Russel Ward and the Australian National Mystique

Publication in 1958 of The Australian Legend, by Russel Ward, was a milestone in the scholarly conception of an Australian national identity. Beginning with an interest in bush ballads and broadening out to other literary and historical evidence, Ward argues that “a specifically Australian outlook grew up first among the bush workers in the Australian pastoral industry, and that this group has had an influence, completely disproportionate to its numerical and economic strength, on the attitudes of the whole Australian community.” This was not a new idea, of course; as Ward notes, there was consensus among popular writers since the late 19^th century “that the ‘Australian spirit’ is somehow intimately connected with the bush and that it derives rather from the common folk than from the more respectable and cultivated sections of society.” What Ward does is treat this old assumption methodically, with evidence. Of course, the evidence is selected in line with the thesis. Ward assumes there is a national character of accepted definition in currency. He does not seek to dispute this; he seeks to explain it. This idea of a national character emerged during the 1890s. As Ward writes,

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the occupation of the interior had been virtually completed, it was possible to look back and sense what had been happening. Australians generally became actively conscious, not to say self-conscious, of the distinctive ‘bush’ ethos, and of its value as an expression and symbol of nationalism.

Here are notes comprising Ward’s major points of argument, organized by his chapter titles.

II. The Founding Fathers

Here is the anti-heroic genesis story.

. . . may prefer not to remember that for nearly the first half-century of its existence White Australia was, primarily, an extensive gaol. . . . this fact is basic to any understanding of social mores in the early period when an Australian tradition was forming. . . . as a distinctive Australian ethos developed, it drew far more upon the habits and outlook of the larger and socially inferior group than upon those of the smaller and more powerful one, for two reasons.

Those two reasons were

1. The elite of colonial society sent their sons home for education and cultivated British habits and loyalties.
2. Other than the small elite, Australia was peopled by transportees and immigrants from the lower social classes, disgruntled outcasts of the Industrial Revolution.

Convict balladry figures prominently in the discussion here, author reproducing the full text of “Adieu to Old England” a.k.a. “The Transport’s Farewell.”

Ward writes, “There is little doubt that the lower orders were singularly unimpressed by the self-proclaimed superiority of the colonial ‘gentry’.” Moreover,

. . . the new environment made society much more fluid and, while it tended to vulgarize and debase the rich, it tended equally to augment the integrity and self-reliance, though not to polish the manners, of working people.

III. Celts and Currency

“In this chapter,” the author announces, “we shall consider the ways in which Celtic and native Australian influences modified the basically English tradition of the majority.” Most importantly, the Irish, who formed a working-class cultural core.

It is now clear that Irish working-class attitudes formed another important ingredient in the distinctive Australian ethos which was developing.

The Irish relished colonial opportunities beyond the dreams of those under English rule at home. They encouraged family and friends to come out. And they hated England. Again, folksong evidence.

The strength of this Irish-Australian hatred of England is vividly suggested by the composition here of Irish revolutionary folk-songs and their survival, in some cases, right down to the present day.

The Irish were foremost in the development of a popular sentiment that this new land belonged to them.

Not only prisoners and emancipists, but Currency Lads and poor settlers generally shared in the conviction that the new land belonged, morally, to them.

IV. Up the Country

Next Ward considers the importance of the up-country, pastoral environment on the developing Australian ethos. This was a life to which convicts were “conscripted,” he notes. Many of them remained there as emancipists. “The very remoteness of the frontier was, in itself, an attraction for some men,” Ward says. Some loved the bush life, others were repelled by it.

It seems that outback conditions exercised a kind of natural selection upon the human material. The qualities favouring successful assimilation were adaptability, toughness, endurance, activity and loyalty to one’s fellows, just those traits already noticed as being typical of the convict and currency elements of the population. . . . there is convincing evidence that convicts and old hands were morally improved, if not entirely made over to the Lord, by up-country conditions. . . . Frontier conditions fostered and intensified the growth of the distinctively Australian outlook whose beginnings we have considered above. Take, for example, the strongly egalitarian sentiment of group solidarity and loyalty, which was perhaps the most marked of all convict traits.

It was a man’s world. “This deprivation of female companionship,” Ward observes, had very important effects on the behaviour and outlook of bush-workers.” Indeed, bushmen were guilty of suspiciously “protesting, perhaps too much, their masculinity.”

V. The Gold Rush

The gold rush accentuated the development of the “Australian national feeling.” It drew many more people up-country, and there they embraced the values of mateship generated by bushmen. This included not only personal relationships but also class solidarity and community cohesiveness. At the same time, gold encouraged egalitarianism of a sort, because people got rich or went bust on their own. Gold also made the ethos more obstreperous and in some ways more abusive. White diggers hated police and any sort of imposed authority. They also hated the Chinese.

Ward illustrates the diggers’ appropriation and accentuation of pastoral bush values with the digger ballad, the chorus of which goes,

With my swag all on my shoulder,

Black billy in my hand,

I traveled the bush of Australia

Like a true-born native man.

VI. The Bushrangers

Bushrangers, Australian outlaws, figured prominently as popular heroes. All the factors treated above combined to create sympathy, indeed admiration, for bushrangers who defied the law and, so it was said, befriended the worthy poor. In particular, Ward notes, “The convict system manufactured bushrangers.” Authority was the enemy. “In the eyes of the bush-workers,” writes the author, “and of a great many other colonists, bushrangers derived added prestige merely from being, so to speak, the professional opponents of the police.” Squatters, too, were objects of hatred, expressed through habitual stock-stealing.

The fact is that every honest bushman, more or less, was a thief upon occasion, at least from the point of view of the law. According to his own code, however, the theft of certain kinds of property, especially his own livestock for food, from government, squatters, or ‘swells’, was at worst a trifling peccadillo and at best a moral and praiseworthy act.

Bushrangers ballads, of course, about. Ward presents many, including a full text of “Bold Jack Donahue.”

VII. The Bushman Comes of Age

Bush values were consolidated and perpetuated, living past the frontier days.

The later bushman exhibited, perhaps even more clearly than his fore-runners, that ‘manly independence’ whose obverse side was a leveling, egalitarian collectivism, and whose sum was comprised in the concept of mateship.

The chapter includes an interesting discussion of shearer culture and shearer ballads, including “Flash Jack from Gundagai.”

The folk attitude assumed a more overtly political form in time.

Another important development in up-country life during the later part of the last century was a very great strengthening of nationalist feeling.

VIII. Apotheosis of the Nomad Tribe

The ethos crystallized during the 1890s, so that the folk culture was hailed or critiqued as a national character. “By 1893 the stereotype was so firmly established that it was already be satirized,” notes Ward. “By the time of federation, then, the ‘noble bushman’ was already firmly enshrined in both the popular and the literary imagination.” Bush values also permeated the growing trade-union movement.

A key exponent of all this was the Sydney Bulletin, a paper edited by J.F. Archibald. He published up-country material, including much verse, for the general public. Ward writes, “The Bulletin ‘discovered’ and published the three greatest ‘nationalist’ writers of the ’nineties, as well as nearly all of their brethren.” The three were Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, and Joseph Furphy.

IX. Two Noble Frontiersmen

Ward argues, “There is every reason to think that the frontier tradition has been, at least, not less influential and persistent in Australia than in America.” So this chapter is devoted to the comparison of the two frontiers, with liberal attention to the ideas of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The author concludes with remarks on the place and importance of national identity.

Native an imported critics of our literature and life now assert repeatedly that the bush tradition exerts a stultifying influence on both. At the same time other voices, more numerous but usually more inarticulate, defend the legend. . . . It is generally agreed that without a distinctive national tradition a people lacks cohesion, balance and confidence. . . . Today’s task might well be to develop those features of the Australian legend which still seem valid in modern conditions.

OK, have you noticed any problems with Ward’s conception of Australian national identity? Is anyone left out? (Hint: you can tell a lot just by studying the chapter titles.)

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