by Don Watson
The bush was an innocent virgin, a fickle temptress, an ‘irrational’ creature beyond the understanding of men. It was the womb and mother and a barren hag. Historians, including Manning Clark, would sometimes say that Europeans had treated the land like a whore, raping and despoiling it in their lust and greed. Miners, we are told, draw a distinction between those who prefer ‘virgin’ fields and those who find more reward in reworking places previously explored or mined. Whichever metaphor we choose, in male hands the women of the bush are left without much to say or do for themselves. They cope, endure, suffer, care for the children, turn bronze and gaunt in the sun; represent something more often than they do something. So that they might move about the bush with ordinary male privilege, in two famous novels, Furphy’s Such is Life and Eve Langley’s The Pea-Pickers, women go disguised as men.
With so much symbolic baggage, a woman’s experience of the bush had little chance of being the defining kind for the new nation. Rosa Praed, Barbara Baynton and Jessie Couvreur (who wrote as ‘Tasma’), to name just three eminent examples, were effectively elbowed aside by the men who ruled at The Bulletin in the identity-defining 1890s. Anticipating the same fate, Ethel Richardson used Henry as her pen-name.
The Bushman’s Bible described ‘how half the world lives’, Barbara Jefferis said, and it would seem to follow that it also defined half the identity. The dominant men of the Heidelberg School preferred the bush with bushmen in it: working men, adventurous men, carving a nation out of the trees and the rocks. When they did appear, women looked hopelessly ill-adapted in crinolines and (in Frederick McCubbin’s works, for example) they did little but add to the weight of sentimentality. Sidney Long got them up and about, but only to romp naked in the scrub and waterholes with native birds and satyrs. The great painting of bush womanhood bears the same title as Lawson’s short story. Like the bush in which Lawson set his embattled woman, Russell Drysdale’s landscape in The Drover’s Wife has been blasted bare by drought, rabbits and dieback. Or it might be Passchendaele after the mud has dried. But where Lawson’s heroine is gaunt and hugs her child to breasts as ‘worn out’ as the surrounding bush, Drysdale’s is a bosomy, soft-eyed monolith, the race mother personified, out of her element but commanding it nonetheless. Her husband or mate is a feckless figure watering the wagon’s horses in the background, not away droving but absent nonetheless. In a plain and sensible frock and hat, she could be the last hope for regeneration and common sense. She could even be the continent itself, as it was once. She might be sticking to her mate, enduring the awful folly into which he has dragged her, or waiting for a bus to take her back to the city and away from the fool once and for all.
Henry Lawson had been out west to Bourke in the middle of a drought and came back talking about the ‘horrors of the country’, how ‘men tramp and beg and live like dogs’. The memories of that experience never left him, and because they informed his greatest and most popular work, they also imprinted the nation’s consciousness. The stories based on those horrors and collected in While the Billy Boils (1896) are founding documents of Australian identity and faith. The character was a sort of homespun ironic humanist philosopher. There was a lot of talk about socialism at the time, a lot of tracts circulating. Lawson’s kept it simple: ‘Socialism is just being mates,’ he said. And a mate, he also said, ‘can do no wrong’.
‘No man likes to lose a good mate, for mateship is more than a mere term in Australia,’ wrote Brady, Lawson’s mate. Many others, including modern politicians, have said the same, even though it leaves us wondering if they believe that men in other countries either don’t have mates or don’t mind losing them. The territory was already well trodden when Bean got to it, but he had a couple of original things to say. Mates were not just the blokes you sheared sheep with, but blokes you could go into battle with. Bean predicted that should she need to call on Australians in war, England would find them sticking to the empire as they would ‘to an old mate’. Empire, too, was just being mates.
Who knows how many men joined up because their mates did, died because their mates did. Then again, another interpretation might have it that they would stick to the empire because, for all their wattle and bottle patriotism, they had never come unstuck. They were British subjects, after all, and the army they joined was an imperial one. Not for nothing was it called the Australian Imperial Force.
In 1914 Britain’s hold on Australian minds had never been tighter. It was particularly tight on the large numbers of bushmen who had joined the Light Horse years before hostilities broke out. For Bean the bush – that ‘mysterious country’ – would be to the Australian imagination what the sea had been to the English. With their mettle forged in the bush, Bean was sure the bushmen would fight like the ‘searovers of Queen Elizabeth’s time’. In the rush to enlist at country recruiting stations, and the deeds of the AIF on the battlefields, he was vindicated.
The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner long ago described how the wilderness that the settlers mastered also mastered them, and how the frontier thus shaped the ethos of the nation itself. Forced to adapt by the natural world, they took on a uniquely pragmatic, democratic, patriotic, individualistic character. The nation, Turner said, drew its values from ‘the forests and gained new strength each time it touched a frontier’.
Abraham Lincoln’s progress from log cabin to the White House was one heroic personification of the thesis: Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, the Western, Clint Eastwood, Yosemite Sam, and other implacable American gun wielders are a few among many examples. The expanding frontier and its free land are credibly held responsible for the country’s insatiable capitalist enterprise, its occasional lack of civilised restraint, its ‘exceptionalism’, and its endless quest for new frontiers, from imperial adventures to space probes to the internet and Facebook.
The utilitarian ethic of the frontier, lauded in the United States as an imperishable creed of American pragmatism or ‘can do’, in Australia became the equally durable belief in improvisation, or ‘she’ll do’. In the 1950s Russel Ward echoed both Turner and Bean by declaring that as the American ethos had emerged from the woods, the bush was the nursery of the local legend. Ward argued that around the experience of the semi-nomadic tribes of bush workers, including those of convict origin, an Australian creed materialised. Like the American, the Australian ideal type was pragmatic, intolerant of authority and class distinction, sceptical and profane, but with a collectivist rather than an individualist faith. The bush turned out men who believed in sticking together, a fair go for all – mateship.
Not in our neck of the bush. Where we came from they were not inclined to sing about solidarity or even to call each other mate, and they believed in a fair go for the deserving only. Unions? Convicts? The very idea! For that matter, the collectivist ideal didn’t tally with the dashing Paterson, or bring much comfort to the poets Barcroft Boake, Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon, for all of whom the bush was a fertile setting for their ‘fiend melancholia’ – the same kind that seems to be afflicting the subject of Frederick McCubbin’s very popular (and very maudlin) painting Down on His Luck. When Boake went to Queensland droving, he discovered sometimes ‘vicious’ bushmen, drovers ‘hollow, shrunken, burning with the pangs of thirst’ and more than a few lying in ‘unhallowed graves’ on the runs of absentee squatters they had served. There were stories of drovers cutting the throats of their horses to drink the blood, of horses and men dying together. Boake and Gordon both committed suicide, and Lawson and Kendall all but drank themselves to death. As much as the Australian frontier drew folk together, both the records and the literature suggest it drove others in on themselves, put a wobble in their psyches – buggered them, they might have said.
It is not to say that Clarke’s overlanders and Mrs Gunn’s stockmen and rouseabouts were less than fine folk, but the bushmen of their classics never seem to get up to the things that a lot of foul-mouthed, fighting, fornicating, alcohol- and self-abusing real bushme
n did. To that list add stealing cleanskin cattle (poddy-dodging), a common moral failing among drovers which, contrary to Mrs Gunn’s observations, seems to have passed unnoticed by the horses they handled so expertly. It is very hard to reconcile not only the gentlemanly blokes that Mrs Gunn made famous, but the bushmen of Paterson, Lawson and Furphy, with the shearer Dennis McIntosh whose story set in shearing sheds of the 1970s is as bleak and anguished as a Jim Thompson noir thriller; or with the benighted boundary rider in Harold Lewis’s memoir who talks to the prickly pear and the crow; or the very nasty pieces of work in Barbara Baynton’s 1902 Bush Studies. And long before Baynton wrote, on the goldfields and in the shearing sheds James Armour met strange men, drunks, blowhards, fools, wife abusers, thieves, practical jokers – the ‘perfidy of mates’ was something of a theme in his account of bush life.
They were bushmen – and mates, very likely – who an English visitor observed living ‘in pairs in the dense dark brushes, their habitation being merely a few sheets of bark’. And they were bushmen and bushwomen who, by another account, lived in the forests of the eastern seaboard: a ‘strange and ghost-like band’, pale and yellowish from a lack of sun, gaunt with ‘piercing eyes’. We are told they emerged into the light for rum, when they could be seen ‘lying on the bare grass in a state of intoxication and only recovering to renew their orgies’. These were the tree-fellers of the cedar industry, a relatively small cohort of the population, but with convicts, runaways, bushrangers and mates among them, one containing powerful cultural medicine. Residents of Nimbin and similar countercultures aside, such people are rare now, but anyone who has been to a sporting event or a pub or listened to commercial radio has heard echoes from those forests.
The same inconvenient lack of consistency (and gallantry) emerges from the writings of bushwomen. Some of the women of Lucy Frost’s No Place for a Nervous Lady rapidly reach terms with the roughness of frontier life and manners, and some don’t. Some feel ‘exiled’, ‘caged’ or ‘imprisoned’ by the bush, and some revel in its space and freedom. Some feel contact with the Aborigines will contaminate them, some feel the deepest pity, and some great affection for them. Some enjoy the strange beauties of the landscape, and some cannot erase the images of English horticultural perfection. Some marry by choice and some because they have to: ‘there never is one decent wedding in Albany now’, a lady declared in 1905. None of them had any shame.
Some marry stalwart men and some, like the marvellous Annie Baxter who wrote 800 000 words of journal, are married to cads who profess their love in the morning and at lunchtime take a lubra behind the tank stand. Some never have to fear for their safety or their virtue, some declare it ‘a peculiarity of this country . . . that men . . . are rather fond of beating their wives’, and some, like Mrs Sarah Davenport, found herself among bushmen who ‘was for pulling poor me from under the dray for their own brutal purpose’.
And then there is that contradiction noted by Rolf Boldrewood: that by a ‘strange’ morphology, the bush was where respect was never granted to a man who lacked the quality to command it, yet there was no ‘place in the world where men feel more out-and-out respect for a gentleman than in Australia’. They will ‘follow them like dogs, fight for them, shed their blood and die for them’, he said. It was ‘some sort of natural feeling . . . [and] . . . nothing can knock it out of them’. Lowly bushmen and pitiless rogues had it in common with respectable settlers. Boldrewood was observing the characteristic in his heroes’ fealty to the gentlemanly bushranger Captain Starlight, but he saw it everywhere, he said. Had he lived long enough he might have seen it in Federation ‘under the Crown’ and, for that matter, among the Anzacs.
Joseph Furphy, who got much of the raw material for Such is Life as a bullock driver in the Riverina, admired the practical, matter-of-fact approach to life in the bush and the egalitarian implications: ‘it is easier to acquire gentlemanly deportment than an axe-man’s muscles; easier to criticise an opera than to identify a beast seen casually twelve months before; easier to dress becomingly than to make a bee-line, straight as the sighting of a theodolite, across strange country in foggy weather; easier to recognise the various costly vintages than to live contentedly on the smell of an oily rag’.
Echoes of Furphy’s homily can be heard in the literature of most frontiers, including the American West. However, much as the task of settling a new country favoured – even demanded – a preference for the utilitarian over the theoretical, academic or artistic, one did not have to be a frontiersman to incline that way, but only to be an Englishman or a Scot. Or a Protestant, puritan or otherwise. Or merely a person of the times: those ‘bush’ sentiments resound in the empire-building Victorian enthusiasm for work and utility – ‘practical usefulness’, in Charles Kingsley’s formulation; in Carlyle’s, ‘not to ask questions, but to do work’. That same utilitarian bent might have also been behind their ‘respect for gentlemen’. Victorians settled the greater part of the bush, and the legend of the bush was their construction. Whatever else he was, the legendary Australian bushman was a Victorian to his bowyangs – and an imperialist, with all the racial and cultural assumptions of that worldview.
That is not to say that the bush did nothing to the minds of those who lived in it, rather that European ideology might have shaped the bush rather more than the bush shaped Europeans. The gospels of hard work, persistence, willingness to endure, and personal sacrifice were Victorian virtues confirmed on frontiers all over the empire and beyond. It was a dominant strain of thought, and all the more robust when allied to Protestant Christianity. Progress too, or the worship of canals and railroads, as John Stuart Mill put it, was not only the default belief of rural Australia, but the watchword of John Bull. And Furphy’s ‘temper democratic’ and his opinionated bush workers echo Mill seventy years earlier, when it seemed to him that in England ‘Every dabbler . . . thinks his opinion as good as another’s . . . It is rather the person who has studied [a] subject systematically that is regarded as disqualified. He is a theorist: and the word which expresses the highest and noblest effort of human intelligence is turned into a bye-word of derision.’
The bush might have given birth to the bushman, but he was conceived somewhere else and generally raised there and taught by harsh example. The weirdness he saw in the bush he might have seen anywhere, given the fashion for it. As the film critic Anthony Lane once pointed out, we tend to forget the surreal dimension of the Victorian. In idealising a stereotyped manliness, and deploring in women any deviation from the model of dutiful wife and mother, and in holding duty – including blind duty – to be the highest good, we might even find in Victorian values a root or two of mateship. The creed’s most lyric advocate, after all, was nothing if not a tormented Victorian. Not every childhood of the time was as difficult as Henry Lawson’s, or as cruel as, say, Albert Facey’s, but both were typical enough. Lawson’s beautiful talent survived the experience and surely owed something to it, as did his chronic uneasiness with women and sexuality, his guilt, his need for a father figure, his heavy drinking, and possibly his racism – syndromes that might be discerned in any gathering of mates, then or now. Henry might have liked to think it was the ‘mother-bush’ that bore him, but his real mother, the singular Louisa Lawson, had more to do with it.
Men who, like Facey, emerged less fragile than Henry and knowing where lay their Duty and the Right did not always care for those who knew differently. They made resilient settlers and redoubtable, often ruthless, soldiers. Even when he was bayoneting his fellow human beings in the Dardenelles, Facey, the embodiment of Bean’s prophecy, seems to have maintained an endearing equability. Others, including some discussed later in this book, found grace harder to come by.
In The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, the novel Henry Handel Richardson based upon her father, the bush mirrors the hero’s personal confusion and decline into madness. Mahoney could no more decide between the city and the country than he could between the English landscape and the Aus
tralian, English manners and the Australian lack of them. One day the bush beguiled him, the next he was repelled and affronted by it. Never did it steer him towards the fellowship of others. But then, he was a doctor, not a shearer or a digger.
Richard Mahoney’s conflicted loyalties are neither rare nor hard to understand. Even those who became attuned to the immense ‘continental features’ of Australia, as Edward Curr put it, could be tortured by memories of the British Isles where ‘the presence of man is everywhere visible’. The Old Country’s scale was so much smaller and the provenance so much longer and more sustaining. Unable to hear the local ghosts or sense time immemorial in a red gum, settlers in Australia yearned for the feeling of ancestral connection that English scenes evoked. Where in this new place was the continuity, ritual and tradition, the predictable pattern of the seasons, the rhythms of deep habit and belief, a civilisation to ease the days of the living and the gathering in of the dead?
In the Aboriginal bush the past was always present: in creation all around them, in the paths of the Dreaming, in the songs ‘that only exist on the breath of the ancestors’. Inspired by the late-nineteenth-century discoveries of anthropologists in Central Australia, the Melbourne writer Bernard O’Dowd posited the Aboriginal Dreaming as an Australian Golden Age, a sort of Athens equivalent; and thirty or more years later the poet Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks made a sustained attempt to steer Australian art, letters and identity away from Europe and towards the Indigenous, including the Creation stories. The idea has never quite gone away, but nor has it prospered. It is impossible to calculate the consequences of a lack of ancestors to worship, but it seems possible that a land whose native people, vegetation, creatures and climate only made people feel lonelier and more alienated would be granted less respect than one where something familiar could at least be imagined. So, until the local environment could be disposed of, efforts had to be made to create another that would screen out the view.
