804 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 



of the southern sea- woods, intensely patriotic in feeling, and 

 permeated with every poetic sentiment which an ardent 

 imagination evolved from that " waste land Avhere no one 

 comes or hath come since the making- of the world." He 

 displays in his poems, perhaps, more of the characteristic 

 flavour of Outre Mer than any other writer. To him was 

 given to interpret the whispers of the rills trickling through 

 the fern-shaded glens of Orara, to behold the dread shape of 

 the " Fever Sprite of Famine " who 



" Sits all the year time through 

 Beyond the rainless Barwon, beyond the red Barcoo." 



He it was who listened in the summer midnight under the 

 burning stars of the South to the sad strange murmur of 

 the forest oak, who mourned, weeping, in the deep despair 

 of the poet's heart, a broken heart! "for that lost chord, 

 that vanished dream, the song I cannot sing." Ere a few 

 short years had passed, alas, " the lyre was broken, the 

 minstrel gone ! " 



Taking a chronological view of early Australian writers, 

 we may, for convenience sake, class them as the pre-auriferous 

 section. They arose when Australia was strictly pastoral or 

 agricultural, before the wondrous golden era, which was to 

 change a colony into a nation, and to proclaim to the world a 

 trans-Pacific treasure-house of boundless wealth. This 

 division is of importance inasmuch as among the thronging 

 thousands of adventurers who crossed the main, and dared 

 the dangers of an unknown land, and a population presumably 

 lawless, were four men, whose names are, in consequence of 

 their literary work inspired of Australian conditions, known 

 wherever the English language is spoken. I refer to Henry 

 Kingsley, Marcus Clarke, Brunton Stephens, and Adam 

 Lindsay Gordon. The golden lure attracted these strong- 

 spirits. They came to dig, they remained to write. An 

 ironic fate refused them the treasure so bountifully bestowed 

 upon the labourer, the idler, even the criminal, in the great gold 

 lottery. Fortunately for us, for all posterity, hard necessity 

 compelled them to transmute the undreamed of mental riches 

 into permanent and negociable wealth. 



" And the individual withers 

 A.nd the world is more and more " 



was literally, faithfully exemplified in the case of three out 

 of four of the gifted quartette. Kingsley sleeps with his 

 o-reat kinsman in the old home of his race, which they both 



