AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE. 799 



3.— HERALDS OF AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE. 



By T. A. BROWNE (Rolf Boldrewood). 



Commencing with the best intentions, I fear that the task 

 may prove over weighty for my powers of descriptive 

 analysis. Australia ! birthplace of my soul, more loved than 

 even my native land, thee and thine I claim to know ! But 

 literature ! Mighty word ! Vast and ancient kingdom ! 

 How shall I essay to explore thy boundless realms, thy dim 

 and awful recesses, thy sacred fanes t The simjjle expedient 

 resorted to by Count Smorltork, of immortal memory, occurs 

 to me, I look out Australia and Literature in the Encyclo- 

 paedia Britannica, and combine the information. A diffi- 

 culty, speaking more seriously, under which colonists have at 

 all times laboured, is to insert the idea into the British mind 

 that their kinsfolk, their own flesh and blood, even though 

 transplanted to a new land, and living under somewhat 

 altered conditions, are really not essentially different from 

 their august European relations. " Coelum non animum 

 mutant, qui trans mare currunt " was said of old by a keen 

 observer of human nature, but Enghsh critics will have it 

 that we have necessarily " suffered a sea change into some- 

 thing rich and strange," or otherwise. They will believe 

 anything but that their "kin beyond sea" have remained 

 much the same Anglo-Saxons, Scots, and Hibernians that 

 they were before they quitted Britain's shores. Nor will 

 they believe that there can be diversity of " mind, body, or 

 estate " among colonists. Still less, that there can be any 

 unwholesome leaning towards the arts and sciences, suitable, 

 even desirable, as such might be in old world communities. 

 No ! every well-instructed Enghsh person knows that the 

 daily duty of all colonists, without respect of persons, is to 

 chop down the vast forests in which they dwell, to con- 

 tend with the bushrangers and Indians, by whom they are 

 naturally surrounded, to wage ceaseless war with the vast 

 forces of nature : the wild beasts, and yet wilder tribes of 

 men, among which their secluded existence has been cast. 

 To think of such people groping blindly after the poet's 

 frenzy, the scholar's triumph, the philosopher's deep dream, 

 was altogether too ludicrous. I'lie prevailing sentiment was 

 tersely, if not inelegantly, expressed in the English minister's 

 historical answer to the Virginian planter complaining of 

 some fancied injustice. " D n your souls ! Grow to- 

 bacco ! " That summed up " the whole duty of man," of 



