sent on to
Edinburgh because no one in Australia could extract it, made him a
celebrity in Scotland as well as Melbourne. But when Prof. Chiene
extracted the spear-head successfully, Morrison’s exploits, for the time
being, were lost sight of in those of the great surgeon, and he became
known as “Chiene’s case.”
G. W. Rusden, the only important historian of New Zealand and Australia
till Henry Gyles Turner’s book appeared, I knew very well. We lived
together, until I was married, at Cotmandene, Punt Road, South Yarra, a
suburb of Melbourne. In fact, I was married from there. He had for many
years been clerk of the Parliaments in Melbourne, and was actually
engaged in writing his histories when we were living together. He was a
strange mixture in his sentiments—a violent Tory in everything except
where natives were concerned. But he was even more violent as an
advocate for coloured people. At that time the Maories were giving a
good deal of trouble in New Zealand, and Bryce, the Minister for Native
Affairs, showed great resolution and capacity in dealing with them. This
infuriated Rusden, who, partly from the yellow journals in New Zealand,
and partly from Sir George Grey, who had been Governor and afterwards
Premier of the Colony, gleaned a farrago of libels, accusing Bryce of
murdering native women and children. He showed these reports to me
triumphantly. At the risk of losing his friendship, for he was very
touchy, I begged him not to make any use of these materials, which
appeared to me patently false. But he persisted in inserting portions of
them. Years afterwards, when both he and I were living in England, Bryce
brought an action for libel against him in the London Courts on these
very grounds. Rusden went to my uncle’s firm, Sladen and Wing, as his
solicitors, on account of his friendship with my other uncle, Sir
Charles. My cousin told me about it. “Well,” I said, “make him pay
anything to keep it out of court. I was living with him when he wrote
that part of his history, and saw the materials, and he hasn’t a leg to
stand on.”
But Rusden was a great deal too stubborn to compromise—and the verdict
against him was five thousand pounds damages.
Turner also is an old friend of mine. He was long manager of the
Commercial Bank in Melbourne, and was one of the founders and editors of
the _Melbourne Review_. He and the late Alexander Sutherland, who was a
schoolmaster, wrote the excellent book on Australian literature which
has been the foundation of all subsequent works on the subject,
especially in the matter of our knowledge of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
And here I must mention my two closest Australian literary
friends—Arthur Patchett Martin and Margaret Thomas. Margaret Thomas, who
was brought up in Australia, though she was actually born in England,
began life as a sculptor. She won the silver medal of the Royal Academy,
and executed, among other public works, the memorial to Richard
Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and the memorials to various Somerset
celebrities in the Somerset Valhalla, founded by the Kinglakes at
Taunton. She was so successful also as a portrait painter that she was
able to retire with a competency, and devote the rest of her life to
travel and book-writing. She has written travel-books on Syria, Spain
and Morocco, and hand-books on painting and sculpture. Probably no one
living has such a wide knowledge of the picture-galleries of the
Continent.
Patchett Martin was born at Woolwich, but went to Australia at an early
age, and was educated at the Melbourne Grammar School and University. He
helped to found, and edited the _Melbourne Review_, and was intimately
associated with the theatre, because his sister married Garner, the
principal theatrical impresario of Australia. He settled in London in
1882, and practically introduced Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems to their
popularity in England, where they had been neglected except for the
reviews and articles which appeared in _Baily’s Magazine_, about the
time of Gordon’s death a dozen years before. While editor of the
_Melbourne Review_, Martin was among the very first to “boom” Robert
Louis Stevenson, who was his model in his own delightful poems and
essays. His big, burly form and hot, good-humoured face were very
familiar in the Savage Club in the ’eighties.
Australian authors in London centre round the Royal Colonial Institute,
and the _British Australasian_, the editor of which, Mr. Chomley, is the
secretary of the literary circle at the Royal Colonial Institute, which
meets on Thursday nights, and has most interesting papers and
discussions.
Both the former librarian (my old friend, J. R. Boosè, who is now the
secretary) and the present, P. Evans Lewin, who was for a brief period
the chief librarian of South Australia, have kept the track of nearly
every book which has been published about Australia or by an Australian,
and Australian authors and journalists make a regular club of the
Institute when they are in London.
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