1 - ‘What a Crusoe crowd we shall make!’: Destabilising Imperialist Attitudes to Space in G. Warren Payne's Three Boys in Antarctica

Summary

When Jack, Ted, and Eric, the three young protagonists of G. Warren Payne's Three Boys in Antarctica (1912), are shipwrecked and forced to create a makeshift home for themselves in the Antarctic, they quickly realise that they will need to utilise all of their skills to survive in this challenging landscape. Finding themselves to be inappropriately attired, they set about making new clothes and shoes from sealskins. As they work to dry out the skins to create pelts, Ted declares, ‘What a Crusoe crowd we shall make!’ (Payne, 1912, 50). Payne consistently sets his tale within the broader framework of the Robinsonade genre through direct references to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and through the structure of his narrative, which follows the familiar pattern of shipwreck, survival, homemaking, and rescue. In many ways, this early twentieth-century text can be seen as a conservative adventure narrative, drawing on the framework of the Robinsonade and simply transporting the action to an alternative location. However, the Antarctic setting is a key strategic choice in Payne's realignment of the Robinsonade genre and in his reconsideration of the genre's traditional didactic bent. Critics including Jacqueline Rose (1994, 59) and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (1994, 38) have argued that entertaining narrative fictions written for children in the nineteenth century remained essentially didactic despite the apparent shift from the earlier, overtly moralising literature of the eighteenth century. Like the adventure fiction of the nineteenth century, Payne’s early twentieth-century text retains a certain kind of didactic impulse – what might be termed an anti-traditionalist impulse; that is, his desire to shore up the traditional didactic rigours of the Robinsonade and to undermine its formal credibility. Payne expressly focuses on refuting the didactic value of the traditional Robinsonade, challenging the usefulness or practicalities of the imperial messages contained within such conventional narratives. However, Payne himself was deeply racist and a fervent Australian nationalist; it is unlikely that he intended to write critically of imperialist ideology, by which he himself was most swayed (Carey, 2011, 13). Payne's decision to write an anti-Robinsonade narrative during a period in which the Robinsonade was the genre de rigueur is less puzzling than the anti-imperialist tendencies which underpin Three Boys in Antarctica, and which suggest an altogether more complex discourse surrounding didactic thought and the Robinsonade genre in the early twentieth century.