1890s Romanticism: Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and the Construction of a National Cultural Imaginary

ABSTRACT

This article re-examines the nationalist poetry published by canonical Australian poets A. B. “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson in the influential journal the Bulletin from 1889 to 1900 as a delayed, settler-colonial instance of Romantic ballad revival. Bush ballads were centrally involved in both the poetic and media dynamics characteristic of earlier Romantic movements. Romanticism therefore provides a new framework to assess one myth of Australian settler-cultural nationalism (naturalized by certain groups within Australian literary studies) that Paterson and Lawson are representative of an organic and distinctly white Australian poetic tradition. This article argues that nationalist ballads used Romantic modes to fabricate a deep white historicity in the bush, establishing a folkloric tradition in a situation with neither an evident folk nor indeed any artifactual lore.

Romantic poetry was present in multiple forms in Australian colonial culture through the nineteenth century. From its founding as a British penal colony in 1788, many of its first settler poets were closely linked to their Romantic contemporaries in Britain. Barron Field, for instance, who wrote the first book of Australian poetry in 1819, First Fruits of Australian Poetry, was close friends with Charles Lamb and claimed that Wordsworth and Coleridge were particularly keen on his poem “Kangaroo.” Field’s job as a colonial administrator (and his intimacy with major figures of British Romanticism) allows his verse to be read as exemplifying the Australian colonies’ history as a romantic contact zone. Field’s poetry, one might say, is an instance of British Romanticism in Australia.

There is also the place of Australia in British Romanticism. For the early generations writing poetry in English in Australia, like the colonial poets Charles Harpur and Henry Kendal, British Romanticism was at once a condition to aspire to and the limit of any conceivable poetics. For both British sojourners like Field and the “native born” (white settlers born in colonies), dwelling in Australia was imagined through Romantic verse. Romanticism was used by poets in Australia’s early settlement as a cultural matrix through which they could imagine themselves at home in Australia. Equally, Romanticism presented itself to these poets as a transformative discourse capable of binding communities together through ties of sentiment and fellow feeling. But the scale of these demands has resulted in the movement’s actual relationship to Australian poetry becoming somewhat opaque. For example, although many young colonial poets during the mid-century began to set some of their poems within the Australian landscape, the locale that these poems project still remained firmly within the inherited imagination of Australia as both arcadian and infused with a threatening but beguiling primitivism exemplified in Robert Southey’s 1794 Botany Bay Eclogues. For many later critics, Romanticism’s influence on Australian poetic imaginings therefore actually delayed and complicated the emergence of an organic or distinctly “home grown” poetic tradition. For this reason, Australian Romanticism has been seen as something of an oxymoron. Since Paul Kane’s Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Romanticism has been theorized as a reverberating absence rather than a movement in its own right in Australia: Australian poetry, in effect, “fell asleep as neo-classicist and awoke as a Victorian” (10).

In this essay, I turn to a later generation of colonial poetry, in line with a model of Romantic influence that sees it as both a discrete movement potentially active across different chronologies as well as an omnipresent influence and context for settler Australian poetry throughout the nineteenth century. This is the fin de siècle generation of poets writing in the lead-up to the Federation of the colonies in 1901 (the moment of Australia’s political constitution as a unified nation) and publishing in the very significant journal the Bulletin, which prosecuted an assertive program of cultural nationalism. Categorizing these poets as Romantic may at first seem paradoxical, for they loudly and frequently declared their verse to represent the overturning of the influence of British poetry in the colony (an influence so evident in such poets as Field, Harpur and Kendall) as part of their commitment to the creation of an authentically Australian poetic tradition of the bush ballad, a nationalist poetics freed from the need to follow British models or to seek British approval. But the primary means through which such poets as A. B. “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson undertook this task, becoming the most canonical and most celebrated of Australian poets in the process, was by staging a local ballad renaissance that followed, in all its important details, the Romantic revival of the ballad as a central poetic form of cultural nationalist projects. In other words: the cultural nationalism of the 1890s represented a colonial Australian movement of Romanticism even as it was positioned as a liberation from aesthetic influence of its British precursors.

This article focuses on Paterson and Lawson, as well as the Bulletin media ecology in which they were publishing, as the bards of an Australian Romantic cultural nationalism. It examines how the ballad functioned in this ecology, just as it did for the British Romantics, as a mediating form through which members of an urban intelligentsia could position themselves as representatives and interpreters of a collective and authentic folk utterance. But the article also explores some of the specific contradictions and torsions that were enacted on and through these romantic modes as they appear in the Australian colonies during the 1890s, a period which represented the culminative moment of a national independence movement.¹ As Lawson put it in 1887, the “British” question hinged on the differentiation between “The Land that belongs to the Lord and the Queen / And the Land that belongs to you” (“A Song of the Republic”). But this attempted opposition to the colonial metropolis was complicated by the history of settler invasion and occupation of Aboriginal land, which threatened the ability of nationalist ballads to mediate a white historicity that moved benevolently between the colonial past of cultural dependency and a postcolonial national posterity to come.

As Maureen McLane has shown, English and Sottish ballad revivals were intimately involved in a Romantic desire to “restore poetry … to its imagined origins in speech and gesture,” positioning the ballad as a vehicle with which to construct and explore connections between “primitivity, modernity and historicity” (423–24). For a school of Australian critics writing in the 1950s, which notably included Russel Ward and Vance Palmer and was known as the “radical nationalists,” Paterson and Lawson’s ballads were representative of a folkloric history and an ethos of mateship that were rooted in the historical traditions of the common people; that is, of the convicts and itinerant workers who populated the pastoral frontiers of early white settlement. The key point for this school was that Australian poetry originated here, as an authentic emanation of an emergent Australian people, rather than being a colonial transplant from Britain. But when Paterson and Lawson’s ballads are understood to be centrally engaged in the kind of cultural and media dynamics identified by McLane, this later moment of literary-political reception, still influential despite dating from the 1950s, can be seen as itself a further re-naturalizing instance of cultural nationalism descending ultimately from European Romanticism. In what follows, I sketch an alternative history of this colonial Romanticism in a period during which the ballad claimed priority for itself within Australian letters. Reading this poetry through its Romantic declensions, we gain a critical sense of why it has proven so important.

1. The Bulletin and bushman Romanticism

As Benedict Anderson has influentially argued, print media were crucial technologies for the imagining of different models of colonial and national communities. In 1887 William Lane’s socialist magazine The Boomerang proclaimed its commitment to “the nationality that is creeping to the verge of being” (qtd. in Moore 57) and New South Wales Premier Henry Parkes’s argument for national independence, the “Tenterfield Oration” in 1889, was widely reported on and circulated in print. But it was the Bulletin, launched in 1880 and published until 2008, that is most often credited with fostering Australian cultural nationalism in modes that endured well into the twentieth century. Poetry was central to the Bulletin’s cultural political project, in particular, the poets Paterson and Lawson, whom it positioned as representative of an already existing independent Australia that had now only to achieve formal expression. What made poetry so central to this project was its ability to encode orality within print’s mass mediatic dissemination. The media of modern nationalism, from print to the electric telegraph, seemed most effective when they carried echoes of demotic speech. In 1896, the Bulletin’s literary editor A. G. Stephens pointed to orality as a benchmark of Paterson and Lawson’s authenticity when asserting that “in them, for the first time, Australia has found audible voice and characteristic expression” (qtd. in S. Lawson 110).

J. F. Archibald, founding editor of the Bulletin, conceived of the journal as a colonial publication modeled on the London Times and Punch, as well as contemporary papers in the United States, and this points to the transnational contexts within which the Bulletin’s program of egalitarian cultural nationalism was formed. Indeed, key to the journal’s success was the recognition that the ballad offered an ideal vehicle to maneuver between the parochial and cosmopolitan commitments which late nineteenth century cultural nationalism demanded, between, that is, the presentation of Australia’s “characteristic expression” and the international models and technological modes that gave that expression form (110). Lawson and Paterson’s bush ballads, which often took as their subject the idealized vision of an everyday Australian man and his life in the outback, were used to distinguish and legitimate the journal’s claim to be the representative “bushman’s bible” in contrast, for example, to the “anti-protectionist” Daily Telegraph or the Age’s “pious support for British society” (S. Lawson 231). But both the bush with its ethos of mateship and the versifiers who articulated that ethos were also positioned in these poems as representing a spirit that transcended such divisions. The bush ballad awarded print the authenticity of speech. But it also presented speech as already print-like—as itself already a modern mass medium of communication. It was a vehicle in which the local and the cosmopolitan, the earthy and the technological, the vernacular twang and the printed letter, could come together in an untroubled fusion of apparent opposites.

Paterson’s canonical “The Man from Snowy River” (one of the best-known of Australian poems) provides a case in point. The poem tells the story of Clancy, a skilled horse-breaker, and his triumph over the escaped “Colt from old Regret” and the ever widening “kurrajong” river. But in doing so, it begins by first mapping the bush as a networked settlement connected by complex circuits of communication and commerce:

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

That the colt from old Regret had got away,

And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound,

So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.

All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far

Had mustered at the homestead overnight. (1–6)

In the ballads of the 1890s, the antipodean frontier represents an emancipation from industrial cosmopolitanism. But it is equally imagined as an organized site of communication, a makeshift but effective transmission network which allows important details, such as the “thousand pound” value of the “the colt” to be “passed around.” Paterson’s ballad performatively articulates the nodes and movements of the “bush telegraph” network, a phrase later taken on in print by the Melbourne Argus as the header for their local news column, consecrating the informal transmission network as a uniquely national symbol.

The final lines of Paterson’s ballad are as prophetic as they are performative in pointing to the necessity of modern forms of transmission for the manufacture of the bush both as a feature of white settlement in Australia and as a folklore articulated and internally generated by the ballad revival: “The man from Snowy River is a household word today, / And the stockmen tell the story of his ride” (102–03). The “household” readers who first read Paterson’s poem in the Bulletin in 1889 have become continuous with stockmen who likewise recount the myth of the Man from Snowy River. Reading has become as authentically outback a practice as mustering.

The ballads of the 1890s Bulletin School remain recognizably Romantic through the complex set of links they establish tying the bush to the cosmopolitan metropolis. Furthermore, they draw on the Wordsworthian poetry of encounter in their development of the discrete ethos that Alexander Bubb has called “border-vision,” “habitual self-reflexivity and self-examining,” a specifically colonial perspective (91). This framing of national pride as a form of Romantic vision provides the context within which to understand Paterson and Lawson’s Romantic turn to the ballad as a popular imagining of the cultural and political independence of the peripheries of the British empire. Their most notable model is imperial versifier Rudyard Kipling, whose collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) inaugurated the Frontier as a folkloric locale, the British subaltern officer as its hero, and demotic or vernacular language as mediating the colonies as an exotic yet anachronistic zone where an ancient orality still resided even within modern print forms.² Using a technique deriving ultimately from Walter Scott’s imagined Scottish border, balladists in the periphery used such authenticating historicity to model their contemporary locale. This justified their importance to cosmopolitan audiences as bards who could offer access to ancient wisdom. It also simultaneously transformed the colonial locale into a place with a distinct folkloric tradition: the settler colony could now be imagined as a place with a deep white history.

Turning to Romanticism for patriotic ends, the colonial ballad revival presented an accelerated and remediated version of its earlier British counterpart. As Katie Trumpener has noted, the bardic tradition began as an antiquarian nationalist resistance movement to eighteenth-century British colonialism in Scotland and Ireland. It relied on an “antiquarian practice which conjoined the material and discursive realms;” it created identities through its self-presentation as the revitalization of ancient traditions that had been repressed and effaced by colonialism (23). For bards of the Australian bush such as Paterson and Lawson, however, there were no such material relics to which they as settlers could appeal in order to legitimize their own cultural nationalism within a historical tradition. The problem was that of a folkloric tradition in a situation with neither an evident folk nor indeed any artifactual lore. In these broader circumstances, the Romantic ballad was repurposed for the manufacture and mediation of cultural national historicity. Ballads circulated in the Bulletin in the 1890s not only used “the sophisticated resources of print culture to satiate the nostalgia for an epoch that preceded print,” as was the case in Britain around a century prior (McLane 333). In addition, they manufactured a version of that preceding epoch using the resources of modern media, effacing in the process the historical difficulties presented on the one hand by convict culture and on the other by Aboriginal priority. As Bubb puts it, in the hands of colonial poets the Wordsworthian lyric became “less confessional than performative” (76).

Henry Lawson’s ballad “The Roaring Days,” also first published in 1889, provides another example of how accelerated Romantic ballad modes mediated the paradoxes facing the bush as a cultural nationalist mythology. He begins in the present tense and also in media res, immediately establishing two interconnected frames of address in the poem. The fictive audience to whom Lawson is orating in the outback pub is conflated with the actual Bulletin readership, which is positioned as “overhearing” (in John Stuart Mill’s famous formulation for Wordsworthian lyric poetry). This “orality-effect” enlarges the balladic chronotope to envelop its reception in print, and this consequently consecrates the Bulletin’s claim to be the “bushman’s bible:”

The night too quickly passes

And we are growing old,

So let us fill our glasses

And toast the Days of Gold. (1–4)

The “songs” of the old bushmen are presented by Lawson as a now obsolete orality (47). By reanimating them in his ballad, however, he distresses them into oral relics of Australian culture, legitimizing the claim of his ballad’s title to articulate the primordial “Roaring Days:”

And choruses were given

The strength of heart and lung.

Oh, they were lion-hearted

Who gave our country birth! (43–46)

Lawson’s mythical vision of an atemporal bush folklore also maps a peculiar history of the bush as a colonial contact zone. He recalls how the bush became “awakened” through the eyes of the pioneers who

came sailing

From every harbour’s mouth,

And sought the land of promise

That beaconed in the South;

Then southward streamed their streamers

And swelled their canvas full

To speed the wildest dreamers

E’er borne in vessel’s hull. (9–16)

The mythic pioneer orality is overlayed by a reimagined history of Australian settlement. The doubled homophonic valence of “borne,” pronounced by the ballad’s song quality, conflates the history of transportation with an autogenetic birth of “dreamers.” It historicizes the egalitarianism of the “lion-hearted” bush pioneers as issuing from the same Romantic discourse of imagination as Lawson’s own poem. This conveniently effaces those convicts in the “hulls” who, in historical fact, first colonized and settled a then extremely inegalitarian bush. But it also reinforces the sense in which the transformative quality of the Australian landscape operates on the same register as the ballads that give it utterance: both the bush and the ballad impart imaginative wonder. It is at once an embourgeoisement of Australia’s founding as a gulag, and the expropriation of key Romantic tropes into the historicity of modern technology. This strategy continues:

Oft when the camps were dreaming,

And fires began to pale,

Through rugged ranges gleaming

Would come the Royal Mail.

Behind six foaming horses. (49–53)

Lawson’s dwindling campfire expropriates Shelley’s description in A Defense of Poetry of “the mind in creation” as “a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (39) into the Australian bush. The “camps” become a dream sequence, and as the chariot of “foaming horses” stampede through the Romantic vision with the “Royal Mail,” Lawson consciously suggests that the men themselves are dreaming in print. His relocation of the Shelleyan metaphor theorizes the conditions of his own ballad’s transmission into the texture of the historicity he is seemingly mourning: the “golden” bush of the past becomes amenable to Lawson’s own context in fin de siècle Sydney. The ballad form makes the bush not only a historical site of seemingly unmediated random encounter and respect between men (a version of the sociable discourse of Romantic sympathy), but it also configures it as a framework, or Romantic vision, for a nationalist ideology. Both Paterson’s “Man from Snowy River” and Lawson’s “The Roaring Days” present versions of what Bubb calls a Romantic “nexus of understanding,” in which the poetic imagination ensures the cultural unity of the border zone (109). By establishing the bush as both an ethical and organized site open to “dreamers” from “every harbour’s mouth,” the bush ballad underpinned Australian cultural nationalism with the creative duality Fiona Stafford identified at the core of the Romantic lyric: knowledge of the local gives into intonations of the universal (38). Parochialism guarantees cosmopolitanism.

Reading the bush ballads of Paterson and Lawson, and therefore the Bulletin’s cultural nationalism of which they were representative, as a movement of fin de siècle colonial Romanticism does not challenge the reputation of their verse as a key manifestation of “national literature.” But it does complicate why and how it came to be so important. The most enduringly influential account of the ballad’s importance for Australian cultural nationalism remains Russel Ward’s 1958 study The Australian Legend. For Ward, the ballads of the 1890s assumed a “natural” role in the history of settlement as the ballad developed from the transportation songs sung by the convicts of Botany Bay in a straight line to Paterson and Lawson, charting an almost inevitable development of a national character underpinned by working-class mateship in the egalitarian bush (Ward 49). Even Jason Rudy in his extensive survey of colonial poetics agrees that Ward’s famous description of the mythic national type “essentially reflects the values apparent in the Bulletin of the 1890s” (173).

On the account presented here, by contrast, such poems as Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and Lawson’s “The Roaring Days” were marked not by continuities with early settler oral traditions but by the break they effected with mid-nineteenth century settler Australian poetry through their staging of a ballad revival which could generate an organic colonial form of Romanticism. Their ballads, like the most successful Wordsworthian ballads, constantly theorized their own medial status, turning the ballad, and thus the bush, into a “space for encounter, not the sign of primitivity per se” (McLane 436). This allowed them to position the bush as an authenticating folkloric historicity and as an organized site of settlement connected to the rest of the cosmopolitan world. Part of their Romantic reimagination of the bush was therefore precisely the effacement of violent early Australian transportation and penal settlement and its replacement by a form of Romantic dreaming organized by modern media. In these poems, the bush is inextricable from the ballad and the bard that articulates it. The idea that the historical ethos of the Australian colonies seemed to be naturally developing towards the cultural nationalism of Paterson, Lawson, and the Bulletin therefore presents itself as an effect of 1890s Romanticism.

2. Ballad scandal: the “Bulletin debate”

Although inflected with a specific colonial context, the tension of authenticity that is continuously mediated in Lawson and Paterson’s bush ballads marks them, and the “Bulletin School,” as navigating well-trodden but potholed paths in the transnational history of the Romantic ballad revival. Susan Stewart has analyzed how the key site of anxiety around the ballad genre’s authenticity in England and Scotland (arisen from the attempt to at once supplant an oral or folkloric tradition while also laying claim to being its heir) climaxed in the “ballad scandals” of the eighteenth century. Stewart illustrates how those scandals surrounding the authenticity of James McPherson’s The Poems of Ossian and the medieval romances of Thomas Chatterton (alias Rowley) “were not products of rules regarding forgery, authenticity, plagiarism, and originality … [but] … produced such rules” for the Romantic ballad genre (“Scandals” 135, my emphasis). In this section I read the famous “Bulletin debate” between Paterson and Lawson in 1892, which has since become a defining moment for the nationalist bush myth within Australian literary history. I read the “debate” analogously as an instance of “ballad scandal” for 1890s colonial Romanticism. Stewart points to the paradoxical importance of scandal for the authenticity of Romantic ballad revivals:

The ballad’s historical exoticism promised, via the theory of minstrel origins, an authentic authorship, and a legitimating point of origin for all consequent national literature. But all of this depended upon the invention of a historical rupture, a separation that would enable the “discovery” of the ballad and the authentication of that discovery as in fact a recovery. (Stewart 138)

As I have noted, a key reason for the ballad’s importance for settler cultural nationalism was that it masked the absence of material relics and artifacts of white Australian cultural history. Following Stewart’s insights, I want to argue that in the “Bulletin Debate” Paterson and Lawson constructed an authentication procedure for the folklore and historicity they had manufactured. By restaging key scenes from each other’s previously published verse, they historicized their own previous ballads as authenticating and “recovered” instances of “obsolete orality” (McLane, “Ballads” 424). The enduring status of the “Debate” as a formative moment in Australia’s national literature (its canonization by critics of the 1950s “radical nationalist school” as an Australian version of Percy’s Reliques [Carter 266]) can therefore be read as a product of Paterson and Lawson’s cunning manipulations of Romantic ballad operations. The “Debate” allowed them to control “the internal structures and thematic … [strands of the ballad revival and to dictate their] … situation in the ‘proper’ historical context” (Stewart, “Scandals” 144), which constantly threatened to undermine the authenticity of the 1890s ballad and the white settler cultural nationalism to which it was central.

As part of a rehabilitation of Lawson as a colonial Romantic poet in his book Brown Romantics, Manu Chander has re-examined the “Bulletin Debate” in the context of Romanticism as “recuperating the opposition between fancy and imagination central to early 19th century poetics” (75). Chander’s Romanticist reading challenges Ken Stewart’s influential account that the “Bulletin Debate” exposed how the “bush legend” was

comprised of two opposing and in some respects incompatible, masculine ideologies and aesthetics. The first, represented broadly by Paterson … consists of a local masculinizing of romantic individualism, and the bush; the second, articulated particularly by Henry Lawson, encompasses certain homosocial and originally working-class codes and forms of behavior, and favors a realist aesthetic. (K. Stewart 114)

Chander, in contrast, reads both Lawson and Paterson’s ballads as participating in different Coleridgean modes, respectively the “imagination” and the “fancy,” in which “the fancy derives its ideas from empirical experience, merely reproducing reality,” while “the imagination radically transforms the world, creating unity from disparate elements” (75). Ultimately, this Romantic framing of the opposition between the two poets repackages Chander’s broader claim that Lawson’s inheritance of Romantic sympathy (as well as, although less clearly, antipathy) marks his poetry as “intend[ing] to create national unity out of fellow feelings among the laboring classes” and that this distinguishes his “understanding of burgeoning Australian nationalism from that of his contemporaries” (72–73). For Chander, Lawson therefore marks a break with both Paterson and their “predecessors,” whose poetry of fancy remained committed to “travel[ing] back to this idealized, mythic space, to wander among [the] recognizable images … [of] … a nostalgic version of the Australian bush” (76, my emphasis).

While persuasive, Chander’s argument underemphasizes the importance of ballad form to both the histories of British Romanticism and of the Australian context of Lawson and Paterson. More particularly, the “nostalgia” Chander describes of poetic cultural nationalism in the 1890s ballad revival’s imagining of the bush was itself a Romantic “orality-effect” designed to counter the preceding mid-century settler poetic gaze, which imagined the bush through various iterations of an inherited concept of Romantic sublime. Chander’s lumping of Paterson in with his “predecessors” suggests his analysis of Romantic influence runs the risk of ignoring the equally Romantic and equally crucial context presented by the cultural nationalist bush ballad in the 1890s. For the ballad established an Australian folkloric locale to which it granted cosmopolitan importance. This is the structure of the “border vision” underpinning the Australian colonies’ independence. Bush “border vision” theorized key tensions in white settler cultural nationalist ideology, namely its lack of a real historicity, within the ballad form itself. The scandalous accusations against Paterson by Lawson in the “Bulletin Debate” can therefore be read not as a limiting “sympathetic” intervention against the white nationalist project of 1890s Australian Romanticism, but instead as an acceleration and intensification thereof.

Lawson’s first missive “Borderland” published in the Bulletin in July 1892 provides a good example of this acceleration:

I am back from up the country, very sorry that I went,

Seeking for the Southern poets’ land whereon to pitch my tent;

I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track,

Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I'm glad that I am back. (1–4)

The “burning” of “fancy verses” establishes a dialogue with Paterson’s breakout poem “Clancy of the Overflow,” in which “wild erratic fancy visions” are imagined by a city clerk of the life of a drover named “Clancy” (9). In Paterson’s ballad, rhyme pulls “fancy” and “Clancy” together, dissolving the barely literate into a Romantic mode through phonology, confirming Paterson’s bardic ability to articulate the folkloric bush. The interlocution between the two ballads established by Lawson in “Borderland,” however, explicitly materializes and textualizes Paterson’s bush as “verse,” thus charging it with failing to achieve the balladic objective to dissolve its own written status in the articulation of an antecedent and pre-written authentic folklore; as S. Stewart points out, the ballad is always “a writing seeking to erase itself as writing” (“Scandals” 147). But Lawson’s arson metaphor quickly spreads from the register of the paper to the bush to which his own ballad is giving utterance. Lawson references the “Clancy” ballad using quotation marks to imply that his ballad is performing a kind of textual emendation to Paterson’s faulty record. Doing so has the dual effect of conflating the burning page of “fancy” verse with his own faithful re-description of the bush, transforming a critique of Paterson’s ballad as the basis for the new ballad itself: “‘Sunny plains’! Great Scott!—those burning / Wastes of barren soil and sand” (9–10). By using poetic quotations Lawson draws attention to the printed materiality of the ballad to remediate Paterson’s “fancy” verse, which from its famous first line positions itself as a transmissible document (“I had written him a letter”) into a historical artifact. Paterson’s picturesque imaging of the Australian bush as the “Southern Poets’ Land” in his Clancy ballad then in fact legitimates Lawson’s own ballad’s articulation of an arid, burning landscape within an existing tradition of bush representation. In seeming to supplant Paterson’s vision, Lawson in fact fortifies the broader “Bulletin School” ballad’s claim to be the voice of a national folk tradition by positioning print as inflammably continuous with the bush: burning verses that are perfectly attuned to burning wastes. His charge against Paterson, then, might be better understood as one of outdatedness, of not seeing the potentials offered by new media technologies, rather than one of fanciful idealism. This citational technique continues in the lines: “In place of ‘shining rivers’—(‘walled by cliffs and / Forest boles.’) / Barren ridges, gullies, ridges!” (29–31). These performative quotations of Paterson’s “Clancy” in Lawson’s “Borderland” indicate ways in which the “Bulletin Debate,” a staged encounter orchestrated with the aim, among other things, of driving up the journal’s sales-figures, was from its beginning a theorizing of the scandalous “crisis of authenticity” it would provoke. And the scandal in question was not one of a clash of competing nationalist ideologies. Instead it involved the artificial backdating and monumentalizing of ballads written only a few years previously, ascribing to some shallow myths of the bush a deep history.

Paterson’s reply “In Defense of the Bush” takes on Lawson’s major criticism by including an arid landscape in its own vision, admitting that “the roads were hot and dusty, and the plans were / burnt and brown” (6–7). It goes on to argue, however, that the barren landscape of the bush is not equivalent with general spiritual destitution. Paterson’s demand of Lawson for loyalty and grit in face of the trials and tribulations of the bush is key to both Chander and Ken Stewart’s reading of the opposition between the two bards as respectively fancy/imagination and idealism/realism. But Paterson presents the reward for “the men who know the bush-land—[who are] … loyal through it all” (18) by restaging a key scene from Lawson’s own wistful ballad “The Roaring Days” (published in the same 1889 edition of the Bulletin as “Clancy”) as a piece of artifactual lore:

But you found the bush was dismal and a land of no

Delight—

Did you chance to hear a chorus in the shearers’ huts

At night?

Did they ’rise up William Riley by the camp-fire’s

Cheery blaze?

Did they rise him as we rose him in the good old

Droving days? (19–26)

The use of the plural possessive in combination with “cheery blaze” (an unattributed quote from Lawson’s 1889 ballad) reminds both the reader and Lawson himself that he was a key accomplice in manufacturing the folkloric historicity of the bush. Paterson’s rhetorical question, “Did they rise him as we rose him,” temporally inserts both the poets back into the “good old Droving days” which, he is tacitly implying, they retroactively manufactured. The near homophony of “good old” with what Lawson had called the “Days of Gold” a few years earlier is thus a poetic transfiguration mirroring Paterson’s remediation of balladic historicity (the atemporal image of the “gold days” into the nostalgic but historical artifact “good old days”) to which both poets can claim true bardic authority on the basis of lived experience.

Just as Lawson reworked Paterson’s “Clancy’s letter” in “Borderland,” Paterson’s “In Defense of the Bush” remediated Lawson’s early ballads, which had maintained a more orthodox opposition between the grim city and the idealized bush, into a discrete literary historical artifact. Chander has pointed to how

Lawson juxtaposes the verbs “gleam” and “glare,” contrasting the intransitivity of the former with the dual meaning of the second … “gleam” suggests a landscape to be seen, “glare” animates the landscape as something potentially monstrous, something not just giving off a glare / gleam but also glaring at the subject. (83)

But again, the recurrence of these verbs also functions intertextually in the “Debate:” the key point is that these words acted as tokens of remediation in the interchange between the two poets. Paterson first uses “glare” (“Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric / glare” [29]) to reference Lawson’s very early 1888 ballad “Faces in the Street,” which decried the monotony of city living. By doing this, Paterson challenges whether Lawson’s charge in “Borderland” that the bush has “Treacherous tracks that trap the stranger / endless roads that gleam and glare” was really in good faith (49–50). This challenge occurs in the stanza directly preceding Paterson’s appropriation and reanimation of “The Roaring Days,” which was a similarly early, but pro-bush, ballad by Lawson that had “Explored the bush with gleams” and with its “rugged ranges gleaming” (34). Although outwardly Paterson criticizes Lawson’s pessimistic outlook on the bush, his ballad also interlaces its criticisms with the dialectical historicity of the 1890s ballad revival, subtly positioning Lawson’s deviation from the “Bulletin Line” as only further evidence for the cultural maturation and sophistication of 1890s Romanticism. The “Bulletin Debate” then staged its “ballad scandal” in order to give the Australian ballad revival the authentic folkloric archive analogous to the functions of ballad anthologies for British Romanticism. These were, as David Mathews has noted, “much more than a simple collection of poems, [they were themselves] a literary history” (87). The key result (and one might suspect, one of the central aims of Paterson and Lawson’s debate) was to validate the poets’ earlier poems as providing just such an archive. In the final stanza of Lawson’s longest ballad in the exchange, “The City Bushman,” the “Debate” is explicitly revealed to have involved cultivating a false bardic antagonism that was necessary to the consecration of 1890s Romanticism as authentic literary prehistory. Lawson admits that “at times we long to gallop where the reckless / bushman rides” (124–25), before addressing Paterson as well as the Bulletin readership: “Let us go together droving, and returning if we live, / Try to understand each other while we reckon up / The div.” (133–35). The duality between authentic folkloric orality and the print media that gives it utterance had always been key to the Romantic ballad. In its recursions to this dualism in the “Bulletin Debate,” Paterson and Lawson’s shared balladic cultural nationalism can be seen to “conjoin the material and discursive realms” that Trumpener argues are integral to the bardic tradition (25). Their colonial late-nineteenth-century Romanticism presents a hyper-mediatized, intertextual example of “distressing” techniques that Susan Stewart has described as a key aesthetic mode of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: of attempts “to bypass the contingencies of time: by creating new antiques, the author hopes to author a context as well as an artifact” (“Notes” 6).

3. The Boer War: Paterson’s Federative poetics

In October 1899 Sir James Reading Fairfax, the proprietor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail, appointed Banjo Paterson as special war correspondent for the two papers and sent him to South Africa with the Australian volunteers to join Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Winston Churchill and report on the second Boer War.

The dispatches that Paterson sent back to Australia were a mixture of journalistic reportage and poetic memorialization of the Australian experience in the war. These poems also evidenced his most direct engagement with Rudyard Kipling’s ballads, as he positioned the Australian volunteer as simultaneously possessing unique prowess and valor (distinctly nationalist traits evidencing the bush ethos) and as a committed participant in the British commonwealth. As with Kipling’s consecration of the non-commissioned “red coat” soldier as a heroic imperial figure in Barrack Room Ballads, Romantic modes were likewise essential to Paterson’s navigation and mediation of the paradox Australian Federation presented for 1890s cultural nationalism. Namely, it had to be shown that a distinctive national tradition could be preserved within the larger structures of Imperial belonging. Paterson’s ballads written during the Boer war operationalized this Federative paradox by remediating the “border-vision” of the Australian volunteer as a tradition also lighting the path for the British empire into the twentieth century. Paterson’s media dispatches thus returned to the structuring dialectic of 1890s Romanticism: parochialism and cosmopolitanism. In fact, the international origin of Paterson’s nationalist writings from the front line actualized the cosmopolitan pretensions of Australian cultural nationalism which had throughout the ’90s been imagined through media operations. As Simon Popple has remarked, the Second Boer War was the first to be characterized by “news-based mass media … the almost instantaneous transmission of news and opinions” (402). The cultural nationalist vision which emerges from Paterson’s ballads in this period (a Federative poetics) thus paradoxically marks the culmination of 1890s Romanticism’s break with mid-century settler poets and their British anxiety of influence as Australia entered its post-colonial future within the British commonwealth.

Kipling’s ballad “Tommy,” which narrates the intense drop in social standing of a “redcoat” in British society out of wartime, is the most famous example of the late nineteenth century reimagination of the Tennysonian figure of the “patriot-soldier.” The ballad marked a break with earlier approaches to versifying combat. For example, Tennyson claimed in the epilogue to his 1854 poem “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,” that he was allowing “the patriot-soldier [to] take / His meed of fame in verse” (Tiresias 104–05). In “Tommy”, however, Kipling queries whether Tennyson’s Victorian verse could do real soldiers justice, or whether it had instead instantiated unreasonable and idealized expectations: “An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints, / Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints” (34–35). By drawing invoking “fancy” here, Kipling condemns poetic memorialization that obscures lived realities of war. But the Coleridgean reference also disguises his own labored participation in Romantic modes. By assuming the first-person vernacular diction, for example, Kipling is engendering his own Romantic “orality-effect” to authenticate his balladic practice as infused with the foot soldier’s demotic speech in contrast to the official laureate’s “fancy painting” (34). Similarly to the Bulletin’s outward break with British Romantic influence in the bush ballad, Kipling’s condemnation of Romantic modes in Tennyson is fundamental to his ballad’s tacit instrumentalization of its key effects.

Sympathetic identification with the experience of the soldier also allowed poets like Kipling and Paterson to be critical of the Empire and its poetic heritage while retaining a bardic claim to articulate its essence from the peripheries. For Paterson, this was integral to navigating his position in the Boer as Australia’s “virtual laureate at the front” during Federation (K. Stewart 114). In his ballad “Commandeering,” which appeared in the Sydney Mail on the 26th of May 1900, Paterson gently lampoons a British soldier who during a pillaging frenzy accidentally drinks pesticides, a performative completion of Kipling’s “Tommy” ballad: “Our hero was a Tommy with a conscience free from care … What ho! Says he, a bottle, and, by George, it’s full of beer” (1, 17). As the colonial volunteers were shoulder to shoulder with British soldiers, Paterson “commandeered” Kipling’s character into his own poem. Dialogue with this other nineteenth century bard simultaneously marks Australian cultural nationalism as heir to a racially exclusive Anglo-Saxon lineage and highlights the way in which Australian Federation would effect an infusion of a muscular outback folklore into a desiccated Tennysonian melancholy. In Paterson’s “Commandeering,” it is the Australians who are able to “stomach pump” a poisoned England back to life (24). But while the ballad makes a joke at British expense (a performance of the practical “no nonsense” attitude so ingrained in the bush mythology), the use of the plural possessive throughout the ballad, “our hero,” also signals Australia’s continuing allegiance to Empire.

By appropriating Kipling’s precedent for the colonial soldier Paterson could legitimate bushman ballads as folkloric artifacts of a deep Australian tradition precisely by virtue of the novelty and help offered by the Australian volunteers during the war. The changing shapes of Australian cultural nationalism throughout the 1890s from Republicanism to Federalism thus continued to rely on ties to Romanticism to communicate a nationalist unity. “The Reveille,” a poem included in Paterson’s 6 January 1900 dispatch, offers a key example.

The second stanza of Paterson’s trumpeting paean locates the Australian volunteers as newly arrived in South Africa after the journey from their far-away “southern home.” This heroic military pilgrimage from home to foreign soil is emphasized by the rousing songlike rhyming triplet embedded within the variant Habbie stanza:

O’er the ocean far away

From your sunny southern home,

Over leagues of trackless foam,

In a foreign land to roam

With your bold reveille. (10–14)

Paterson’s rhymes, however, are also a reworking of the latter half of Tennyson’s fifth Spenserian stanza in “The Lotos-eaters,” in which Odysseus and his mariners are too “on alien shores:”

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said, “we will return no more”;

And all at once they sang, “Our Island home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.” (Poems 32–35)

If Tennyson’s mariners have succumbed to the fate of never returning to their “island home,” however, the Australian lancers are clearly out to legitimate theirs on foreign soil. Paterson’s Tennysonian reversal is thus also a reversal of his Homeric paradigm from book nine of the Odyssey; Paterson rhetorically positions his poem as an upside-down Antipodean Odyssey that creates the home to which it is returning.

This continues in its poetic transfigurations; the melancholic singing of Tennyson’s mariners “far beyond” becomes the triumphant toot of the teleologically oriented Australian military trumpet “far away” (35, 10). This distinction between “beyond” and “away” assures the integrity of Paterson’s reversal. To be beyond implies dissolution into an unthinkable locality, but “far away” is a relative quantifier addressing the Australian readership to whom it would be transmitted via media channels. The spontaneous eruption of singing (an event of folkloric orality in Tennyson's poem) is appropriated by Paterson and imbued into the trumpet, which can be blown at any time, aurally transmitting national tradition and thus signifying that Australians are on foreign soil to legitimate Australia as a part of the world system:

Trumpets of the Lancer Corps

Sound a loud reveille;

Sound it over Sydney shore,

Send the message far and wide

Down the Richmond River side.

Boot and Saddle, mount and ride,

Sound a loud reveille. (1–7)

But this cosmopolitan technologization is dialectically entwined with the ballad’s parochial Romantic brio. Paterson performs his bardic translation of Tennyson through metonymic replacement as wartime sonic reverberations linking the Boer and the “Sydney Shore” turn both into bush emblems. Paterson’s intertextual work highlights that the historicity of Australian bush folklore is constitutively cosmopolitan. In its poetic interlocutions, “The Reveille” thus also implies that Australia has overcome the phenomenon of homesickness which reveals itself in varying forms running from Homer to Wordsworthian nostalgia to Tennysonian melancholy. The geographical isolation of Australia is ironically reversed through the ballad form into evidence of a particular readiness and aptitude to carry out imperial expansion.

Australian cultural nationalism as the revived essence of the empire becomes even clearer in the fourth stanza:

English troops are buried deep.

Sound a soft reveille.

In this foreign land asleep,

Underneath Majuba Hill,

Lying sleeping very still,

Nevermore those squadrons will

Answer to reveille. (24–30)

Paterson’s historical evocation of Majuba Hill references the first Boer War’s final battle, which secured Boer victory. The “Majuba Hill” battle cast a dark shadow across England for the following two decades, especially as it became an annual day of Boer nationalist celebration. Kipling’s 1899 poem “An Absent Minded-Beggar” (another famous instance of his recuperation of the noble “Tommy”) used the Second Boer War as a context to proselytize for the recognition of the “gentleman in khaki … [who was to] wip[e] something off the slate” (4, 7), namely the humiliation suffered at Majuba Hill two decades earlier.

This is the context for Paterson’s intervention. His “soft reveille” immediately appears to be paying patriotic tribute to the British who had sacrificed their lives in this battle. The reveille, however, was traditionally sounded to wake up military officers in the morning. It thus becomes clear that under the aegis of Shakespearian poetic license, Paterson’s equation of sleep with death undercuts the texture of his mourning of British defeat with a scathing implication that it happened because they were incompetent soldiers who did not get out of bed in time for battle. That implication is further heightened by his portraits of Kipling throughout the Boer dispatches. Although Paterson knew Barrack Room Ballads by heart, he described their creator somewhat pejoratively in the Sydney Morning Herald as a “little, squat-figured sturdy man of forty” with “round glasses” (qtd. in Semmler 72). The reveille becomes the oral emanation of Australia's national rise (the successor not only to Tennyson, but to Kipling and the “Tommy” too) as the key site for the construction of an imperial future. In the reportage accompanying the ballad, Paterson notes that “The English troopers had a ‘heavy, vacant, chaw-bacon look about them’” whereas soldiers from the Australian state of Victoria “looked more smart and wide-awake” (25). That military supersession of the imperial center by the colonial fringe is poetically performed as the cosmopolitan imaginary of an empire of “all Britons side by side” is dissolved by Paterson once again into 1890s bush Romanticism:

Onward without fear or doubt,

Sound a bold reveille.

Till that shame is blotted out.

While our Empire`s bounds are wide,

Britons all stand side by side,

Boot and saddle, mount and ride.

Hear the bold reveille. (32–38)

In his Boer dispatches, the ballad form was integral to Paterson’s navigation of the paradox Federalism presented to cultural nationalism. The ballad allowed him to prosecute a subtle critique of the Empire’s military prowess which not only distinguished the Australian bushman from his English compatriot, but in fact imagined him at the vanguard of the Empire’s future. The authenticating procedures of the Romantic ballad revival thus allowed Paterson to rewrite Lawson’s 1887 “The Song of the Republic” into a Federative poetics without undermining the imaginative unity of cultural nationalism as the Australian colonies were brought together and into the commonwealth.

The influence exerted by Romanticism on Australian poetry has often been understood symptomatically, as indicating the imaginative limitations in the settler poetic project that sought to claim spiritual possession over an invaded country that had been previously articulated in English verse as either Arcady or Abyss. But that reading, as argued in this article, is itself an index and manifestation of 1890s cultural nationalism’s success as a movement of delayed colonial Romanticism. What has become known as the “Bulletin School” can then be understood as part of a literary history of the transnational ballad revival, in dialogue with not only the icons of English Romanticism like Wordsworth and Coleridge but also with the earlier bardic resistance of the Ossianic periphery and the later appropriation of these techniques in Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. The ballad revival emblematized by Paterson and Lawson’s poetry expropriated the key modes and techniques of these European movements into their fin de siècle media ecology to artificially fabricate a white folkloric historicity of the Australian bush that simultaneously effaced the historical realities of both convict presence and Aboriginal priority. By actively using media dynamics to accelerate Romantic modes, their ballads positioned the Bulletin as a print form that articulated a deep national “border-vision” and as evidence supporting Australia’s claim to entry into the world-system as an independent nation. The ballad form was integral to both of these projects. Paterson and Lawson used the ballad’s demotic and popular valences to claim heir to a bardic tradition, infusing “orality effects” into print media through poetry that generated a series of artificially distressed verse artifacts and tales of bush lore during the 1890s. These have since continued to be claimed as evidence for a unified and authentic white historical tradition in Australia. The claim their poetry made as the articulation of this historicity was thus conditional on a false antagonism they generated between the ballad revival and the mid-century verse which preceded it. It was in the formally simulated gap effected between poetry of Romantic influence written in Australia and Australian Romanticism that the cultural nationalism of the 1890s was nurtured. The structural logic of 1890s Romanticism had purchase well into the twentieth century as its key mythologies were taken up and re-naturalized in the historical studies of the “radical nationalist school” of critics. But like the settler nationalism for which it provides a structure of feeling, the essential drive of 1890s Romanticism was towards the fabrication of a historicity that could disguise the historical realities of white settlement in Australia. By reading some of Australia’s most canonical poetry through the dynamics of ballad revival, this article has attempted to sketch how Romanticism was not only a pervasive influence on colonial Australian poetry but was a condition ensuring the imaginative unity of white Australian settlement as it was mythologized through the bush.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Thomas H. Ford and Abigail Fisher; their detailed comments and edits on numerous drafts of this article improved it immeasurably.

Notes

1 I take the term “expropriation” from David Harker’s Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day. Harker uses the term to describe how emerging ballad industries drew on Scottish, English, Irish and Welsh materials in order to sustain cultural nationalism.

2 A critic from the Literary Yearbook London in 1895 wrote, for example, that Paterson’s “immediate success is … without parallel in colonial annals, nor can any living Englishman or American boast so wide a public, always excepting Mr. Kipling” (qtd. in Hooper 62).