Locating Australian Literary Memory

By Brigid Magner

‘Locating Australian Literary Memory’ explores the cultural meanings suffusing local literary commemorations. It is orientated around eleven authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon – who have all been celebrated through a range of forms including statues, huts, trees, writers’ houses and assorted objects. Brigid Magner illuminates the social memory residing in these monuments and artefacts, which were largely created as bulwarks against forgetting. Acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables them, she traverses the many contradictions, ironies and eccentricities of authorial commemoration in Australia, arguing for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise those who have been hitherto excluded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785271090

Book preview

Locating Australian

Literary Memory

Brigid Magner

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Brigid Magner 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-107-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-107-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Remembering Absent Authors

Chapter OneAdam Lindsay Gordon’s Grave

Chapter TwoJoseph Furphy in the Riverina

Chapter ThreeHenry Handel Richardson and the Haunting of Lake View

Chapter FourHenry Lawson Country

Chapter FiveThe Multiple Birthplaces of A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson

Chapter SixNan Chauncy’s Sanctuary

Chapter SevenLiving Memorials: The Houses of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark

Chapter EightStatue Mania: P. L. Travers and the Appeal of Mary Poppins

Chapter NineKylie Tennant’s Hut

Chapter TenThe David Unaipon Monument at Raukkan

Conclusion:Towards an Expanded Repertoire of Literary Commemorations

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1.1Still from The Life's Romance of Adam Lindsay Gordon (1916). Reproduced with permission of the National Film and Sound Archive, Title no. 6497

1.210 Lewis Street Brighton, Adam Lindsay Gordon’s home at the time of his death (1933). Reproduced with permission of the State Library of Victoria, PCLTA 771

1.3Third-form students from Brighton Grammar School conducting a poetry reading at the grave of Adam Lindsay Gordon on the centenary of his death. Photograph by Maggie Diaz (1970). Reproduced with permission of the State Library of Victoria, PCLTFBN 309

2.1Residence of Joseph Furphy at Shepparton. Photograph by John Kinmont Moir (1938). Reproduced with permission of the State Library of Victoria, PCLTA 2222 F.2642

2.2Unveiling tablet to Joseph Furphy (in garden of his home): guests listening to address (27 September 1947). Reproduced with permission of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, MSPH-0001.2

2.3Joseph Furphy statue, Welsford Street, Shepparton. Photograph by Susan Lever

2.4Letter from A. G. Stephens to Joseph Furphy, 26 June 1903. Permission granted by the National Library of Australia, MS 2022

3.1Social Function at Lake View Homestead, Chiltern. Photograph by Le Dawn Studios. Reproduced with the permission of the State Library of Victoria, PCLTFBN 214

3.2Re-enactment of Laura’s journey to school in The Getting of Wisdom, Maldon (2009). Courtesy of Janey Runci

4.1Henry Lawson’s home at Eurunderee (1948). Reproduced with permission of the State Library of New South Wales, FL 2004622

4.2Opening of Henry Lawson’s Home at Eurunderee, near Mudgee (1949). Reproduced with permission of the State Library of New South Wales, FL1745226

5.1Emmaville Cottage, Orange. Photograph by Brigid Magner

5.2Jack Thompson addressing a crowd at the Buckinbah ruins, 2009. Photograph courtesy of Sharon and Alf Cantrell, Banjo Paterson Museum, Yeoval

6.1Nan Chauncy outside Day Dawn with dogs. Reproduced with the permission of the State Library of Tasmania, PH 30/1/7536

6.2Nan Chauncy’s typewriter ‘George’ at Day Dawn. Photograph by Sophie Underwood

7.1Katharine Susannah Prichard with Eleanor Dark on the verandah at Greenmount (1948), Western Australia. Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Australia, PIC/8840

7.2Katharine Susannah Prichard’s work room (circa 1930s). Courtesy of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation

7.3Inside Eleanor Dark's work room at Varuna. Photograph by Brigid Magner

7.4Jerrekellimi, Blue Mountains, New South Wales. Photograph by Brigid Magner

8.1Mary Poppins statue outside the Birthplace Museum, Maryborough Queensland. Reproduced with the permission of Joy Newman

8.2Sean Crampton’s rough for a statue of Mary Poppins in Central Park (1966). Reproduced with the permission of Harriet Crampton and the State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS5341

8.3Mary Poppins statue, Bowral, NSW. Reproduced with the permission of John Huth

9.1Kylie’s Hut, post-restoration. Photograph from the personal collection of Benison Rodd

9.2Cleaning up Kylie's Hut. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Australia, MS10043

9.3Sign at the site of Ernie's Metcalfe's old house, Diamond Head. Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Australia, MS10043

9.4Ruins of Eve Langley’s hut, 2018. Photograph by Brigid Magner

10.1Raukkan church, South Australia. Photograph by Brigid Magner

10.2David Uniapon monument, Raukkan, South Australia. Photograph by Brigid Magner

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has my name on the cover, but it is the result of a collective effort. In the following list, I will attempt to mention the people and organisations who have helped me bring it to completion.

Thanks to the Fellowship of Australian Writers (NSW) for access to their records; Trish Kotai-Ewers and Peter Bibby of FAW (WA) for their hospitality at the Tom Collins and Mattie Furphy houses in Perth; Shannon Coyle at the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writing Centre and Barbara Palmer at Varuna; Henry Lawson Society members particularly Kevin Robson, James Howard, Tony Lambides Turner; John Adams and Allan Childs of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Commemorative Committee; Janey Runci and Helen McCrae, Di Parsons, Graeme and Dot Charles, Clive and Meg Probyn and Beryl Pickering of the Henry Handel Richardson Society; Alf and Sharon Cantrell from the Banjo Paterson Museum, Yeoval; Mick Doyle from Rotary in Orange; Bill Boyd and Phillip Bowman of the Camden Haven Historical Society; Andrew Marshall from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and Karen Hughes of Swinburne University.

I am indebted to the State Library of Victoria for a Creative Fellowship in 2015 and for publishing an article on Adam Lindsay Gordon in the La Trobe Journal. Extra thanks to Fiona Jeffery for her assistance with images from the Pictures collection.

I would like to acknowledge the role of the ASAL Vets in my thinking – particularly the efforts of Susan Lever who published a version of the Furphy chapter in JASAL and encouraged me to join literary outings even though I’m not yet retired. Roger Osbourne has also been very generous with sharing his theories about Furphy’s typewriter.

Special appreciation to John Arnold and the late Peter Pierce for answering my endless questions and to Robin Gerster for title suggestions.

I express gratitude to my colleagues at RMIT University, especially Linda Daley, David Carlin, Lucinda Strahan, Laurene Vaughan, Tracy O’Shaughnessy and other members of the non/fictionLab for reading early drafts of essays on Henry Lawson and Nan Chauncy. Also to Vern Field and Jacinda Woodhead for publishing them in Island and Overland and Sheila Hones of Literary Geographies journal for giving me insightful feedback on my article about Henry Handel Richardson’s house.

Huge appreciation to Kai Jensen for his brilliant editing and to Janet Hope for coaching me to believe I could do it in the first place. And to my dear friends Emily Potter, Tessa Laird, Hester Joyce, Abigail Dent and my sister Tui for keeping my spirits up.

Finally, I offer immense gratitude to my family - Brett, Augie, Griffin and Violet -- for their love and willingness to accompany me on trips to literary locations scattered around the country.

Introduction: Remembering Absent Authors

Such monuments, alas, too often are a saving of face by the living in regard to the neglected dead.

– Miles Franklin (1942)¹

The language of literary commemoration is shot through with references to memory. The word ‘monument’ is derived from the Latin word ‘monere’, to name. ‘Memorial’ comes directly from ‘memorialis’, meaning ‘of or belonging to memory’. Monuments are structures which usually refer to something other than themselves, recalling people or events from the past. A memorial or monument exists both in physical space, as a ‘landmark’, and in historical space as a ‘historic site’, the commemoration of an event or person in history.² Literary memorials or commemorations function as portals for remembrance or bulwarks against forgetting.

In this book, I attempt to ‘read’ places imbued with literary memory around Australia, connecting the practice of reading with the material reality of location.³ I define ‘literary memory’ as the remembrance of particular figures, works or characters which are associated with a place or a ‘country’. I am concerned with the ways in which literary memory is located or ‘fixed’ in the form of certain tributes or artefacts and the ceremonies practiced in relation to them. Whereas some forms of literary memory gain authority and are legitimised through organisations or institutions, others remain marginal.

Pierre Nora has famously argued that the development of modern memory culture, especially the rise of specific sites of memory, is in inverse proportion to the demise of traditional societies in which people were connected to the past through practices such as oral storytelling. He contends that our contemporary preoccupation with lieux de memoire or ‘places of memory’ derives from the disappearance of milieu de memoire or ‘real environments of memory’. For Nora ‘memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name’ while history is ‘the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’.⁴

Francois Hartog claims that Nora misunderstands collective memory, regarding it as a vivid recognition and a faithful reproduction in opposition to history, which is regarded as external and detached. Hartog contends that we should talk about a change of regimes of memory: oral societies are ruled by the regime of the transmission of memory, whereas today we are ruled by a memory obliterated by the written word.⁵ In this formulation, authors might be seen as complicit in the privileging of the written over the oral, yet their work can also be at least partly driven by a desire to collect memories before they disappear.

In the Australian context, Indigenous memory reaches back into deep time despite being violently interrupted by colonisation. By contrast, memories of the most cherished icons of settler-colonial culture need to be reinforced by monumental forms to ameliorate forgetfulness. Following Nora, we might ask, whose will to remember do Australian literary monuments ultimately reflect?⁶

Monuments can be read as ‘texts’ to be decoded. Howard Williams suggests that they are texts with iconographic programmes or constellations of allusions and metaphors, which can be seen as sensitive indicators of shifting ideologies.⁷ As ‘external deposits of memory’⁸ located in public space, literary memorials are an index of the popularity, or cultural significance of an author at a particular moment in time.

Arguably the prevalence of traditional monuments to Anglo-Australian (often male) writers serves to a reinforce myths about Australian identity while excluding many authors who are equally worthy of public remembrance. This could partly explain the more ambivalent approach to the preservation of houses associated with transnational expatriate literary figures such as Christina Stead and Patrick White. Inevitably, sites associated with iconic authors who have contributed to a shared sense of national identity will be more popular than those who have been critical of this project, such as Stead, White and P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins.⁹

Practices of tangible commemoration, such as museum making and the preservation of writers’ houses, rarely begin while authors are alive.¹⁰ Often there is a long period after the author’s death in which nothing much happens and then there may be an upsurge in popularity. Naturally, dead authors are easier to manage, without their cantankerous personalities, radical beliefs and drinking habits to interfere with processes of reification. Purged of their uncomfortable political views or aberrant behaviour, literary figures of the past can be offered in ‘newly inclusive ceremonies of collective identification’.¹¹ A certain amount of ‘whitewashing’ often occurs after a writer’s death, focusing on the positive, ‘uplifting’ qualities of a writer’s work and ignoring their less palatable pronouncements.

Authors may be explicitly connected with specific places or regions. I argue that literary places are locations which people have made meaningful through a range of practices, primarily writing, reading, collecting and commemorating. ‘Literary place’ can cover a whole range of locations, both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’. Real-life places can be connected to various stages in the author’s life such as their birth, literary production and death. Imagined places might be completely invented or may be composites of verifiable topographies featured in author’s fictions. Places that are imagined – or re-imagined – by authors are sometimes sought by literary tourists who wish to connect a favourite fiction with an identifiable location.

The places discussed in this book can be defined as ‘heritage’ sites but they are not all officially designated or protected as such. As Richard Prentice observes, the word ‘heritage’ means an inheritance or legacy; things of value which have been passed from one generation to the next.¹² In this sense, cultural heritage is cultural property, and in extreme cases may be fought over or otherwise physically appropriated.¹³ This is why literary commemorations can involve conflict with authors’ families and communities, with debates arising about the authenticity and ownership of these tributes.¹⁴

In The Uses of Heritage (2006), Laurajane Smith proposes that there is a hegemonic discourse about heritage, which acts to constitute the way we think, talk and write about it. The ‘heritage’ discourse therefore naturalises the practice of ‘founding fathers’ rounding up the usual suspects to conserve their memory and transmit their importance to future generations, and in so doing promotes a certain set of Western elite cultural values as being universally applicable, undermining alternative and subaltern heritage practices.¹⁵

Chris Healy characterises heritage as a ‘constitutive and organizing rhetoric across the field of cultural institutions and practices’.¹⁶ In Australia, many heritage sites and related artefacts have been assembled by State¹⁷ and national bodies and listed by the now defunct Register for the National Estate,¹⁸ the National Trust and the Australian Heritage Commission, now known as the Australian Heritage Council. Like museums and galleries, these are institutions that articulate inherited customs and beliefs through heritage collections which are designed to stand for the nation as a whole.

In the British context, Patrick Wright has argued that traditional heritage features ‘represent a unitary image of a privileged national identity which has been raised to the level of exclusive and normative essence’.¹⁹ An official appreciation of heritage arrived later in Australia than in the ‘mother country’. In Britain, the National Trust was established in 1895; a similar national organisation did not exist in Australia until the Australian National Trust movement begun in New South Wales in 1945. It was rapidly embraced by other states with multiple offices set up in the 1950s and 1960s and the establishment of the Australian Council of National Trusts in 1965.²⁰ Before 1965, state organisations such the Bread and Cheese Club and the Victorian Trust in Melbourne sought to document and potentially protect heritage sites.²¹ The concerns of these smaller, local organisations, which often had a focus on arts heritage, did not always coincide with those of the National Trust. By the time the Federal Government Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate was formed in 1973, the conservation movement already had a constituency of considerable size.²²

Overall, literary heritage activity has occurred sporadically - the 1920s, 1940s and 1970s were notable high points. It has been more prevalent post-war and during periods of resurgent literary nationalism, and eras characterised by greater support of the arts, as under the Whitlam government in the 1970s. Following the Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate, the Whitlam government rejected the widely accepted notion that the protection of the environment has a socio-economic basis, that conservation is a ‘middle-class issue’. The Prime Minister stated strongly that ‘the pillage and neglect of the National Estate diminishes us all in equal measure’.²³ The 1980s ushered in a more neo-liberal approach to public heritage and accompanying divestment and ‘taken-for-grantedness’²⁴ of heritage across many countries including Australia. The 1988 Australian Bicentennial celebrations, which were boycotted by Indigenous people, involved a re-evaluation of singular and exclusionary notions of Australian national heritage but was unable to replace them with a coherent vision for the future. After 1988, Indigenous people and their allies have contributed powerfully to the revisioning of Australian heritage.

It should be remembered that literary heritage is merely a small subset within the wider field of Australian heritage. Yet there are certain common tendencies – just as heritage properties or tributes have traditionally been associated with the elite, literary heritage in Australia has tended to validate canonical authors at the expense of others. Expatriate, international or multicultural authors have been left out of national myth-making and until recently Indigenous storytellers were almost routinely excluded. In their study of Australian literary commemoration, Toby Davidson and Donna Houston have identified a skewing towards the first half rather than the second half of the twentieth century which effectively disenfranchises Indigenous and multicultural authors, who are predominantly found in the latter.²⁵

The ensuing chapters are organised around eleven authors who have been celebrated through material forms of remembrance: Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon. Although some of these authors might be regarded as ‘the usual suspects’, each one tells us something different about the conventions of literary commemoration in Australia from the nineteenth century onwards. My focus is on places associated with these authors – their birthplaces, sites of death, dwellings and the objects contained therein. This book necessarily involves an exploration of the more ephemeral practices enacted through places, houses and artefacts imbued with literary significance.²⁶

Second-Hand Traditions

In order to understand why Australian literary heritage has been largely dependent on imported models, it is necessary to return to eighteenth-century Britain where the cult of the picturesque set the stage for literary tourism, granting to domestic sites and authors the kinds of homage previously reserved for classical ones. A similar movement in taste occurred in Australia, with migrants initially seeking scenes and views familiar from the Old World. After initially resisting the attributes of the ‘new’ country, they began to endow Australian places with similar associations, and then started to appreciate the unique qualities of their new country.

Modes of associationism were inevitably inherited from Britain as part of the colonisation of Australia. William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809) – which proposes to mark the burial places of notable men – explores the emotional resonances of historic places by calling on the psychological doctrine of association. For Godwin, the psychology of association is active in producing feelings of patriotism and reverence for antiquity. This essay, largely ignored when it was published, suggested a growing interest in the cultivation of an ‘inward’, subjective response to sites and scenes of historical importance.²⁷ Unlike many of his contemporaries, who tended to be preoccupied with classical antiquity, Godwin saw Britain as a landscape of history, worthy of domestic tourism.Paul Readman notes that the Lake District, a popular site for literary tourism, was ‘storied ground’ offering a collection of various historical associations which could be read as a coherent, continuous narrative.²⁸

Associationism allowed settlers in Australia to find connections between the landscapes they had left behind and the new country they encountered. The central feature of associationism is the idea that material objects appear sublime or beautiful because the spectator connects them with sentiments associated with other scenes and places stored in the memory, or with works of art or literature.²⁹ In other words, the scene in front of the spectator triggers off a train of associated images and emotions, usually derived from their home country. Robert Dixon has argued that particularly in the English-like landscapes of Tasmania, associationist theory provided a ‘fundamental mechanism of psychological transition and accommodation for British immigrants in the early part of the nineteenth century’.³⁰ Arriving in Hobart in 1829, Augustus Prinsep noted in his letters that the scenery appeared both ‘picturesque’ and ‘suggestive of a thousand English associations’.³¹ Louisa Meredith applied medieval and Gothic associations to the Tasmanian landscape. In ‘The Chapelle of Clematis in the Forest Abbaye’, her memories of Tintern Abbey transform native clematis into an imaginary cathedral. Here Meredith demonstrates the way in which associations can actually serve to enhance our joy in natural scenery; for this reason it is a ‘complicated joy’.³²

In 1867, Henry Gyles Turner expressed the view that Australians were a ‘new community’ living in conditions which did not enable the flourishing of literary genius.

The Classical and the Romantic die in the garish light of a country whose first civilized inhabitant still walks her streets, and where the moss-grown ruined Abbey, or crumbling ivy-covered castle, are only emblemed by the falling log cabin, or tenantless slab hut of some deserted goldfield.³³

Turner implies that the ruins of huts and goldfields are not fertile ground for the production of writing equal to those of the canonical authors of the old world.

Ian D. Clark contends that new world tourism in Australia in the nineteenth century is rendered in old world paradigms. The tourist gaze in colonial Victoria was

essentially mediated by Old World paradigms such as the picturesque and the panoramic. These sensibilities were shaping the gaze of British colonists and travellers and the Victorian landscape was seen through an Old World lens.³⁴

In the early days of the colonial project, there was a perception that the country was too young to harbour any literary sites of interest, overlooking at least 60,000 years of prior inhabitation by Indigenous people.

Explorers, like their contemporaries, adapted the newly fashionable language of Romantic poetry and Romantic tourism – the sublime, the picturesque, the grand, the awe-inspiring – to their observations. These were useful modes through which to express their sense of wonder and trepidation in response to a radically new landscape however unfitted for the task.

Julia Horne observes that a major aim of much early colonial travel was to ‘discover’ land with economic potential, but even when these journeys were unsuccessful, journals were still published to provide accounts of the journey and the Australian countryside and its curiosities.³⁵ Inevitably, early observers characterised the ‘foreign’ landscape in negative terms.

Judge and literary critic Barron Field’s poem ‘On Reading the Controversy between Lord Byron and Mr Bowles’ (1823) begins with this line: ‘Anticipation is to a young country what antiquity is to an old.’ Field’s book First Fruits of Australian Poetry was printed for private circulation in 1819. In his new country, Field saw ‘a land without antiquities’ where, instead:

Of heart communings with ancestral relicks,

Which purge the pride while they exalt the mind,

We’ve nothing left us but anticipation³⁶

Within the English literary tradition, ruins have traditionally acted as obvious ‘collecting points’ for historical sentiment.³⁷ Field saw a land bereft of the ‘relicks’ which might provide a sense of meaning and belonging. Despite the fact that the continent was already covered with ruins by the mid-nineteenth century, including gold-mining ghost towns, few were considered worthy of poetic appreciation.³⁸

For Marcus Clarke, the Australian landscape was characterised by a ‘Weird Melancholy’ as expressed in his well-known preface to Poems of the Late Adam Lindsay Gordon (1876).

The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle in their black gorges a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade.³⁹

Literary critic Ken Gelder argues that Clarke’s account of ‘weird melancholy’ evokes spectral Aboriginal presences linked to the Lemurian novel in Australia, a popular version of the post-frontier Gothic.⁴⁰

As a historian, especially in his Old Tales for a Young Country (1871), Clarke helped to create the romance of the Australian past, as had Cooper and Hawthorne for American literature and Scott for English literature.⁴¹ Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859) was a major influence on Clarke. His novel His Natural Life (1874) was the second text to endow the Port Arthur penal colony with literary associations that attracted visitors. Before Port Arthur was abandoned as a prison in 1877, David Burn, who visited the site in 1842, was awed by the peninsula’s beauty and believed that many would come to visit it.⁴² Conversely, novelist Anthony Trollope declared in 1872 that no man desired to see the ‘strange ruins’ of Port Arthur.⁴³ By the late 1880s, it was falling into further decrepitude. As the Hobart Mercury proclaimed, ‘the buildings themselves are fast going to decay, and in a few years will attract nobody; for they will be ruins without anything to make them worthy of respect, or even remembrance’.⁴⁴

In Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (1998), K. S. Inglis discusses Henry Parkes’s call for a ‘national shrine’ during debate in the New South Wales parliament, noting that the proposal for a national shrine attracted few votes. Edward O’Sullivan countered: ‘We have not advanced to that stage of our national life when we have any great heroes to offer.’⁴⁵ As Inglis puts it, Parkes’s idea for a State House was scuttled by ridicule […] There was a prevailing conviction that Australian history did not yet warrant such a monument,’ echoing Field’s lament about the lack of ‘ancestral relicks’.⁴⁶

In the late nineteenth century, a number of voices began to call for the preservation of sites of literary significance, possibly responding to the establishment of the National Trust in Britain in 1895. Parkes had been unsuccessful with his call for a ‘National Shrine’ but he was able to erect a statue of English author Charles Dickens in Centennial Park, Sydney, in 1891, disregarding the stipulation in Dickens’s will: ‘I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me.’⁴⁷ At this distance in time, it’s difficult to know whether Parkes commissioned it before he knew of Dickens’s request, or whether he merely ignored it.⁴⁸ Originally sited at the junction of Parkes and Hamilton Drives, the Dickens statue was later relocated to the junction of Dickens Drive and Loch Avenue in 1897, to make way for a statue of Parkes himself.⁴⁹ One of only two known life-size representations of Charles Dickens in the world, the statue went missing for over forty years, until it was located in storage at the Royal Botanical Gardens in 2007 after agitations by the New South Wales Dickens Society and the Melbourne Dickens Fellowship. The restored statue, unveiled on the author’s 199th birthday,⁵⁰ has become a ‘huge drawcard for Dickensians’.⁵¹

One of the first local literary memorials was to the poet Henry Kendall whose headstone was erected in Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery in 1886, four years after his death in 1882. The campaign was led by Louisa Lawson and the dedication of the memorial was attended by the young Henry Lawson – who had been named after Kendall – and was later buried in the same grave. In the late 1880s, there were requests for ‘unofficial’ Australian poet laureate Adam Lindsay Gordon – a close friend of Kendall’s⁵² – who committed suicide in 1870, to be commemorated more fully. Gordon admirer George Forbes published a letter in the Argus (Melbourne) on 26 August 1889 suggesting that his grave in Brighton General Cemetery be fenced, to allow for the planting of greenery. He refers to the fact that ‘foreigners’ have often initiated tributes to Australians, as when ‘the people of Sydney were put to the blush by the praiseworthy action of a foreign violinist’ who raised sufficient money to place a monument over Kendall’s grave in Waverley Cemetery.

Unfortunately, the proclivities of Australians for money-getting and money-spending leave little time for the admiration of poetic genius or the finer arts, but it will be a blot on our escutcheon If we allow some outsider to do what devolves upon us as a duty.⁵³

For Forbes, Australians were not sufficiently engaged with the finer arts due to their obsession with money.

In Britain, the turn of the nineteenth century brought the development of literary geography and the invention of the idea of the literary ‘land’ or ‘country’. Certain authors such as William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen were designated their own territory which was celebrated and reimagined in their writing. In this conception of ‘author country’ or ‘writer country’, Nicola Watson argues, the author and characters from discrete works were thought to exist in magical and documentary simultaneity.⁵⁴ Although this development took longer to reach Australia, it had a distinct influence on the ways in which literary inheritance was understood and charted.⁵⁵

As Tom Griffiths has argued, the creation of memorials can be viewed as a way of ‘inscribing the settler presence on a land that was seen as devoid of any antiquity’⁵⁶ wilfully disregarding millenia of Indigenous habitation.

In 1925, the educationalist Charles R. Long emphasised the importance of recognising early pioneers through tangible memorials in order to pass on knowledge.

It is incumbent on each generation to preserve for its successors a knowledge of the happenings of its own time, and to hand on a knowledge of the things that mattered in the times of the predecessors. The most important means of doing this lies in the making of records, the erecting of monuments and the holding of commemorative services.⁵⁷

Long was deeply involved with commemorations for the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon and the genocidal Gippsland pioneer Angus McMillan, whose monuments remain standing to this day, to the distress of the Gunai(sometimes referred to as the Gunaikurnai) people. In Long’s mind, pioneers and poets were both worthy of generous stone monuments in order to ‘hand on knowledge of things that happened’; yet this learning is necessarily selective.

Robert Darby observes that in the 1930s there was a fascination with memorials and a general concern that writers of the past were being forgotten and ought to be commemorated. However, not everyone agreed with the memorialisation of local writers. In an article published in the Age in 1935, Professor George Cowling of Melbourne University denied the very possibility of Australian literature, arguing:

I cannot help feeling that our countryside is ‘thin’ and lacking in tradition […] there are no ancient churches, castles, ruins – the memorials of generations departed. You need no Baedecker in Australia. I am not concerned with the political aspect of this, but from the point of view of literature it means that we can never hope to have a Scott, a Balzac, a Dumas or a Konrad Ferdinand Meyer, nor a poetry which reflects past glories. From a literary point of view, Australia lacks the richness of age and tradition.⁵⁸

One correspondent jokingly retorted that perhaps Australian authors should be banished to Europe, where ‘their flagging invention and prosaic imagination might be stimulated by the constant contemplation of castles, ruins and ancient churches’.⁵⁹ In a subsequent letter to the Age, Frederick Macartney wrote that other countries would take Australian literature seriously only ‘when we take it seriously ourselves’.⁶⁰ P. R. Stephensen’s The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay towards National Self-Respect (1935) was written as a retort to Cowling’s article. Stephensen offers a spirited summary of Australian literary achievement, arguing that a long line of melancholics, including Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, A. L. Gordon and Henry Kendall, had deferred to the idea of Australia as a ‘permanent colony’ but were succeeded by writers who are ‘optimistic and humorous about Australia’, figures such as A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin and Steele Rudd.⁶¹

In the 1930s, there was a feeling among intellectuals that Australia’s authors had been forgotten and neglected. Victor Kennedy remarked in 1937 that it was ‘an age of memorials’ in which people were doing what ‘should have been done long years ago’ for local writers.⁶² Miles Franklin’s speech at Henry Lawson’s statue in the Sydney Domain in 1942 argued that memorials were essentially a way for the living to save face after neglecting the dead. In her view, their function was compensatory, rather than life-giving.

In 1931, the editor of the Shepparton News suggested that the town should erect a memorial to Joseph Furphy, ‘a genius that once tabernacled within our gates’, but this was not achieved until 1947. A pilgrimage to Joseph Furphy’s birthplace at Yarra Glen was instituted in 1934 through the efforts of his friend Kate Baker. J. K. Ewers wrote in 1935 that it was to become an annual event marking Furphy’s entry to the select company of Australian writers – Lawson, Kendall, Gordon – whose names are honoured by annual pilgrimages.⁶³ After an initial burst of enthusiasm, these pilgrimages dwindled and the practice lapsed two years later. In 1935, the Melbourne patron J. K. Moir came up with the idea of planting groves of native trees near Warrandyte, each one named after a significant writer: Lawson, Furphy, Kendall, Gordon and others but it became overgrown and the individual groves can no longer be distinguished.⁶⁴

Between the wars, literary places were identified, nominated and preserved as evidence of an emerging cultural nationalism. Literary critics Vance and Nettie Palmerfelt a need to respond to public and professional perceptions that Australia lacked the historical traditions required to sustain a sophisticated ‘indigenous’ culture, observing that there were many sites worth protecting.⁶⁵

Frank Dalby Davidson, then the president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, insisted upon the importance of the preservation of the Lawson family home (in Eurunderee) if Australia were to develop the rich historical environment required for cultural inspiration.⁶⁶ In other words, the celebration of the homes and haunts of Lawson was seen as a necessary part of the national project. As it happened, the house was not saved from demolition but it was later ‘opened’ as a memorial site in 1949. As I discuss in Chapter Four, the discovery and designation of ‘Lawson country’ was part of a process of commemoration which continued throughout the twentieth century.

Australian ‘heroes’ have tended to be explorers, soldiers and bushrangers rather than authors, nevertheless figures such as Henry Lawson and A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson have become enduring icons of national pride, generating a wide range of tributes. Lawson and Paterson were just two of the authors who have been identified, nominated and commemorated as a side effect of an emerging cultural nationalism.Yet this project of literary mapping has not been comprehensive, with many significant writers given scant attention or ignored completely.

A Memorialising Nation

In a largely secular settler-colonial society, Australians tend to seek equivalents to the shrines and idols of religious culture. Settlers almost immediately constructed cadastral boundaries and fences for control of territory, followed by the erection of countless monuments to people who contributed to this ‘settlement’ process. Tracy Banivanua Mar observes that ‘Australia is a memorializing nation and historical metanarratives of pioneers, wars and great men are marked explicitly throughout the landscape in memorials, cairns, plaques and other physical markers.’⁶⁷ Classic examples of this tendency are the multiple cairns marking the routes of the explorers Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt who might be seen as early Australian authors since they produced texts about their travels around the country.

Chris Healy and others have identified the ways in which colonial monuments, and the monumental forms of history from which they emerge, have served to obscure Indigenous presence in place before and after colonisation.⁶⁸ Indeed, this lack of monumental representation might be seen as symptomatic of a wider amnesia about the historical and contemporary presence of Indigenous people. In 1968, W. E. H. Stanner identified amnesia as one of the distinctive attributes of non-Indigenous Australians.⁶⁹ There have been a handful of memorials to First Nations people, with even fewer dedicated to Indigenous authors. In Sacred Places, Inglis expresses consternation that Aborigines ‘raised no legible monuments to either their own traditional civil wars or their resistance against invaders’.⁷⁰ This may be due to the bad consciences of white Australians who chose not to recognise the achievements of Indigenous people because it would draw attention to the violence with which they were dispossessed.⁷¹ Some colonists certainly felt that it was pointless to build memorials to people whose country had been taken and who would soon conveniently disappear. This is now slowly changing with more memorials to Indigenous people being initiated and produced.

There is an often unacknowledged clash between imported modes of literary commemoration and the unceded Indigenous country into which they have been introduced. The designation of ‘author country’ is especially problematic in a post-colonial context because it is overlaid upon Indigenous heritage, obscuring it from the view of white Australians. Kylie Tennant’s hut in Crowdy Bay, New South Wales, and Nan Chauncy’s house ‘Day Dawn’ located in the Chauncy Vale sanctuary in Tasmania are ‘protected’ territories which are associated with white Australian women writers. Crowdy Bay National Park and Chauncy Vale sanctuary might be seen, less positively, as examples of ‘suffocating heritage’⁷² in which one form of heritage protection elides another, in this case Indigenous history.

The Role of Literary Organisations

In Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy, Maria Tumarkin has argued that there is labour involved in keeping memory undiminished ‘both within our souls and across generations’.⁷³ This work is sometimes done by the relatives of authors, as is the case with Joseph Furphy and David Unaipon whose families have directly advocated for commemorations, but often it has fallen to literary organisations to keep the memory of writers alive in the collective imagination.

Before homegrown literary societies became commonplace, commemorations were usually in honour of writers from the Old World. In the period between the wars, Martyn Lyons writes, literary milestones including the Robbie Burns anniversary, the Charles Dickens Centenary, Shakespeare Day, the Goethe Centenary and the bi-millenary of the birth of Virgil were marked by meetings,