Victorian Settler Narratives

Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Tamara S Wagner, Tamara S Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317323136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperialist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as 'girl Crusoes' in works of fiction.

1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels

Dorice Williams Elliott

DOI: 10.4324/9781315655796-2

At the climax of Anthony Trollope’s 1873 novella, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, the eponymous hero and his employees fight a raging bushfire deliberately set by his nearest neighbours and other enemies, including some disgruntled former employees and ruffians, the sons of a former convict. “The whole horizon’, writes Trollope, is lurid with a dark red light’ and the air, which is ‘sultry enough from its own properties, [is] made almost unbearable by the added heat of the fires’, which the men are attempting to extinguish by lighting small areas and beating down the flames ‘with branches of gum-tree loaded with leaves’. By ‘sweeping these along the burning ground, the low flames would be scattered and expelled’, leaving a scorched-over patch that will stop the encroaching conflagration.¹ At this climactic moment, Harry receives help from an unexpected source — Giles Medlicot, a ‘free-selector’ recently arrived from England whom, up until this point, Harry has considered an enemy. The two gentlemen become allies during the fire and the succeeding fight between their men and the decidedly ungentle-manly Brownbie clan responsible for the fire.

One of Trollope’s nine Christmas stories, Harry Heathcote is set in the bush of mid-nineteenth-century Queensland and based on his visit to his son, an Australian ‘squatter’. In many ways Harry Heathcote is much like an American western with its ranchers and farmers vying for control of the frontier.² The men called ‘ranchers’ in America were ‘squatters’ in Australia: large-scale graziers who leased huge tracts of land from the government to graze cattle and sheep. Despite what might seem an inelegant or even derogatory name, by the mid-nineteenth century the squatters were considered by many to be the aristocracy of the Australian colonies, both because of their wealth and their connection to the land, likening their situation to the aristocratic and gentry landowners of England. In fact, the term ‘squattocracy’ is often used to describe them. The ‘free-selectors’, on the other hand, bought or were granted smaller portions of land in order to farm and their lands were often carved out of the huge ‘runs’ of the squatters. Thus there were economic and social class conflicts between the influential squatters and the more humble free-selectors, who were often emancipists (transported convicts who had completed their sentences and set up on their own) or emigrants with only a small amount of capital.

In Harry Heathcote, Trollope switches these conflicts around. The free-selector, Giles Medlicot, whom Harry at first mistrusts and even quarrels with, is an English gentleman who has come to Queensland to grow sugar cane and manufacture sugar. Although Medlicot has purchased a prime section of what Harry considers his land, bordering on the river, by the time of the fire the two men have discovered that their common interests as gentlemen of character outweigh their differences and thus Medlicot unexpectedly shows up to help battle the fire and the Brownbies who set it.

The Brownbies are squatters, supposedly of the same class as Harry. ‘Old Brownbie’, the patriarch of the clan, is a former convict who has managed to acquire land and cattle through diligence and hard work, but his six sons are scoundrels, some convicted as cattle thieves and the rest reputed to be; they are emphatically not gentlemen. Their station, in fact, is portrayed in much the same way as an American moonshine operation. Harry, whose chief fault is that he is autocratic and has an inflated sense of himself as a master and gentleman, has made enemies of the Brownbies and several of his own former employees through his pride, outspokenness and open disgust for people like the Brownbie clan, and moderating his imperiousness is the lesson he has to learn in order to become the heroic gentleman squatter he imagines himself to be.

Harry Heathcote is primarily a man’s story, dealing with political squabbles, ruthless enemies, disaffected employees, raging bushfires and outright fighting. However, not present at the scene of the fire and the fight, left back at the station to watch the sky and worry, are Harry’s wife Mary and his sister-in-law Kate Daly. Mary is a model angel-in-the-house wife and mother, while Kate is an appropriately bashful and modest young spinster who, in the conclusion — though not the climax — of the novel becomes engaged to Giles Medlicot. Cementing the relationship of Harry and Giles, Kate is the classic object of the triangle of desire that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has discussed in Between Men.³ In the middle of the fire and fight scene, when Harry discovers that Medlicot has not only come to help him put out the fire, but has also admitted he was wrong in a former dispute, the narrator tells us that ‘Harry had not a word to say, unless it were to tell the man that he loved him’ (p. 91). When Medlicot is the first to become physically involved in the scuffle and the only one seriously injured, the homosocial bond between the two men is clearly confirmed and the proposal to Kate seems somewhat anticlimactic and certainly conventional.⁴

Yet the engagement at the end of Harry Heathcote is important to the resolution of the class conflicts brought to a head in the fire scene. One of the criticisms of the Brownbie household is that ‘there were none of womankind belonging to the family, and in such a house a decent woman-servant would have been out of her place. Sometimes there was one hag there, and sometimes another, and sometimes feminine aid less respectable than one of the hags’ (p. 57). Harry, by contrast, ‘was always thinking of his wife during his solitary rides, and of her fear and deep anxiety. It was for her sake and for the children that he was so careworn — not for his own’ (p. 49). A key sign of his gentility is that ‘When the work of the day was over, he would lie at his length upon rugs in the verandah, with a pipe in his mouth, while his wife sat over him reading a play of Shakespeare or the last novel that had come to them from England’ (p. 6). It is the women, of course, who create the cultural capital, as Pierre Bourdieu terms it, so necessary to any claim to aristocracy or gentility as defined in English terms.⁵ Yet in Trollope’s novel, even more than in most nineteenth-century novels, the women are almost wholly restricted to the walls of home and its wide verandah; only once do they venture beyond the gate of the house-garden and that is to pay a social visit to Mrs Medlicot, Giles’s aging mother. In Trollope’s Australia, even in the bush it is necessary for women to be restricted to the domestic sphere in order to guarantee the family’s respectability. For Harry, it takes both the civility of genteel life and the practical knowledge of how to battle fires, round up sheep, fight with enemies and command the respect and loyalty of other men to make a squatter into a gentleman. Besides cementing the bond between Harry and Giles, marrying Kate to another Australian gentleman forms the beginning of genteel society in the bush.

In contrast to Trollope’s frontier Christmas adventure story, Mary Vidal’s novelBengala, also set among Australian squatters, is likened by Susan McKer-nan to a Jane Austen comedy of manners.⁶ The novel, which is subtitled ‘Some Time Ago, was published in England in 1860, thirteen years before Harry Heathcote and is set some years before that.⁷ Its author was a clergyman’s wife who had spent five years living in Australia.⁸ Even more than Trollope’s novella, Vidal’s novel focuses on the social dealings of the bush aristocracy, set, as it is, in a more settled area of the country. The genteel society Vidal depicts is composed primarily of former tradesmen and shabby gentry from England who have managed to increase their fortunes in Australia and aspire to gentility, along with the convict or former convict servants who work for them and serve as signs of that gentility. Like Harry Heathcote, Bengala portrays conflicts between Australian squatters and recently-arrived English competitors; in Vidal’s novel, in fact, the squatters’ main business seems to be to establish their gentility and jockey for position in the social world of a bush town. Even Vidal’s choice of genre emphasizes the importance of gentility for her characters, despite the difference in landscape from the society described by writers like Austen.

Although it is much longer and has a considerably more complex plot thanHarry Heathcote, Bengala also both upholds and expands the English ideal of a gentleman’s conventional role. Unlike Harry Heathcote, however, Bengala does the same for women, stressing the importance to bush society of the gentlewoman’s civilizing role, but also extending that role beyond the domestic sphere to which Trollope limits his heroines. Like these two novels, with their emphasis on social relations within as well as between classes, many nineteenth-century narratives set in Australia worked to redefine genteel masculinity and femininity on a new Australian model while solidifying the social class positions of those men and women who claimed a place in the Australian gentry.

In Australia, the roving bushman’s manly independence, rugged practicality and loyal mateship are commonly considered the essence of the national character, but in nineteenth-century England the Australian figure who attracted the most attention was the squatter.⁹ Newspaper and magazine articles describing the adventures and life of the squatter on his station abounded. Novels about squatters were so numerous that one modern scholar writes of ‘the genre of the squatting novel’, popular from the mid-nineteenth century on and branching into film and even a popular Australian boardgame called, appropriately, ‘Squatter’.¹⁰ Both Harry Heathcote and Bengala could be said to belong to this genre, whose conventions include adventures in the bush, encounters with bushrangers (outlaws) and Aborigines, descriptions of the life (both inside and out) of the station and, as we have seen, class conflicts both between and within social groups. In fact, the diverse culture of the bush as portrayed in such novels defies the binary that G. A. Wilkes identifies between the stockyard (Australian, working class) and the croquet lawn (English, gentry).¹¹ Most squatters, as portrayed in mid-nineteenth-century novels for both English and Australian readers, were both genteel and adventurous, refined and possessed of practical skills, and the point of the novels is often to bring such men and women from diverse backgrounds together into one party capable of ruling the unruly bush culture and setting moral and behavioural standards for all to follow.

Thus, while much recent scholarly work on Australian settler narratives focuses on the relations of the colonizing settlers with indigenous peoples, which is certainly a crucial issue, I mean to address a somewhat different concern — the class and gender relations within Australian settler culture, particularly that of the squatters. Both fictional and non-fictional narratives about squatters redefined genteel masculinity and femininity in order to unify the ‘squattocracy’ into a reim-agined gentry class based on, but different from, the English one. Representing a new but still genteel ruling class may not have been as important to the Australian nationalists of the 1890s as was the democratic bushman, but believing in a uniquely Australian gentry was important both in the construction of a white Australian identity, or what Benedict Anderson calls an ‘imagined community’, that is based on but different from England’s¹² and in convincing the English public that Australia was both capable of self-government and different enough to need it, so that the new nation could be granted independence without a violent revolution.

The Squatters

Representations of squatters, not surprisingly, varied considerably and changed over the course of the nineteenth century. The term itself reflects this variation, as it underwent changes in both definition and connotation from the late 1700s to the 1840s. At first a derogatory name applied mostly to former convicts who either occupied land illegally to graze sheep or to steal cattle and sheep from established settlers, ‘squatter’ gradually came to be used more neutrally for anyone using Crown land without an official title and then referred to those who occupied the land under a licence or lease. At this point the term had taken on ‘a class meaning, carrying a capitalistic suggestion and social prestige’.¹³ Eventually it was used for ‘any grazier who owned or leased a large amount of land’, although in the twentieth century the term ‘pastoralist’ also became common.¹⁴ As Robert Dingley points out, even after the term ‘squatter’ acquired a more generally positive connotation, it was still an unstable term capable of generating anxiety among those it named.¹⁵

The changes in the name ‘squatter’ reflected economic, political and social developments in Australia. As wool became the basis of the economy, those responsible for successfully raising the sheep and preparing the wool for export to England became more and more wealthy and influential. Squatting was hard and often dangerous work, though, and subject to many uncontrollable factors such as fires, floods, disease among the flocks and fluctuating wool prices. In each successive wave of pastoralists, many more failed than succeeded, and the failures often sold their claims (cheaply) to the more successful, allowing some to build up huge operations, with thousands of acres of land and many thousands of sheep and cattle. At first, those who could trace their colonial roots to the first twenty years of settlement in New South Wales claimed the status of gentry and adopted the conservative principles typical of the Tories back home in England, though many would certainly not have been able to claim gentry status in the mother country.¹⁶ The same happened in the colony of Victoria, where the earliest of the successful squatters also coalesced into a relatively unified status group constituting ‘society’.¹⁷ These early gentry themselves were a varied group that included military officers, civil authorities, free emigrants who had started with little capital, settlers from Van Dieman’s Land seeking more land and even former convicts, and they tended to live either in the larger cities such as Sydney or Melbourne, or on country estates in the vicinity. As new squatters arrived from Great Britain (or elsewhere) or amassed enough capital to buy flocks of sheep, they claimed even larger tracts of land further and further away from the settled areas. Again, many failed, usually contributing to the success of others in the process.

For instance, a story published in two parts in Charles Dickens’sHousehold Words in 1855, entitled ‘Old and New Squatters’, describes the trials of Tom Scott, a squatter who came from Van Dieman’s Land in search of larger runs so he could raise enough sheep to be economically viable.¹⁸ Scott, like the many squatters described by Trollope in his travelogueAustralia and New Zealand, has mortgaged his station (which in reality means his wool, since he does not actually own the land) from a city merchant named David Macleod. In Part I Scott goes through hardships that include having his debt called in and becoming an overseer on his own former runs, finding his wife and children killed by Aborigines and finally disappearing into the bush along with his faithful convict servant. Part II centres on Macleod, who takes over Scott’s run and, after several years of being an absentee landlord living in Melbourne and now fantastically wealthy, comes to the station to draw up plans for ‘a castle befitting his own importance, a very palace of the wilderness’.¹⁹ While sitting in the rustic station dreaming, however, he sees either Scott, who is rumoured to have become a bushranger famous for killing blacks, or Scott’s ghost (no one else on the station sees Scott), and becomes so frightened that he abandons his plan of building on the spot.

One reason that many squatters like Scott failed was the 1840s depression in both England and Australia that sparked a huge drop in the price of sheep in 1842 from over a pound to eight shillings. Many squatters who had staked out stations and bought flocks in the boom on wool prices in England prior to the 1840s were unable to keep their stations and sold out to speculators or larger pastoralists. Some squatters were saved by the news, published in 1843 in the Sydney Morning Herald, that there was a market for tallow in England.²⁰ Squatters began ‘boiling down’ their sheep in large numbers and, though tallow was not as remunerative as wool, were able to hold on to their stations and runs. In the 1850s, of course, everything changed again when gold was discovered. In Victoria especially, life was transformed and squatters, despite radically increased labour prices, had new markets for both sheep and cattle, which led again to prosperity for many and encouraged another wave of emigrants from Britain.

William Howitt’s 1857 novel Tallangetta, the Squatter’s Home, for instance, describes a baronet who has lost his title and estates in England through the treachery of a relative and brings his family to an already established station in Australia right on the road to the diggings just prior to the beginning of the gold rush. His family works together not only running the station but also selling supplies to the diggers, thus earning a fortune and, his title and estates restored, returning to England in style.²¹ Although it is not the depression of the ‘hungry 40s’ that sends the elegant Fitzpatrick family of Howitt’s novel to Vic...