5 - The Novel in the Late Colonial Period

Summary

This chapter offers empirical rather than ideological explanations for two late colonial cultural phenomena: the establishment of a canon of Australian colonial novels around 1890 that was exclusively male (Geoffry Hamlyn, His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms); and the coming into existence of a nationalist imagined community, fully formed, in the 1890s, with Henry Lawson as its typifying literary voice. A book-historical approach is taken that cuts across the grain of existing explanations. Book availability is shown to be the key to the canon question. It conditioned, without exactly determining, the literary-critical reputation-making; and the women went with less effective publishers. But tastes were also changing, with a favouring of historical storytelling and stocktaking that set some Australian novels apart. In the slow shift to forms of realism, the male novelists incorporated the leftover allure of adventure fiction in a way that the domestic realism of the women could not. Sales figures, earnings and other evidence of Lawson’s delayed reception in the post-World War II period render dubious the supposed historical basis of the Australian Legend of the 1890s – unless it is a very ‘Long 1890s’ we are talking about.