The Calm After The Storm

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, edited by Peter Pierce; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 622 pages, $140.

Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke,  edited by Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Stewart and Michael Wilding; Australian Scholarly Publishing in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2009, 339 pages, $39.95.

These two books on Australian literature appear at a time when the teaching of the subject at universities has reached crisis point. There are now only two professors of Australian Literature, compared with eighteen in Creative Writing, and numerous others in Cultural and Media Studies. The latter fashionable areas have swallowed up the former.

From the 1980s, Australian literary critics let in to their conferences tribes of theorists who promised to revolutionise the discipline. All sorts of way-out notions were foregrounded (to use the current jargon). One Adelaide conference on Australian literature had as a main theme cross-dressing in Australian literature—not, you might think, a significant topic, but one that allowed a lot of talk about “the body”, “transgressing the boundaries” and “gender changing”. It was commonly argued at the time that we whites had no right to talk about Aboriginal writing, and that Aborigines themselves had been so denatured by white repression that they were incapable of producing it, which didn’t leave you much room to move. The theorists had no love for Australian literature; they simply used it as target practice.

The leaders in the field of Australian literature, who themselves went in for none of this, were warned of the dangers. But their bête noire at the time was Professor Dame Leonie Kramer, because she carried out traditional lit. crit., and believed, for Heaven’s sake, in a canon. They did not see the real danger—a cuckoo had entered their nest, for when the new trendies went back to their university departments after the talkfests, they proceeded to abolish in the main the teaching of literature, including Australian literature, to abolish English departments, and instead to set up endless seminars on the villainy of Rupert Murdoch, and on “interrogating” our culture to show how flawed, even genocidal, it really was, something the politics, sociology and history departments had themselves been long since doing.

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, which is a fine piece of work, represents the calm after the storm. It is intended as the most up-to-date reference work on the topic, and succeeds admirably. The writers are the survivors—they were not the destructive party, but the ones who had positions of authority at the time and let the disaster happen. So shell-shocked are they now that this sorry theory episode is not mentioned, except briefly in a valuable essay by David Carter on cultural politics over the last fifty years. In this book boundaries are firmly back, abstruse deconstructions are absent, and there is no obsession with saying the unsayable. The essays cover their fields expertly.

What then is new in this book? An editorial decision has been made to concentrate on the production of literature rather than pure literary criticism. This is sensible, as there exist many books on the latter. In addition, to avoid the danger of excessive nationalism, these essays look at Australian literature in an international context. The essays are broad surveys of their topics, rather than ones focusing on individual authors; this approach works well, but does have some drawbacks. Two chapters by Elizabeth Webby and Tanya Dalziell cover much the same ground in nineteenth-century literature. Instead, one of these chapters could have been devoted to major prose works like Geoffry Hamlyn, His Natural Life, Robbery Under Arms and Such is Life, which are not given enough attention in this work of general reference.

The previous overarching interpretation of Australian literature, based on promoting nationalism, is rightly out of fashion now. In its place we have an undercurrent in this book which moves in the opposite direction, by focusing on the dispossession of Aborigines since 1788. This is a genuine anxiety, but can be taken too far. One problem with this interpretation is that it was not apparent in a lot of our literature until recently. To overcome this, the poet John Kinsella in his chapter resorts to “paranoid readings”, that is, searching for white guilt even when it is not overtly there. This has the danger of imposing a pre-determined reading onto the literature. The “Stolen Generations” government report is considered here as part of Australian literature because it contains Aboriginal autobiographies.

This book is mercifully free from semiotics, theory, deconstructionism, post-structuralism and other unreadable formulations. Overall it is clearly and intelligently written. But some remnant jargon words from the bad decades creep back when the writers’ minds slip out of gear: nuanced, contested, dialogic, canonical, gendered, hegemonic, ironised, hybridising, valorising, signifier, trope, alterity. In contrast, essays by Peter Kirkpatrick on early Australian modernism, Robin Gerster on Asia, and Vivian Smith on early poetry are brilliant pieces where fact, analysis, information and original ideas are blended into a stimulating whole.

Most readers and students want factual information and basic analysis. If theory and lit. crit. are out, what can Australian literary critics fruitfully do? Biographies and annotated editions of texts are areas where objective scholarship can be utilised. Recent examples are the wonderfully informative biographies of Patrick White by David Marr, Rolf Boldrewood by Paul de Serville, Joseph Furphy by John Barnes, and Christina Stead by Hazel Rowley. With publication of the biography of Marcus Clarke by Cyril Hopkins, we have a book which happily combines biography and textual annotation.

Brian Elliot produced a biography of Marcus Clarke in 1958, but it is now sadly out of date. One essential source on Clarke’s life has been an unpublished manuscript biography of him written a century ago by his school friend Cyril Hopkins, brother of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This manuscript, which has lain in the Mitchell Library in Sydney for decades, has now been edited and published by three scholars in the field, Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Walker and Michael Wilding. To the Hopkins text of 250 pages, they have added seventy-five pages of notes, which include an enormous amount of additional information not known to Hopkins or Elliot when they were writing their biographies. The editors’ scholarly work almost amounts to a new, third biography of Clarke.

Cyril Hopkins knew Clarke’s early life in detail. He kept letters sent to him by Clarke on Clarke’s early Australian years in the Wimmera working as a jackeroo on stations there. These were two important times in Clarke’s life few other people knew about, which makes Hopkins’s biography so valuable. Clarke’s later life in Melbourne as a journalist, of which Hopkins had scant knowledge, has been covered by his contemporaries and later commentators.

Hopkins does not provide material on the tragedy of Clarke’s last years. But his biography throws clear light on the fatal flaw in Clarke’s character which led to a rapid decline in his thirties, from “my brilliant career” to “my career goes bung”. From his schooldays Clarke exhibited a recognisable decadent late-Romantic sensibility—impetuous, manic, and needing self-induced highs. It was the triumph of a brilliant and fevered imagination over everyday reality. Marcus Clarke was wonderful company and stimulating over the short course, but the toll this exuberance and lack of restraint had on him is hard to grasp, as we get few insights from Clarke’s writing of the depressive side of his character.

Hopkins’s text is surprisingly modern and readable. This worthwhile publishing venture has been jointly sponsored by the State Library of Victoria, where Clarke was employed, and the Mitchell Library, which holds the Hopkins manuscript.