2 - Colonial Adventure Novels

Summary

Colonial adventure fiction provided settler Australia with many of its foundational narratives, but they weren’t always about triumph and domination, and the energies they released into the colonies could be unruly and difficult to contain. Restlessness and movement become important here: colonial adventure novels are what Barbara Fuchs has called ‘itinerant texts’. This chapter begins with bushrangers, from the early feral bushranger narrative Michael Howe (1819) to Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1882–3) – where the protagonist’s rejection of a settled working life is almost pathological. Convict adventure novels such as James Tucker’s extraordinary Ralph Rashleigh (c.1845) and Marcus Clarke’s epic transportation melodrama His Natural Life (1874) take their characters on a gruelling detour into the Global South from which they never return. We then look at the challenges of the kangaroo hunt novel, from early Bildungsromans like Sarah Porter’s Alfred Dudley (1830) to Alfred Ferres’s His First Kangaroo (1896). These are picaresque narratives, chronicling a sequence of adventures that end only when settlement is finally achieved. Settlement is also the final destination of the squatter novel, where colonial adventure is built around speculation and the often violent business of land acquisition: from Thomas McCombie’s hallucinatory Adventures of a Colonist (1845) to the rambling squatter novels of Boldrewood and Henry Kingsley. Finally, this chapter examines some explorer narratives, looking at early examples of this genre and then turning to the wild travels undertaken in Lemurian adventure novels at the end of the nineteenth century, such as J. D. Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896). By this time, Australia is the last destination for a genre of colonial adventure that seems to have exhausted its potential elsewhere.