Bushmen of the Bulletin: Re-examining Lawson's ‘Bush Credibility’ in Graeme Davison's ‘Sydney and the Bush’

Abstract

Graeme Davison turned Russel Ward's argument in The Australian Legend on its head: the rural ethos and mythology which Ward argued had been transmitted from the bush to the city was instead a projection of city intellectuals. Davison's argument in ‘Sydney and the Bush’ rests primarily on the claim that the Bulletin poets who promoted the bush myth lacked bush credibility. This claim is tested against evidence that Lawson and others had a lifelong experience of bush life—as campers. I argue that camping provided an experiential foundation for the collectivist and egalitarian values identified by both Ward and Davison as distinguishing ideas of national identity in the 1890s.

Notes

³Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’ Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (1978): 191–209.

¹This paper was first presented at a staff seminar, School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies, Monash University, 7 October 2012.

²Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958).

⁴Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 83, 85.

⁵Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985). An embryonic version of the idea is suggested by Bernard Smith in Australian Painting 1788–1960 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962), 84.

⁶Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies 22, no. 86 (April 1986), 116–31, 117.

⁷Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 29.

⁸Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 35.

 ⁹John Carroll ed. Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 67.

¹⁰Graeme Davison, ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend’ public lecture delivered at the University of Melbourne, 2010.

¹¹Christopher Lee, City Bushman: Henry Lawson and the Australian Imagination (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004).

¹²Letter from Henry Lawson to G. Robertson, 21 January 1917, quoted in Davison, 191.

¹³Davison, 192.

¹⁴Davison, 207.

¹⁵A. G. Stephens, ‘Henry Lawson’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 1922, reprinted in Colin Roderick, ed. Henry Lawson Criticism 1894–1971 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972), 217.

¹⁶Letter from Henry Lawson to Mrs Emma Brooks, 16 January 1893. Reprinted in Colin Roderick, Henry Lawson: Commentaries on his Prose Writings (London: Angus & Robertson, 1985), 44.

¹⁷Davison, 208.

¹⁸Roderick, Commentaries, 143.

¹⁹Brian Matthews, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1987), 73–87.

²⁰T. D. Mutch, ‘The Early Life of Henry Lawson’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings XV111, no. V1 (1932): 289.

²¹E. J. Brady, ed. Henry Lawson by His Mates (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1931), 155.

²²E. J. Brady, ed. Henry Lawson by His Mates (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1931), 137.

²³E. J. Brady, ed. Henry Lawson by His Mates (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1931), 19.

²⁴Richard White, On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2005), 79.

²⁵Brady, 32.

²⁶Brady, 234.

²⁷Roderick, Commentaries, 43.

²⁹Brady, 92. The set-up appears very similar to the tent he was born in. Matthews, 73, 86.

²⁸Roderick, Autobiographical and Other Writings, 92.

³⁰Brady, 241.

³¹Brady, 142.

³²Brady, 155.

³³Brady, 139.

³⁴Brady, 216.

³⁵Brady, 235.

³⁶‘The Shearers’ (1901) in Colin Roderick, ed. Henry Lawson: Collected Verse, vol. 2 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967–69), 11.

³⁷Brian Elliot, The Landscape of Australian Poetry (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1967), 147.

³⁸Joseph Furphy, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1903).

³⁹P. R. Eaden and F. H. Mares, ed. Mapped but Not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986), 102.

⁴⁰Kylie Tennant, The Battlers (London: Gollancz, 1941).

⁴¹G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1.

⁴²A. B. Paterson, The Collected Verse of A. B. Paterson (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1923), 37.

⁴³Michael Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia (London: Methuen, 1898), 96, 98.

⁴⁴Davison, 209.

⁴⁵The ‘import’ case is argued by several contributors to Intruders in the Bush, including by Carroll.

⁴⁶Alan Atkinson, ‘Russel Ward: Settlement and Apotheosis’ Journal of Australian Colonial History 10, no. 2 (2008): 91–102, 98.