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This time, admin is going to explain about the beginning of the known literature in the kangaroo country. Let's pay attention to the explanation below.
Land and language have
been the two major rival determinants of written literature in Australia. Two
hundred years ago, in 1788, white settlers, bringing with them an
alphabetically written language, the concept of a distinction between
literature and utilitarian or ephemeral writing, and the technology for
producing multiple copies of what needed to be widely disseminated, came to
establish a penal colony for Britain. A colony, penal or otherwise, immediately
establishes a tension between the introduced culture, with its language, law,
education and scale of values and the indigenous qualities of the land that is
settled and its existing inhabitants. A sense of exile may, through the
perspective of distance, sharpen appreciation and assessment of homeland, but it
can also be an inhibiting factor in coming to terms with the new cicumstances.
The initial puzzlement, incomprehension and near-despair of some of the first
white colonists in Australia was offset by the enterprise, curiosity, and
wonderment of others. Many convicts and settlers, together with some officers
and soldiers, sooon realised that this was no temporary exile but a new home,
with qualities different from those of the British Isles.
The contrast between
gloom and hope runs roughly parallel to the contrast between colonialism and
nationalism in the first century or so of settlement. Language, with its often
unrecognized cultural biases, tended to pull the settlers back towards British
values. The land, with its many phenomena unnamable in the English language,
tended to pull them towards a sense of National uniqueness.
British valus were, of
course, often disguised as universal values, through from at least the last two
decades of the nineteenth century genuine internationalism was advocated by
J.F. Archibald and others as an anticode to purely British literary and
cultural values. From early in the period of transportation a high proportion
of convicts were of Irish origin and they, with Irish settlers and officers,
formed and nucleus of a vociferous and influential element in Australian
culture. While the present-day population of Australia has fewer than 20 per
cent of Irish origin, the contribution of the Irish to Australian literaturehas
been very very substantially greater.
Australian still contains
substantial numbers of advocates for cultural colonialism (the ‘cultural
cringe’), who emphasize commonality with derivatiness from Britanian. They
exist alongside vociferous nationalists-advocates, for instance, of
republicanismand a new national flag- and those who reject both colonialism and
nationalism in favour either of internationalism (that is , emancipation from
all social pressures, expectations and categories).
These divisions in
Australian culture, literature, and critism bear no close correlation with the
purely literary division between the solid descriptivness of social realism on
the one hand and a more ironic, poetic, romantic or comic mode on the other.
Social realists tend to be left-wing nationalists, but many left-wing
nationalists (such as Xavier Herbert) are far from being social realists, and
some would- be social realists, such as Kathrine Susannah Prichard, are really
romance writers. In any case, the modes of fictions in Australian writings, as
in other literatures, became very fixed from 1960s onwards, and all one can say
now is that pure social realism is a discredited mode.
The same period is also
one in which two groups of writers, Aborigines and non-English-speaking
migrants,have come to prominence . Both groups have causes to express a sense
of alienation from land and from language. Both have lost their homelands and
both are required to use an alien tongue.
For a variety of
reasons and from a variety of cultural backgrounds, writers in Australiahave
emphasized such them as the search for identity by wanderer or explorer , the
establishment of a habitation and famiy line, the quest to recover the past,
sense of being and outcast, and the threat of impending violence. The
exploratory quest to discover what lay
at the heart of the continent a quest not completed until the early twentieth
century provided a natural metaphor for the exploration of the country of the
mind.
The quest for the past,
associated through the operation of memory with the attempt to the align
chronological and experiential measurements of time or to escape entirely from
the dominanceor chronological measurement, has been a major features of
Australian literature, especially from the 1930s onwards. Historical novels
from at least His Natural pursue this theme, but so too do poets such as FitzGerald, Wright, Shapcott and
Malouf. The search rarely, however, for alost Eden. For historically the
beginnings of white settlement in Australia were brutal and dismal.
A sense of oppression,
loneliness, alienation, and fear is often symbolized by or is preliminary to
violence or the threat of violence. Australian literature, in novels, stories,
plays and poems, is a literature of violence in its treatments of judicial
punishment, male-female relationships, gang warface and declared war.
Literature about convicts is inevitably full of brutality, what is more
suprising is a similar brutality in the works of writers as diverseas Patrick
White, Thea Astley, David Ireland, Roger McDonald, Colin Johnson and Archie
Weller. Its presence is often associated with a sense that culture is never
here and now but always elsewhere or at another time.
Whatever its theme,
Australian literature in its characterization and its own literary character is
in large measure a literature of persistence, edurance and repetition almost
beyond endurance. Australian authors wear down and wear out their readers by
the repetition of horrors, instances of similar incidents, lists of details, or
stylistics mannerisms. Bush ballads, with their insistent, inevitable refrains,
practise seduction by exhaustion. In the modern area short story many writers
amass detail to nullify resistance by the reader or to reduce the reader to a
state of nervous tension, waiting for the repeated pattern to be lifted.
Perhaps this stylistic
quality operates as an analogue of the land itself. Whatever he reason through,
Australian literature has within it frequently an air of infinitude,
timelessness, changelessness, endless, space, the stil moment out of time, and
the endless progress through space. It is, once again, a characteristic found
also in the Canadian prairie novel. It is. In fact, a common characteristic of
imperial pioneering literature in various countries. Boundlessness and
timelessness can represent either absence of cultural landmarks or a return to
the void of Nature of the loss of self identity or a mistycal union the the
divine. All of these possibilities are laid out to in Australian writing all can, for instance, be found in the novels
of Patrick White and Randholp Stow, as they can in various degrees In the late
Romanticism of Harpur, Kendall, Gordon, Clarke, Lawson and Furphy. Such writers
often begin from the premise that Australian is a materialistic society,
bordering of philistinism, and hence liable to alienate and despise its
writers. Novels about writers other artists who are ill at ease with their
environment have a been a staple of Australian writing since the 1930s.
Writing in Australia
obviously begans as a literature metaphorically in chains, the shackles, of
British expectations of what a colony and its writing should be. New South
Wales was a colony founded before the romantic revival had made an impact in
Britain, and it is not surprising that in modes of writing, as in styles of
architecture, the new colony clung to eighteenth century Georgian models long after they had fallen out of fashion in
Britai. In time, the Romantic ethos spread from Britain to Australia. At any
rate Romanticism and post Romanticism server as the prevailing modes for poetry
and prose until the second half the twentieth century. In Australia, the bush
in its melancholy aspects and the oppressed or fugitive nature of convictism
are the commonest symbols of personal solitude and despair.
Twentieth century
modernism was a late arrival, in visual art and in literature. Despite some
flutterings of experimentalism by Slessor and a small number of others in the
1930s and the efforts of the Angry
Penguins group in the 1940s, most Australian poets wrote in romantic style
into the 1960s. At about the same time fiction writers discovered the ludic and
ironic modes, and playwrights caught up with Brecht.
Some chauvinistic
critics would find such statements contentious. There are some hostility in
Australia to the whiggish notion that Australian literature has experienced
‘development’, partly on ideological grounds about the nature of literary
history, partly on xenophobic , especially Anglophobic, grounds that
development may imply imitation at a temporal distance of some external model. Antipathy to such tendentious
statements as ‘Australia literature is a branch of English Literature, and
however great it may become and whatever characteristics it may become and
whatever characteristics it may develop, it will remain a branch’ is
understandable. This account of Australian literary history does not, however,
seek to avoid notions of periodicity. Australian literature in its rich variety
is not amenable to critical reductionism.
Australian
Literature in 19th Century
1.
The First
Hundred Years of Colonization
Human
language has existed in Australia for some 40.000 years. In that time the
Aboriginal peoples of Australian perhaps from the beginning of their occupancy
of the land perhaps much more recently – developed a very rich oral literature.
It contains long song cycles, shorter communal songs dancing and entertainment,
songs of love and of mourning songs on contemporary events, spoken poems, and
prose tales. Those who perform them believe that the inspiration for the sacred
song cycle came from the mythical time of the Dreaming and that in his dreams
and in performance the poet, is in contact with the ancestral spirits. In
contemporary poems too, the song man or song woman is thought to have attained
material and inspiration through communion with his or her personal spirit in
dreams. It is not surprising, then, that much of the material concern the
mythical time of the making of the earth, sun, and moon, the making of human
beings and their arrival in their own land, and the making of trees, birds and
animals. Much also concern the right relationship that human beings must have
with the land, its creatures, relative and others in the clan, and the spirits:
some of it with the rituals expressing the meaning of puberty, marriage, old
age and death.
 |
| Aborigines |
Almost
nothing of this rich imaginative life was appreciated by the first European voyagers to visit
Australia. The first authenticated European sightings of and landings on
Australian were made by Dutch explorers early in the seventeenth century. They
made landings in the west and north of Australia, often in places that seemed
virtually uninhabitable to them. The Aborigines seemed hopelessly primitive and
savage. Their literature, their art and even their technology remain hidden to
the prejudiced eyes of the Europeans. The people seemed entirely alien and even
dangerous. In 1623, Jan Carstensz, having landed on a Cape York Beach, became
alarmed by the behavior of Aborigines and fired on them, killing some. Later in
the century William Dampier, encountering Aborigines on the north-west coast,
described them as ‘the miser ablest people in the world’, and seemed surprised
that ‘we could not understand the word that they said’.
More
favourable reports of the inhabitants came from Lieutenant James Cook abd Joseph
Banks, the naturalist, when they encountered Aborigines on the east coast of
Australian in 1770. Cook recorded in his journal that clothing given by the
Englishmen to the Aborigines was left ‘carelessly upon the sea beach and in the
wood, as a thing they haad no manner of use for: in short, hey seemed to set no
value upon anything their own for any one article we could offer them’.
Partly
because of Banks’s of favourable reports presented some years after his visit
the British Government determined to established a colony at the site of Cook’s
first landing, Botany Bay, in the territory known to the British as New South
Wales. The convict settlementestablished early in 1788 under the Governorship
of Captain Arthur Philip consisted of just over 1000 people, nearly
three-quarters of them convicts, the remainder, marines, seamen, wives, and
children. It was established a little to the north of Botany Bay, at Sydney
Cove, on the shores of a fine harbour of ships. Philip tried to disabuse them.
He found the soil poor, the rains unreliable, the seasons unpredictable, the
tools brought out for agriculture unsuitable and poor quality, and the pests
almost intorable. No plough arrived in the colony for fifteen years: the
convicts described as ‘dreadful banditti’ by one English official mostly lacked
even a modicum of farming skills. More than once while waiting fo supply ships,
the colony almost starved.The first theatre was built by convicts in 1796; its
first production (also staged by convicts) was The Line in 1721: ‘their effort
to please were not unattended with applause says a contemporary account.
The
sentiments, moral, political and religious, expressed in a diaries and in the
first print accounts of the colony reflect those of late eighteenth century
British society. Four years later the first novel written or published in
Astralia appreared. It was Quintus Servinton, a Tale Founded upon
Incidents of Real Occurance by Henry Savery (1791-1842).
2.
The Bulletin School
The Bulletin was
published in Sydney from 1880 to 2008. During The Bulletin’s heyday from 1880
to 1918 it dictated the debate in Australian culture and politics. The Bulletin
was founded by two Sydney journalists, J.F. Archibald and John Haynes. The first
edition was published on 31 January 1880 that ran political and business
opinion pieces and popular fiction. Between 1880 and 1918 The Bulletin cruelly
lampooned colonial governors, business leaders, the bourgeoisie, the church,
feminists and prohibitionists. The best-known of all the Bulletin contributors
was Henry Lawson, his prose Short Stories in Prose and Verse (1894).
The Bulletin fostered
19th century Australian bush culture that underpinned the celebration of the
Australian bush. Archibald opened The Bulletin to contributions from its
readers in 1886, featuring poetry, short stories and cartoons contributed by
miners, shearers and timber-workers from all over Australia. Some of this
content was high quality and many of Australia’s important writers had their
start with The Bulletin which became know as the ‘Bulletin School’ of
literature.
Archibald retired in
1907, and afterwards The Bulletin became more conservative, so much so that by
the Great War it had become openly pro- Britain and empire. This signalled the
end of its popularity and influence in Australian culture and politics and its
gradual decline. By the early 1930s its pre-war attitudes and its
romanticisation of the bush was seen as anachronistic by a now largely
urbanised population. By the 1940s The Bulletin was seen as a sad reactionary,
racist and antisemitic relic that had become a self parody.
3.
Nationalism in
Australian literature
From around the middle
of the 19th century, an observable change began to take place in Australian society.
The Australian-born proportion of the population had reached unprecedented
numbers, as more and more children were born and raised in the colonies. Around
the same time, colonial governments were being granted increasing independence
from Britain, and a sense of national pride emerged in society. For the first
time, many people living in the colonies turned away from the British way of
life, which they had previously attempted to uphold. By the 1880s, strong
feelings of nationalism had begun to emerge in the lead-up to Federation
(1901).
This surge of
nationalism during the late 19th century heavily influenced writers living in
the colonies. Many writers abandoned their imitation of English writing styles
and, instead, began to compose stories and poems which were distinctively
Australian. Despite Australia having already developed into a relatively
urbanised society, these early pieces of Australian literature usually shared a
common theme of life and experiences in rural Australia. The 'typical bush
worker,' who embodied the spirit of 'mateship,' was often featured as the main
character in these types of nationalist literature.
Proferssional
theatre had begun in Sydney with the opening of Barnett Levey’s Theater Royal
in 1833. Before long, the other main settlements hd regular performance in
permanent playhouse. By the early 1890s there were five large theaters in each
of Sydney and Melbourne, as well as many smaller semi-professional and amateur
theaters. Between 1834 and 1914 over 600 Australian plays are known to have
been performed.
Mid-century
Directions
The most influential of the historians
who have attempted to analyse Australia as a land a nation have been C. E. W.
Bean (1879-1968), Keith Hancock (1898- ), C. M. H. (Manning) Clark (1915- ) and
Geoffrey Blainey (1930- ). Bean, the editor and major author of The Official of Australian in the War of
1914-18, tried to show how the
Australian people approached, survived and were changed by the war. As a
skilled journalist he decided to give a first-hand account from soldiers’
evidence. Sir Keith Hancock’s Australia
(1930) is an economic history that also attempts to characterize the national
temperament of white Australians. His view of Australia is one that has
influenced most later social and cultural historians.
The post-war years produced many
significant works of social critism and history, many new writers for children,
and a major reshuffle of theaterical conditions. Many theaters in the cities
were turned over to film; the remaining theaters survived on audeville, musical
comedy and imitations if overseas play productions. Amater theater, by
contrast, flourished in most cities and towns.
In the early 1950s a number of
fundamental alterations occurd in the structure of Australian literature. The
University of Melbourne helped to found the Union Theatre Repertory Company in
1953 for the purpose of performing in repertory rather than in individual
entrepreneurial productions. A year later, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust was
established, largely through the efforts of Dr H. C. Coombs. The trust was
instrumental in promoting the idea of govermentally subsidized national
theatre, opera and ballet companies, and these in turn encouraged the raising
of professional standards of acting and direction.
David Williamson began his work with the
Australian Performing Group in 1970. Dorothy Hewett (1923- ), This Old Man Came Rolling Home (1966,
published 1976).
Australian
Literature in 20th Century
1. The Last Decades of The ‘Old’ Bulletin
In 1961 The Bulletin was sold to the media
baron Sir Frank Packer, who appointed Donald Horne as its chief editor. The
magazine was modernised and ‘Australia for the White Man’ banner was jettisoned
from its masthead. Under Packer The Bulletin remained politically
conservative, but rejoined the political and journalistic mainstream as a
well-produced magazine that was modelled on Time magazine. It ran political and
finance news and opinions, with occasional fiction pieces without the bile and
racism of its former years. The Packer family’s Australian Consolidated Press
(ACP) absorbed the magazine’s financial losses as a trade off for the prestige
of publishing Australia’s oldest magazine. It was published as a dual
publication in conjunction with Newsweek in attempt to recoup costs. The
Bulletin online was established in the early 2000s, publishing extracts
from the magazine and exclusive web content, image galleries, an archive of
past covers and a comments blog known as ‘The Bullring’. As what can be seen as
a nod to the Archibald Art Prize, The Bulletin Magazine also founded
the Smart 100 Awards that identified most innovative and creative people
working in Australia at the time. On 24 January 2008, ACP announced the closure
of the magazine. Magazine sales had declined to 57,000 copies compared to
100,000 during the 1990s and despite ACP’s financial and human resources the
magazine was no longer profitable. The loss in readership was attributed to
changes in the Australian media and the increasing popularity of online popularity
and development of technology. The Bulletin is historically
significant as evidence of 19th century Australia colonial society with its
bush-centric, masculist, radical and racist culture. The Bulletin has
interpretive significance that enables us to look back into Australia’s past
and examine colonial attitudes, myths and social mores.
Some works were last printed in the Bulletin, ie:
a. Douglas Stewart
(1913-85), his poetry The Green Lions (1936)
b.
Francis Webb
(1925-73), his poem Ghost of The Cock
(1964)
c. John Blight
(1913- ), his sea sonnets Beachcombing
Days (1968)
d. Gavin Casey
(1907-64), his short story It’s Harder
for Girls (1942, republished as Short-Shift
Saturday, and Other Stories in 1974)
2.
The Uniqueness
of Recent Writing
The last twenty-five
years have seen the development of two groups of writers not much represented
before: Aboriginal writers in English and migrant writers in English or in
European languages. Ironically, both oldest and newest Australians share the
themes of displacement, alienation, loneliness, and withdrawal already familiar
from nineteenth-century writing about convict and reluctant settlers.
The first major Aboriginal
writer was Kath Walker, whose frist volume of poetry, We are Going (1964), that ironicallly contrast a sense of the epic
Dreaming with the pathos of contemporary disenchantment and misery. The
preservation and dissemination of Aboriginal at the hands of white settlers,
and adjurations to right the wrongs and produce interracial harmony are the
themes of most of her poems. Walker’s voice is more declamatory than musical,
suited for oral recitation of the short, self-contained lines.
While all white
Australian writers are migrants or the descendants of migrants, those who come
from non-English- speaking countries commonly express feelings of alienation,
loss and rejection akin to those of aboriginal writers and the more disaffected
of early British and Irish immigrant. With the large numbers of migrants coming
to Australia since the late 1940s from countries such as Greece and Italy,
substantial communities of bilingual writers and readers from specific
countries have emerged, sometimes with their own publishing literary modes.
Short story and poetry have been the preferred literary modes. Pino Bosi is
known for his broadcasts in Italian and English, and for his short stories and
poems. The Checkmate, and Other Stories covering a wide
variety of circumstances and characters of many ethnic origins, has most of its
narratives dependent on the clearing-away of some misconception in
incomprehension.
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