The skeins of ideas and influence which run through this study do not divide neatly into lives, periods or places. Archibald Strong could be a passionate idealist and publicly denounce the intellectual influence of Germany in his middle age, when war made all things German repugnant. At a time when idealism was firmly in the ascendancy in the Australian academy, Walter Murdoch could laconically wonder, in a letter to a former prime minister, what was the point? Even over a single life, literature, criticism and teaching could have different meanings in different places and different times – perhaps that is why believing in an immanent meaning or a timeless text is so seductive for so many.

Cultural conditions for the ‘rise of English’ were set late in the nineteenth century, even as classics held sway in curriculum and cultural value. An extravagant and propagandist imperialism was expressed in all manner of ways in popular culture, as John MacKenzie and others have shown. It found its focus in three conveniently spaced military encounters, the first two on colonised ground and all three of which were joined by Australia. The war in the Sudan in 1885, the ‘Boer War’ in South Africa at the turn of the century, and the First ‘World’ 281War of 1914–18 each became rallying points for imperial sentiment, in which fervent patriotism was expressed. The formation of the Round Table was one manifestation of this sentiment, but the organisation and its affiliated political formation, imperial federation, reflect a kind of nationalism which presumed that political representation in London was desirable. The dream of imperial federation could also be, in some minds, an unashamed bid for white supremacy.

One argument to explain the intensity of the feelings about war and the glorification of participation has been made by Linda Dowling. Dowling describes a ‘metaphysics of community’, a transcendent sense of the polity at once classical and romantic,

Dowling suggests that this ‘underlying martial ethos’ is something that ‘Macaulay’s account of Greek antiquity brilliantly captures, the sense in which the life of the entire community is reduced in moments of dire extremity to the body of the single warrior’ (7). Virtue is the sublimation of private desires to the public good, but it is a good defined in terms of the preservation of national and racial unity. If Dowling is correct – and I think she is, at least in terms of the class fraction her analysis concentrates on – it explains why the reasons for going to war expressed in the universities were so different to those which seem to have inspired many Australian soldiers. Students took seriously the belief – and in many cases gave their lives to demonstrate – that the virtue of the community is embodied by those young men capable ‘of discharging the martial obligation to the polis’ (Dowling, 8). Participation in these wars was a test of integrity deeply felt by those steeped in classical thought, like Charles Jury.

That universities were focal points for cultivating and expressing what we might call race patriotism is demonstrated by the rapidity with which university regiments were formed, the high levels of enlistment 282by students and staff, and sometimes rabid expressions of hatred of Germany, that training ground of so many academics.

In other words, the universities and the promoters of imperial federation had similar constituencies. Imperial ideology could mesh with quite different strains of idealist philosophy and with the Romantic nationalism which split, spread through and energised disciplines like philology, ethnography and literary studies, giving emotional and intellectual force to faith in the connection between land, ‘blood’ or ‘race’, and language, which made the growth of English seem not merely logical but essential.

In the first century of the discipline, the two most influential critical modes – idealism, then Leavisism – were those that were articulated as part of a clear and compelling rationale for life and for literature, which pushed to the background questions about method and focused on the development of the cultured individual. But cultural emissaries in new worlds often struggled against the impossibility of their own mission. And because he is not attuned to the political and cultural exchanges of Empire, Turner claims that nineteenth-century British Hellenism ‘almost denied the existence of the nonrational, aggressive, and self-destructive impulses in humankind’ (36). In the lived world of colonial violence, these aspects of human being were displaced onto local populations, not least through scholarship (by academics and others) which took ‘savage’ languages, cultures and religions as objects of study, and which referred constantly to warding off ‘savagery’ as a reason for literary study. The reification of culture was a conscious attempt to face the ever-present dangers of colonialist society: that the white population, in its attempts to ‘settle’ and ground itself in a usurped indigeneity, would renounce the values of the metropolitan

283centre. There is a fear that in having adopted local customs, one will become unrecognisable ‘at home’: in the ‘settler’ colony; ‘here’ was local and parochial, ‘home’ was learned and urbane. Metropolitan culture differentiates human beings by overcoming nature, that which is innate and common to human kind; ‘custom’, on the other hand, the term used for indigenous cultures, is merely a crude elaboration of nature, barbaric ritual. The most damaging epithet of condemnation was, therefore, ‘provincial’ – a word that derives from the Latin, meaning conquered territory. The struggle is to remain, as Judith Wright termed it, of the conquerors, rather than the conquered (Born of the Conquerors). On odd occasions the epithet could be turned back against the centre (or at least its women), as when McAuley declared Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse ‘rather stuffy and oddly provincial’, but this was a rarity, and indicative of awareness of the power of the putdown.

The professionalising of English studies after the First World War, which was commensurate with attempts to shift the centre of gravity in postgraduate studies from Germany to Oxford and Cambridge, pared back the scope and terms of intellectual debates and for a time exposed these institutions’ lack of capacity to nurture research. This might help to explain a palpable sense of disdain for other intellectual traditions, a disdain manifested mainly through silence. Silence is a powerful tool in academia, and one of the cruellest, but as England loomed larger in the intellectual imaginary, ignorance of local or European intellectual traditions and languages was thought nothing to be ashamed of. Intriguingly, many if not most of the early academic proponents of Australian literature – from Murdoch and Enid Derham, both honours students of Tucker’s, to FW Robinson, AN Jeffares, and Brian Elliott – were also, by education and/or preference, classicists rather than English literature specialists; Jean Hamilton took her degree in languages. They, like others of their training, tended to move in the literary and cultural communities and were perhaps more often and more forcefully exposed to the ideas of local writers. For example Bernard O’Dowd, socialist poet and thinker, was a friend of both Murdoch and AT Strong, who represented quite different positions in criticism and politics. 284

In the 1920s and 1930s, a second and third generation of graduates from English and Australian universities were appointed to chairs of English. By and large they did not bring with them a sense of the liveliness of debates about the uses of literature that were occurring in England, developing English degrees heavy with language studies. At Sydney, where none of Brereton, Holme, or Waldock had studied overseas, the diet of language and canonical literature was at its heaviest: first-year students in 1924 heard thirty lectures on Shakespeare from Brereton, thirty on Chaucer from Holme, and thirty on narrative poems from Waldock.2 Of a total of 210 lectures across all years of the degree, fifty were on Shakespeare and a further twenty on Elizabethan drama, but the largest part of the course was taken up by early and middle English. In these interwar years it was writers, a few critics working outside the universities, as well as teachers’ college educators, school teachers and tertiary students, who took up the fight for the introduction of Australian literature. In small and localised ways they succeeded, but such advocates did not gain access to the professoriate.

The critical and theoretical debates of the interwar period came to Australia in the decades after the Second World War: England’s intellectual issues of the 1930s became hot topics in the 1960s. Perhaps because of this lag, debates in Australia were conducted in a curiously ungrounded way: the cultural specificities, their local terms of reference, were either unknown or ignored. Criticism often borrowed the peremptory tones, the negligent putdowns, and the snobbish insecurity of the worst kinds of Leavisite criticism, a rhetorical mode often finding its fullest expression in those who denied any interest in or influence of Leavis himself. Because the English nationalism that energised the discipline had been overwritten with a (hi)story of universal value, nationalist arguments for the study of Australian literature were easily discredited as self-evidently partisan, political and theoretically unsophisticated. The Anglophile sentiment that pervaded the academy helped to produce a narrative of resistance which, at times with almost

285equal relentlessness, sought to recuperate the mythic egalitarianism of white working-class men as the basis of national identity. What is brought into being as ‘national identity’ is not a set of cultural practices, a landscape, nor a different set of histories, but a single figure, the ‘typical Australian’, whose accent and emotions stand in for the population at large. The guardians of culture stood in opposition to what they saw as the intellectual, emotional and cultural poverty of this Philistine figure. They turned to England, an England created through the imagined world of literary texts and imbibed through study abroad. In general, they seem not to have seen that they were immersing themselves only in a different national tradition.

More worryingly, understanding literature as the embodiment of the racial, cultural and geographical connection with England can be understood as part of a ‘mission’ that constituted a writing-over of three main aspects of Australian history: the convict origins of white ‘settlements’, the materialism implied in and generated by the gold rushes and rapacious pastoral expansion, and the material, sexual, psychological and cultural violence that characterised the encounter between the colonisers and Indigenous peoples. This is the generation of Stanner’s famous silence (see After the Dreaming). These violent, conflictual, often insalubrious histories could be erased by adopting an idealised version of the English story as the ‘true’ history of Australian culture: the old Romantic metaphors of tree and family, reflecting the faith in the notion of a ‘living’ polity, encouraged critics to look to England rather than to Australia for their ‘roots’ and ‘ancestry’. And such was the power of this Anglophile vision that, once adopted, Australian texts could become literally unreadable: RG Howarth noted in his tribute to Waldock that ‘he could not read our books with any great pleasure. He tried Tom Collins’ Such is Life several times, and retreated, as he confessed, baffled’ (6).3 Equally powerful and lasting was the intellectual anxiety caused by talk of abandoning the ‘roots’ of culture: at one Australian university, where the founding professor was widely known as a proponent of Australian writing, the prizes for

286English study he established were available only to those who completed subjects in medieval language and literature.

Networks were called into operation in the 1950s and 1960s, when older universities were creating second and third chairs in the subject, newer universities were founded, and staff turnover was further increased by the small but steady flow of returnees to England. Indeed, more than a third of those who obtained a chair before 1975 gained their first full professorial appointment in the 1960s, and it is probably not unfair to those concerned to suggest that appointments were made on the basis of promise rather than performance (see Rowe, 127). There is, however, a misconception that in the past academics did not publish to the extent that is now expected, or did not work as hard: the amount of work published varied dramatically from person to person, and some holders of chairs from this and earlier periods have records that would be envied in any era. The 1960s and after were probably low points in recruiting: it was possible for at least one career (including a founding chair) to be based on the publication of just twenty-one pages, or five items. There is a marked dominance of senior positions by those with a postgraduate degree from Oxford: nearly half of those who obtained chairs of English from 1945 to 1974 held at least one degree from the English university, while seven had postgraduate degrees from London and five from other British universities. Those with degrees obtained only in Australia were almost always limited to appointments at universities in their own state, although this lack of mobility might also reflect personal factors. Another important element in selection is that of the fifty-three professorial appointees in the period from 1945 to 1974, almost exactly a third were internal candidates. Only seven (thirteen percent) were appointed directly from England, but the most telling figure is that eighty-three percent of professorial appointees in the discipline of English either were English or took their final or only degree in Britain.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Sydney became the dominant, the most ‘traditional’ of Australian institutions, and provided numerous professorial staff to Australian institutions. This is 287by no means simply a ‘natural’ effect of its size and quality; rather, it reflects the pervasiveness of the assumption that there are hierarchies between centre and periphery within the country, as well as between Australia and the rest of the world. Melbourne also came to dominate as an institution but did not gather student research strength until relatively late – except for a brief flowering in the 1950s, numbers of postgraduate studies were usually something like half those at Sydney. Allan Edwards brought with him firsthand involvement in the Scrutiny movement and related debates, and might have transformed the discipline had he not remained isolated at Western Australia. There, he built a department that reflected his views but did not transmit them beyond Perth until a movement of academic staff from UWA to Melbourne began in the 1960s.

Thirteen holders of chairs of English held first degrees from Melbourne, but none appointed in this period had obtained a final postgraduate degree there except Buckley, and his decision not to take a degree while studying at Cambridge was atypical. The numbers for Sydney are similar: fourteen of those who had taken their first degree there later obtained chairs of English, while time spent teaching in the Sydney English Department was an immediate preliminary to a chair for Maxwell, Russell, Oliver, Cross, Arthur Delbridge, Peter Edwards, Arthur Brown and Derick Marsh. Within the department, Holme, Waldock, Milgate, Wilkes, Harold Rogers and AG Mitchell were promoted to chairs. Another important spoke in this wheel of fortune was Canberra: the CUC and later the ANU, as well as Duntroon, provided positions for various leading figures from Melbourne and Sydney at the beginning and end of their careers. Among these, for example, is Ralph Elliott, who took up a position as Master of University House at the ANU and became an active reviewer for the Canberra Times. Elliott is an interesting and unusual figure: his application for the position in Canberra claims descent from Martin Luther. As a German national living with his uncle in Aberdeen whilst attending university in Scotland, he was interned in Britain thence in Canada soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. On release he joined the British 288Army, completed his degree at Aberdeen after war’s end and became a naturalised British subject in 1947.4

Few noticed that the first postgraduate theses in English literature were written in Walter Murdoch’s UWA department, or perhaps they presumed that such research could only be mediocre. This is the kind of impulse or reliance on assumption that scholarship must resist, refusing to take at face value an authority provided by institutional framing. Only by such intellectually simple and socially complex means can we expect to generate a vigorous academic culture, one which allows new ideas and new forms of authority to come into being. Little of newness or passion for firsthand judgement is in evidence in the postwar period; the modesty of aspiration in some institutions now seems anomalous, even scandalous.

The trophy in almost any struggle over ‘English’ is Shakespeare. While John Docker points out that Macaulay had advocated that ‘the 17th century should be taught as the decisive period in which British political institutions and the Protestant religion were moulded’ (In a Critical Condition, 113), Chris Baldick argues that ‘for F.R. Leavis, the rehabilitation of seventeenth century [English] literature in place of that of the nineteenth century was “the great critical achievement of our time”’ (Social Mission, 212). This idealising of England is connected to another important aspect of academia: the venerating of Oxford as the site of a particular and almost transcendent intellectual authority, ‘creating an imaginary spiritual and intellectual “centre” for English culture’ (Baldick, Social Mission, 46). This is a prevailing theme in academic memoirs and reminiscences: generations of students have sought to recognise in the English landscape the world of their favourite texts, ‘coming home’ to world they already inhabit in imagination. What is at stake in these imaginings is precisely the nature of that collective sense of what is right and true for the world. An idealised England, a set of canonical texts which powerfully evoke the landscape of the ‘sceptr’d isle’, and an Anglophile university environment go hand-in-hand in shaping a sensibility that is profoundly ‘out of place’ in the

289landscapes of Australian literature, a person for whom the local is only ever ‘provincial’.

What Oxford is to intellectual milieu, Shakespeare is to literature: the touchstone and the wellspring of sensibility. ‘Shakespeare’ signifies the English people, their language, and their literature in their most complete and distinguishable form. Talk about English returns, irresistibly, to his name. In his polemical study A Nation at Last, Stephen Alomes even claims that ‘Shakespeare’ was one of the names suggested for the new Australian capital city (49). This ideal England, with Shakespeare at its centre, was the very heart of Empire, a heart laid bare in John O’Gaunt’s speech on the beauties of England (in Richard II, II: i). As one Indian professor of English put it, ‘when we think of England, we think of English democracy and we think of Shakespeare’ (Nagarajan, 125). Alan Sinfield’s comments on the status of Shakespeare, and its relationship to the construction and maintenance of the historically determined idea of ‘Literature’ in England, are also applicable to Australia: ‘Shakespeare is the keystone which guarantees the ultimate stability and rightness of the category … Shakespeare is always there as the final instance of the validity of Literature’ (Give an Account of Shakespeare, 135). In Australia the early modern period dominates public perception in this abstract, psychological and emotional sense, such that the authority of ‘the Shakespeare scholar’ can be invoked to provide validation for behaviour that in other contexts might be named differently (see Livingstone; Livingstone and Corkill). For it is not only within the profession, but at the interface between the academic and the public, that the cultural authority of Shakespeare is brought into play.

An exchange some years ago between Leonie Kramer and Ken Goodwin demonstrates this contestation. The debate was prompted by a conference paper, ‘Regimes of Value’, delivered in Melbourne by Goodwin’s professorial colleague at Queensland, John Frow. Frow, noting the sustained influence of academics like Kramer, whom he named, had suggested that intellectuals ‘do have a vanguard role, a “leading” role in Gramsci’s precise sense of the word, not in the political but in the cultural sphere’ (217). He put the view that ‘in the long run it is we, the élite intellectuals in the universities, who for better or worse shape and 290articulate those uses’ of literary texts (217). His paper was somewhat unusual in drawing explicit attention, as this book has attempted to do, to the fact that academics are not passive transmitters of cultural authority. Their decisions in teaching, criticism and research actively shape students’ and colleagues’ sense of what is valuable. Needless to say I find such an argument an uncontroversial one, although one might suggest that this is because my own postgraduate training and the research for the thesis that became this book were undertaken in the department of which Frow was head.

In her column in The Australian newspaper, under the heading ‘Bard-bashing Will Leave Us Poorer’, Kramer accused Frow of failing to apprehend Shakespeare’s universal appeal, and thus of undermining his cultural pre-eminence; she perhaps had heard that her name had been mentioned, but almost certainly not realised that Frow had used her as an example of an influential critic. Few perhaps would have noticed the letter that surfaced four days later, making the case against Kramer:

For the reading public, the authority of Kramer’s comments was re-enforced by her own high profile, her tone, and by the fact of her remarks being positioned within Australia’s only national daily under the editorial heading ‘Education’. Goodwin himself was undone by the subeditor, who placed a smiling picture of Kramer nearby. When I circulated the two letters for discussion in class, students overwhelmingly sided with Kramer: they were keen that anyone questioning Shakespeare’s authority, which they saw Frow as doing, be put in their place. Perhaps their Schadenfreude, their pleasure in another’s pain, reflected 291their awareness that for students and academics alike, reflexivity about how value is made can be a painful thing. Much better to pick a winner – and students know that Shakespeare is a winner.

But certainty has its troubles too. The inheritor of tradition must sufficiently resemble that ideal past to be a rightful heir, and be sufficiently different to have credibility in their own moment. Structurally, one can make intellectual authority through citation or through critique, by being seen to continue or by creating a rupture with what has gone before; the balance between these two modes must be delicately maintained. Self-evidently, for example, the decades in which this project was formed, researched, drafted and rewritten are ones in which critique or rupture themselves became acts of credentialisation. It is in the light of such projects, perhaps, that Makarand Paranjape should conclude that intellectual culture in the west is modelled on patricide: ‘Western thought is a quest, essentially, for power not Truth, it is violent and usurpatory. It preys on its predecessors’ (159). This comment might be said to capture the spirit of this book, but I hope it is a little more than that. For I have tried also to identify and tease out points at which scholarly writing renounces the object of knowledge in favour of making authority, to track the specific ways in which certain modes of writing and certain institutional contexts allow academics to substitute the imperative of seeking carefully researched grounds for opinion in favour of the expression of views that are partisan and self-serving. Yet no-one can capture the full extent to which off-hand judgements about things that matter – writers and their work, ways of thinking about literature, the relationship between literature and society – persist long after the basis for making them (if there ever were one) has been obscured. How words nag. And only by constant careful work can we dispute those careless judgements. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to be vigilant about the basis for our own pronouncements, or to note our own failures.

Part of the problem of what might in some circumstances even be called corruption lies in the intensity and the complexity of the relationship between a student and their discipline, or field of study. Academics and students invest heavily in the fiction that there is a careful 292and chronological acquisition of knowledge that is commensurate with level of difficulty and breadth of field – easier to believe, certainly, in the days of English I, II and III. But such a model is, I have no doubt, a fiction. Studying literature, and probably many other disciplines, is perhaps better described as a lumpy and uncertain shuttling between different kinds of sources: literary texts, critical ones, sources on historical context, archival resources which pertain to the writer and their text, reflections on method (which often come from related disciplines as diverse as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, history, political science and sociology) as well as knowledge of research tools (like bibliographies and reference works), supplemented or challenged by chats via email and in the pub. There is no foolproof way of ensuring that knowledge is developed in a logical order, because there can be no logical order: who is to say how interest and understanding of any one text can best be sparked in each individual? What verbal aside or what standard reference work will provide the basis for understanding? Even the most erudite and self-confident scholar can be in ignorance of some basic tool or text of the discipline; the most nervous or dilettantish student can have read and been engaged by some complex work, and offer insights that will guide a class in a new and exciting direction. Different cultural or educational backgrounds can mean that a text, writer, period or theme finds a resonance that is more or less unfathomable to fellow students or colleagues.

Perhaps it is amidst this disorder and uncertainty that many academics and students experience a desperation to impose their own version of certainty, to ensure that the ‘right way of doing things’ is perpetuated and thence their academic record or their scholarly reputation preserved. For myself, I am convinced that what are transmitted are not so much canonical texts as general impressions about what it is appropriate to say about or think of texts, without necessarily having any clear understanding of the basis for such views. As an honours student, I remember being part of an audience which tittered as the lecturer pronounced the name of a famous critic, and then complimented us on our laughter, which he took as evidence that we shared his disdain. Actually, I think most of us were laughing at 293the combination of the lecturer’s exaggerated southern drawl and the American predilection for middle initials; in fact, we had no clue that ‘Wayne C. Booth’ was unfashionable, and we certainly didn’t know why (or perhaps everyone else did and I didn’t?). The detail and complexity of critical arguments are almost inevitably lost through such moments, in which students are encouraged to dismiss rather than interrogate. As three examples, Green’s idealism or Arnold’s ‘culture’ have been transformed beyond recognition; in their reiteration, so have the intricacies of deconstruction as a critical practice or way of thinking become lost through the word’s widespread (mis)use as a synonym for ‘critique’ or to mean literal collapse. This blurred inheritance is periodically sharpened, but even more frequently it is misrepresented or lost entirely, even during a single career, let alone by a generation. Thus knowledge of German philosophy, for example, the starting point for so many debates in current literary criticism, more or less ‘went missing’ in English for almost seventy years – an amazing phenomenon. And it is this general lack of precision or firsthand judgement that makes the claiming of space and place, being authoritative in body, expression and voice, crucial to the exercise of authority. ‘Authority’ is not necessarily knowing but a manner, even a mannerism, of seeming to know.

Scholarly excellence is merely one of several things considered in making an appointment, for example, or making a reputation. During the appointment process, scholarly originality or precision seem rarely to have been significant factors, which is not to say that applicants might not be fatally handicapped by ignorance. But where the candidate is otherwise thought desirable, gaps in competence are massaged away, the weaknesses of competing candidates are highlighted, and qualifications and personal qualities can be re-configured (by influential committee members) into handicaps. During this process, and in gatherings like conferences or seminars, it can be seen that any discipline has what we might call areas of permissible ignorance. In the teaching of English literature in Australia, I would argue that this permissible ignorance once again includes Australian literature. In other words, socially and professionally it is acceptable to express ignorance of Australian writers and their work, whereas confessing to not having read, say, the work of 294George Eliot or Shakespeare would be professionally damaging; equally, it is thought acceptable for academics to write on Australian literature without any knowledge of the field. And frustratingly for specialists, it is constantly necessary to dilute research publications, particularly those for overseas audiences, with introduction and survey in order to inform supposedly ‘expert’ readers of the basics. (Thus it is as likely to be the most simplistic as it is the richest work in Australian literary studies which finds an international audience.) For notwithstanding the myth and ambition of academia, what we are able to think and write are by no means the product of free enquiry: these things are shaped by what it is institutionally desirable to know and to say; research is not always, or not even about, what needs to be known, but what might build a career. Knowledge and authority are over-determined by class, gender and social background, and this fact is reflected in the backgrounds of members of the professoriate under discussion here. Although there are exceptions, by and large, only the exceptional survive coming from the ‘wrong place’. Conversely, evidence shows that attending a private high school or a selective metropolitan public one is a more consistent foundation of a career than is a strong record of publication.

This relative homogeneity of socioeconomic backgrounds parallels the situation described by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in their study of academics in France, The Inheritors. Bourdieu and Passeron show that university students from privileged social backgrounds inherit from their family ‘knowledge and know-how, tastes and a “good taste” whose scholastic profitability is no less certain for being indirect’ (17) – those from privileged backgrounds are familiar from their childhood with the ‘infinite, infinitesimal nuances of good taste’ (22). Related to this ‘inheritance of taste’ is a studied disdain among such students for orthodox reading and the formal requirements of the degree: the memoirs of many academics relate with glee their determined non-attendance at lectures, and the wide range of their reading prior to and during (but not part of) their degree. What is not mentioned is the fact that family background frequently meant that ‘canonical’ territory had already been conquered, as had related areas of knowledge. Those already steeped in the literature, languages, history, 295art and theatre that constitute formal study, and whose familiarity with academia might have been increased through family connections, have the time and self-confidence to move beyond the curriculum and to supplement their knowledge in ways that become socially productive, in the off-hand reference to another form of high culture, say opera or theatre.

What is implied time and again in the criticism from the 1930s through to the 1970s is that it is middle- and upper-class detachment from and opposition to popular culture that has been the basis of intellectual authority, attitudes that had a material effect on the lives of academics, writers and students. Significantly, the protocols of the profession only required critics to read other critics, as Miles Franklin suggested in a comment on Harold Oliver. Franklin was critical of Oliver’s ignorance of scholars working outside of the universities. Writing to fellow author Katharine Prichard in 1953, she made an important point regarding authority and the ‘safety of distance’:

Whilst Franklin’s contempt has her usual hyperbolic fervency, it is certainly true that this study is often reiterating arguments that were long made by critics and writers such as Franklin, AA Phillips, and Nettie Palmer, as well as the sentiments of students and junior academics who have identified and protested Anglocentric bias in appointments, curricula, and criticism. In the 1950s and 1960s Australian literature was the unkempt, unruly adolescent in the academy, under the disdainful 296scrutiny of its by then well-entrenched ‘parent’, whose fortuitous amnesia regarding its own struggles just a generation before enabled teaching and criticism to exist on a deceptively rich rhetorical diet of ‘universal standards’ and ‘universal human concerns’.

The centre is able to resist interrogation because it marginalises, in structural ways such as the organising of curricula, ‘other courses’, and the ways of speaking that are related to those new fields. For English studies, it was only in these ‘other’ courses that the identities the ‘centre’ takes for granted come under scrutiny, as Toni Morrison argues in her early study of whiteness, Playing in the Dark. And in terms of method, bringing questions about the basis of value judgements to the fore in discussions of literature is often resisted by students who believe in objectivity and universality, who experience the posing of such questions as a kind of corruption:

The pervasiveness of this view in the literary media is a reflection of the strength of waves of influence – here, of versions of Arnold’s ‘disinterest’ – that retain their energy for decades, travelling from university English departments to students across the country via graduates who become teachers and media critics. And I am conscious of it in this work too, anticipating the reader who thinks me too attentive to, say, homophobia.

The findings of this study also suggest that a discipline will seek to write its origins in terms of its conquest of the site of greatest opposition, a moment that represents a crisis in the political project that the development of new fields within disciplines seem inevitably to represent. Thus ‘English literature’ as an oppositional (democratic) practice was greatly compromised by its inclusion in the curriculum at Oxford, where the first appointee to the chair was a philologist; at the same time, ‘other’ origins of the discipline at Edinburgh and the provincial universities were erased. Thus the history of English in 297England becomes a story of debates about its inclusion in the site of greatest prestige and power: the title of DJ Palmer’s history of the discipline in England, The Rise of English Studies, signals this movement towards the gratifying moment of conquest. The introduction of Australian literature to Australian universities has likewise been mythologised in ways that imply that the moment of greatest ‘success’ is the moment of incorporation into the academy. This is a dubious assumption but one constantly restated.

Perhaps because of its apparent proximity to literary culture – the ecology of writing, publishing and selling books – the introduction to Australian universities of the study of Australian literature pushed at the limits of the discipline of English in a way that the introduction of American literature, with which it was roughly contemporaneous, did not. But when the subject was taken up by those in positions of power, it was with considerable ambivalence. Critics sought on the one hand to claim authority over the local, and on the other to read that ‘local’ using the ‘universal’ measures of authority typical to their profession. For ‘Commonwealth literature’, on the other hand, the inaugurating moment was a conference, a meeting in England of comparative nationalists and contrasting nationalisms, whose gathering together legitimised the field in an important way. What this mode of storytelling involves is the tacit recognition that it is precisely this encounter with the dominant that produces the greatest risk to the ethical and/or political project, as Vincent Buckley argued later in his life.

It is the relentlessness of reinstating of simple versions that, in a sense, every researcher struggles against, at the same reducing their capacity to reach and to persuade a general audience as they do. Thus it is clear that academics with relatively weaker reputations for scholarship often play the central role in the literary culture of their time, not just as newspaper reviewers (the most common form of such participation) but as confidant(e)s, supporters and friends of creative writers and their institutions, or as driving forces in educational institutions other than universities. This seems to be a kind of structural tension, as more ‘scholarly’ versions of the discipline are understood as being those which are quite deliberately removed from contemporary 298literary culture, in that way mimicking either the temporal distance of early modern literature or the highly self-conscious elitism of literary modernism. One indicator of this tension is that it is as routine to poke fun at scholarly interest in popular culture as it is to satirise the esotericism of academic research.

It is clear that scholars might usefully try to analyse the relationship between the teaching of literature and the production of creative texts: how might writers be influenced, for example, by their perceived failure in gaining academic as opposed to commercial success? In that sense the formative relationship between writing and scholarly study of writing is yet to be understood; Christopher Newfield puts it more angrily, speaking of the United States: thousands of writers ‘fully engaged in the analysis of their times, died on vines that lacked the basic cultivation [literary and cultural studies] continued to lavish on Shakespeare and Joyce’ (Unmaking the Public University, 145). A further area of inquiry is the history of the discipline since the late 1960s and 1970s, when major demographic and political changes affected tertiary education in Australia. A number of new universities were founded: Monash (1958), La Trobe and Macquarie (1964), Flinders (1966), Griffith and Murdoch (1973) and Deakin (1979). In roughly the same period, university colleges at Armidale, Newcastle, Canberra, Townsville and Wollongong became autonomous. Following the development of the ‘unified national system’ various colleges became or merged with universities. This proliferation, coupled with changes in approaches to literary studies, makes the landscape of English over the period since 1970 far more complicated than it was in the first century of the discipline in Australia.

Perhaps the key finding of this study pertains to the continuing and powerful influence of teachers and mentors. The examples of Holme, Brereton and Murdoch show the importance of patronage, a situation not unique to literary studies. Indeed for some, mentoring is the single most important variable in determining the success of an academic career:

It is most of all through mentoring that a kind of institutional echo is sent and heard, with habits of administration, research, teaching and recruitment maintained by the heirs of the institution long after the passing away of the specific ‘presence’ who shaped the environment. I think of these two things as ghosts or swamps: some individuals seem to loom over their workplaces for generations; others almost literally disappear. There is a remarkable longevity and continuity in the distinctive institutional identities developed in Australian English departments over the first century of the discipline, but these do not precisely reflect the shape of the past. ‘Reproduction’ in education, much debated, is an inexact science, and there is very little evidence to justify the pervasive belief in supersession evident in much modern criticism. While we might be comforted by the belief that we have intellectually and morally outgrown the past, there is no convincing evidence that scholars have become more or less diligent, more or less learned, more or less ‘scholarly’ from one generation to the next. What is clear is that there is a regular cycle in which new intellectual approaches or ideas, and those who propound them, are demonised as a threat to scholarly integrity and the social order, only to become dominant on the back of that resistance, and are seen by the next generation as the old order embodied.

This study can validly be criticised for its focus on dominant institutions and dominant personalities, and for paying little attention to those who do the most work in tertiary institutions: students. Studies that focus on what happens in classrooms and what happens after classrooms – the practices, and long-term impact, of teaching and learning – are urgently needed. The necessary recuperation of ‘other’ 300histories is, likewise, another project; my feeling is that to begin with it is to risk ignoring the fact ‘that members of minority groups who do succeed in such a system are at least as likely to identify with it as the enabling cause of their own success as to turn against its unjust distribution of symbolic capital’ (Moi, 1037). Such is the power of ‘tradition’ that femaleness, homosexuality, Jewishness, a country background, attendance at a state high school, working-class families and ocker accents have been disguised, dismissed, grown out of and disowned far more often than they have inflected criticism or teaching in the first hundred years of the discipline in Australia, at least for those who reached positions of power within the academy.

One example of this is provided by Andrew Riemer, a Hungarian immigrant who spent time in a ‘special’ class at primary school because he did not speak English when he first came to Australia in 1947, and who subsequently became a specialist in Shakespeare and an associate professor of English at Sydney. He described his experiences at Sydney in his award-winning autobiography, Inside Outside:

Riemer describes the ways in which mimicry and parody became part of his coping with the institutions of literature, criticism, assessment and teaching. But it is striking that he should here take up two key concepts, mimicry and colonial lack, from a nascent post-structuralist postcolonial criticism (exemplified in the work of Homi K Bhabha).

There is a certain irony in the fact that Riemer’s work has become part of the ‘new diversity’ of Australian writing while he himself defended the ‘core teaching’ of the English Department, having insisted on the universality of precisely those values he is critical of in Inside Outside. With Wilkes, Riemer was one of the most outspoken opponents to curricular revisions at Sydney in 1992 and took early retirement not 301long after, convinced that his colleagues ‘were irresponsible … in their refusal to countenance anything but the most minimal imposition of structures on our students’ courses of study’.5 In the midst of the debate he commented to journalist Tony Stephens that although he would ‘continue to teach in the ruins of the English Department’, he rejected the claims made by ‘ideology’ and those who had no sense of literary value (Stephens, Winds of Change). As this reaction and other debates at Sydney illustrate, there is a passion, one might even say ferocity, in the advocacy or defence of what are conventionally represented as ideological rather than personal disputes. But as my discussion of Riemer implies, what emerges most strongly from this study, this institutional history, is the power of the personal: the impact of childhood reading and the study of literature at schools and universities on an individual’s ideas about and ideals of culture and place; their sense of what is right and valuable. The importance of this history, and specifically of the personal and emotional elements of taste and training, emerged more and more strongly during the course of my research, as people approached me with stories of their own undergraduate and teaching experience. These discussions tend to reveal that, although very little of the course content was retained, memories of particular teachers – their manners and attitudes, likes and dislikes, passions and idiosyncrasies – could be vividly recalled. Conversely, and fascinatingly, remembered details of ‘fact’ such as dates, places, etc., were almost always wrong (checked against sources such as university calendars).

The nature of this anecdotal evidence is reflected in the conclusions drawn from Graham Little’s important study of the experiences of Arts and Science students at Melbourne. Little found that for most students, their time at university brought about a shift in personal style rather than any specific intellectual growth (150). Their undergraduate education had not equipped them to make a critique of the disciplines they had studied (151), and their comments on teachers were related to impressions of personality rather than scholarly approach: ‘they seemed on the whole accepting rather than critical; certainly there were few signs of informed, sustained criticism of the university’ (170). Little

302suggests that students feared ‘to betray the idealism, vague and tentative though it is, of their more romantic notions of what the university can do for them … The myths have not only preserved but stifled’ (183; emphasis added). This seems to me a very accurate account of the impact of universities as institutions: they are places where intellectual disputes are played out through personality, and more often reflected in decisions about appointment, tenure, promotion and funding of research activity than they are reflected in (and contained to) academic fora such as journals and books. Nevertheless, students and academics continue to believe that there is an objective truth, unsullied by any personal element, to such debates. Thus they are entranced by any detail of taste or tantrum. Students and academics have an investment – emotional and professional – in seeing the forms of knowledge they promote and produce as timeless and valuable. But perhaps this mood is changing: the repositioning of students as clients, the shifting of terms from enrichment to value for money, and the ever-present threat of litigation mean ever-increasing attention to quantifying the ‘value adding’ achieved by education. This change reinforces what Cary Nelson, more than twenty years ago, identified as the crucial element of institutional success: conformity. As he so scathingly put it, speaking of the United States, ‘we retain the tendency to replicate our worst selves, and we are most likely to tenure the amiable, the uncontroversial and the dull’ (3).

In the period under discussion in this book, perhaps the most important of these signifiers of conformity was accent. Voice, along with appearance, is used as the basis for judgements not only about voice and appearance, but intellect, manners and values. Broad Australian accents were long associated with ‘coarseness of sensibility’, to use a Leavisite term. In several important essays, the first published in 1951, AG Mitchell suggested that prevailing assumptions about ‘standards’ and ‘standard English’ that were the basis of speech education were wrong, and that the (Australian) accents of children should not be ‘modified’ in the classroom. These arguments represented a challenge to conventional educational thought and practice: ironically, one of the reasons women were preferred, however grudgingly, in teaching was 303because it was assumed their more refined speech would be a better model for children. Mitchell was one of a group of language specialists, among them Arthur Delbridge and GKW Johnston, who poured their labour into studies of Australian English. These academics were associated with the production of the major Australian dictionaries, including the Macquarie. As noted, Mitchell was founding vicec-hancellor at Macquarie University, where the dictionary project was housed, and his younger colleague at Sydney, Delbridge, was one of the foundation professors of English and subsequently Director of the Speech and Language Research Centre there.

The arguments Mitchell made were quite radical ones, and they did not go uncontested. A response to the Australian Quarterly, written by a former teacher, demonstrates the ways in which the authority of England was naturalised and deployed within the school classroom, and the way in which the assumption of the moral high ground can seamlessly cohere with a rhetoric which defends ‘standards’. The quotation used here is lengthy because the response exemplifies in many points the attitudes to Australia, England, and cultural authority with which this study is concerned. The letter also models that blindness to biases of class and culture which could be manifested by the most committed educators:

The two meanings of ‘standard’ – like the two meanings of discrimination – resonate throughout. Drafting the sheep from the goats is easy work, as is renaming a regional English accent the best of Australia.

But in the past, as now, far more serious threats to literature and its study come from sources outside the university. Many Australian universities no longer teach literature. Those that still do are trimming back their curricula with a commensurate effect on staff and student numbers. And current debates seem to have a sharper edge. Educational institutions and the political cultures by which they are shaped are characterised by a contempt for kindness (derided as weakness or sentimentality), a horror of criticism (belittled as obstructionism or ignorance), and a contempt for expertise (sneered at as ‘preciousness’). The values which inform current work practices – in the case of academics, teaching and research – not only militate against compassion and inquiry, they are actively hostile to them. Underpinning this situation is an antagonism to history, understood as ‘experience’ (of what works and what does not), as precedent (what has been valued in the past), and as method (attempting to understand or strip away the effects of temporality in developing serious analyses of why things have happened). This antagonism is rhetorically and structurally determined by laissez-faire capitalism, by a constant demand for and valorising of growth. Change and momentum are normative, but less valuable as part of an unthinking charge into the future on the basis that the future is better. It is not a real future but an imagined future that fuels capitalism, a future built on the fantasy of limitless growth just as powerful as the fantasy of the imagined England that shaped the lives discussed in this book.

305In these circumstances there is vital work to be done by historians of all academic disciplines in introducing methodological reflexivity, particularly in those areas now numerically, financially or culturally dominant in modern universities, notably commerce, medicine and the applied sciences. Understanding the volatility and contingency of disciplinary truths gives us a powerful tool for reflecting on the ways in which institutional environments have the capacity not only to create the conditions for the discovery of truth, but equally to suppress truth. Insisting on the value of history as integral to academic and pedagogical practice, not to mention good governance, means insisting on the value of considering context and precedent (whether positive or negative), as well as the necessity of reflection, and the value of humility. What I mean by this is that it is too easy to presume that we are morally and intellectual superior to those who went before us simply because of the passing of time – or because we have databases now, or because ‘they didn’t have to worry about money then’. The study of history can help reflection, if and when we are able to imagine that the current order of things is no more inevitable than the unfolding of events in the past. Making time … reading … remembering … asking questions about why things are as they are, or could be … these are now radical acts. 306