In the late nineteenth century in Britain and its Australian colonies, quite different positions were available in arguments for and about the teaching of English. The subject was seen by many – opponents and proponents of its introduction to universities – as a ‘practical’ one, giving knowledge of grammar and style; for others, who again might be supporters or critics, literary study could instil culture or shape character in ways that were powerful yet could not easily be measured. One thing is clear: the most powerful beliefs about the ‘need’ for English 91were provided not by academics but by those who believed that culture was the most effective way to strengthen the ties of empire, and thereby to maintain the supremacy of what was then often termed ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’, or more often and more obviously, the British empire.1

Before the Australian colonies federated in 1901 ‘English’ was not a specialist discipline, at least in terms of staffing, at any of the four local universities. It was part of the chairs of modern language at Sydney and Melbourne; at Adelaide it was linked with history; and at Tasmania it was coupled with classics. Each configuration reflects local exigencies, as well as a slightly differing conception of the discipline. For some, English was a ‘modern’ subject, as distinct from classics; for others, it occupied a thematic relationship with history; and for others, its methods were understood as being connected to those of classics, whether as literary or language study. It was the pairing with history that perhaps made it easiest to stress what might be called ‘imperial’ versions of the discipline, although as we have seen, any mode could be co-opted to this cultural program. But by 1926 specialist positions – chairs of English language and/or literature – had been created at Melbourne (1911, RS Wallace), Western Australia (1912, Walter Murdoch), Sydney (1920, ER Holme and John le Gay Brereton), Adelaide (1921, AT Strong), Queensland (1922, JJ Stable) and Tasmania (1926, AB Taylor). In the prewar period, there had been little to suggest that such a rate of expansion was inevitable. In this chapter, the focus is on the first generation of specialists, the discussion grounded in a consideration of one of the most powerful motivating forces for the study of English literature, imperialism, and to the guiding spirit of this approach, Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Arguments for the study of English have been linked to the political goals of imperialism, principally by Gauri Viswanathan in her history of the teaching of English in India. Viswanathan’s key piece of evidence comes from debates recorded in parliamentary papers, which show British authorities, anxious to avoid political unrest, as explicitly committed to the use of secular (as opposed to religious)

92literary education to inculcate a love of British culture. But the most widely known document in the history of the relationship between imperialism and the study of English literature is TB Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’, an essay published in February 1835 that is a legal judgement on how to spend money laid aside for ‘reviving literature in India’. Although the contents of the Minute are well known, the circumstances of its writing are less well publicised; these are important, however, because they bear on the ways in which we might interpret this document in terms of debates about reasons for ‘the beginnings of English’.

Thomas Macaulay arrived in Madras on 10 June 1834, in an era when well-connected young British men knew their fortunes could be made with just a few years of public service in what was then Britain’s wealthiest colony. Five months later Macaulay was made president of the Committee of Public Instruction, a body which was at the time, in Macaulay’s own words, ‘divided into equal parties. All their proceedings were at a stand, and had been so for several months.’2 The point at issue was the medium of instruction for literary study: half the committee supported the teaching of Sanscrit and Arabic; their opponents were in favour of using English. The problem was put to the governor by Macaulay in his Minute, in which he threatened to resign his post if English was not supported (which it was).3

The crux of Macaulay’s argument is that Sanscrit and Arabic are intrinsically unfit for the transmission of complex knowledge, although he also admits having no familiarity with the languages. This claim about intrinsic intellectual deficiencies ignored scholarship which had demonstrated structural connections between Sanscrit and a language Macaulay did revere: ancient Greek.4 And a different argument about

93the relationship between language, learning and cultural value can be found in a speech by Macaulay to the British House of Commons on 10 July 1833: ‘If, instead of learning Greek, we learned the Cherokee, the man who understood the Cherokee best, who made the most correct and melodious Cherokee verses … would generally be a superior man to him who was destitute of these accomplishments’ (GM Young, Speeches, 142). In Macaulay’s words, the ‘Orientalists’ who supported the use of the classical languages of Indian scholarship were mainly the ‘old guard’, advocates of the policies of the East India Company which had ostensibly ruled the country before the British crown. Contrastingly, the supporters of English were those he saw as ‘the cleverest and most rising young men’. And this group included Charles Trevelyan, who was courting Macaulay’s sister. As Manju Dalmia has shown, senior colonial administrators such as Macaulay and Trevelyan were also coming under pressure from Indians lobbying for the introduction of English language education, on the grounds that such education would ultimately give them greater access to power in the administration of their own country (Dalmia, 44). This role of local elites is often set aside in postcolonial condemnation of the Minute, but so too is the fact that literature also came to bear on Macaulay’s personal life in a perverse and powerful way in his first year in India.

Macaulay had been accompanied to his new position by his sister Hannah. When she married Charles Trevelyan early in 1835 – around the time the Minute was being written – he was devastated by what he experienced as the ‘loss’ of his sister, albeit to one of his closest political allies. The governor and his wife saw Macaulay the evening after the wedding and wrote to Hannah and her husband ‘begging us to return as soon as we could, as they were frightened about him. I am sure his mind was disturbed for he wrote me the most fearful letter of misery and reproach, followed the next day by one begging me to forgive it.’5 If this seems melodramatic, the intensity of Macaulay’s feelings of loss is confirmed in the contents of a letter he wrote on Christmas Eve to his other sister, Mrs Edward Cropper, who had remained in England:

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Whilst in this dire condition Macaulay transformed what was already a sustained interest in literature into an obsession. In the same letter to his sister in England he says that ‘Books are becoming everything to me’; a year later he claimed to Thomas Flower Ellis that ‘Literature has saved my life and my reason. Even now I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand’ (Pinney, 158). During this period of grief and confusion Macaulay claimed in his letters to have re-read the classical canon, in the original languages, twice over, for emotional sustenance. This deep dependence surely gives the lie to Macaulay’s claim, made in the Minute, that English ‘stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West [and] abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us.’ And his now notorious words, that the study of English would help to cultivate ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’, while obviously racist, can also be understood as a wildly overstated claim about the transformative effects of reading (Young, 359).

Macaulay’s is the crucial text in the history of literary education in the English-speaking world, including Australia. It occupies that place because it argues, with extraordinary rhetorical force and to lasting influence, that English literature transmits a morality, a sensibility and an intellectual habit of mind vastly superior to that of any other culture in the world. As we have seen, little in elite English education at this time could be said to have justified such a claim, but in some important respects it was easier to make these ambitious claims for the 95study of English in the colonies than in England itself. This imagined, imperial England, embodied in its literature and thereby mobile across the colonies, was quite as seductive for colonial elites as were British political authority and the lived place – for some, more so. Such claims about the pre-eminence of English, a belief expressed by politicians as different and as distant as Macaulay and Menzies, did not offer students or scholars a methodology for study, but did seem to provide a pervasive and powerful rationale for the subject. This explicitly political reason for English study gained much more traction in the public realm than ‘scholarly’ approaches, like critical idealism, ever could. That the argument was put most influentially in an essay that was not so much a profound expression of faith in English literature as it was a deliberately partisan intervention in a political debate, written in circumstances of private desperation, does not undermine the strengh of the relationship between imperialism and the study of English which it demands.

The weakness of method and the emotional or persuasive power of imperial sentiment are evident in published accounts of two lectures delivered in Sydney thirty years after Macaulay’s Minute. In 1865 the Reverend John Graham gave a lecture on English literature to a ‘large audience’ at the Pitt Street Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society. In the tradition of Macaulay, Graham contends that

Graham suggests that educators were coming to see that

96The lecture ended with the singing of the national anthem, ‘in which nearly all present joined’. Few academics, at this time, would have made such bold claims for English literature or for English language. Almost none would have subordinated classics to English.

A different kind of rationale for the teaching of English is at work in a lecture given by George Barton at Sydney in 1868, just three years later. Barton was ‘Reader in the English Language and Literature to the University’ from 1865 until his appointment lapsed in 1868. As well as being the first person appointed to a position teaching English literature at an Australian university, Barton was the first to publish books on the history of literature in the Australian colonies. In contrast to Graham’s advocacy of the moral and cultural value of English literature, Barton concentrated on elucidating the advantages of chronological reading as a method of study, in his lecture on The Study of English Literature. Only by reading selected texts in a particular order, and in light of each other, he argued, could their true significance be grasped. This method has obvious weaknesses in conceiving history only as literary history; it also implicitly presumes that all creative authors have experienced literature in precisely this serial fashion and are ‘serially’ influenced in the same way. But the appeal is that this kind of knowledge can be taught and tested: students can be examined on names, dates and ‘influence’ (simplistically conceived).

This approach was popularised by the appearance of English as an examination subject for various arms of the civil service, which in turn became the raison d’être of publications like Austin Dobson’s Civil Service Handbook of English Literature (1874) as universities like Oxford shied away from providing for such pragmatic needs. The Handbook advertises itself as a crib for students which aims to ‘give a concise, and, as a rule, chronological account of the principal English authors, noting the leading characteristics of their productions, and, where necessary, the prominent events of their lives’ (1). Significantly, though, we can associate the need to teach and test English literature in this pseudofactual way with the rise of the idea of meritocracy and with imperial civil service. Indeed Benjamin Jowett was involved early in his career with revisions to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination which 97saw particular emphasis given to English, just as Jowett’s Balliol gave particular emphasis to the ICS.

If we can see imperialism as providing impetus for the study of English literature in the nineteenth century in a range of very practical as well as highly political ways, certainly in the British colonies, it is also important to note that imperial fervour needed to be filtered through what were thought of as rigorous testing regimes, success in which gave a new social class of students access to higher levels of public service and the professions. It is not surprising, then, to find strong emphasis, in Barton’s lecture, on the need to avoid ‘unconnected and promiscuous reading’ (13). Such practice might mean a student or reader becoming ‘overloaded’, surely a euphemism for reading which would find value in anything other than patriotic themes: ‘we may certainly acquire a vast variety of information on many topics, but we shall never be able to feel that we have grasped the invisible spirit which animates the literature of our country’ (13). The patriotic spirit evident in Barton’s presentation is weaker than in Graham’s lecture, although the methodology is surer: our journey from past to present can proceed on the railway tracks of chronology. But as these two lectures also show, apparently very different ideas about the study of English were by no means mutually exclusive – in fact, they were in some ways complementary. Their coexistence illustrates the problem critics like Green and Ker were attempting to address: how to develop a scholarly approach to vernacular literature which could offer strong motives for study, firm criteria for evaluating texts, clearly defined methods for reading them and sure mechanisms for testing. It is against the backdrop of an awareness of the powerful political arguments for English being made from 1835 onwards that we can consider events at Melbourne.

Morris and Murdoch

After lengthy discussion it was decided to advertise a chair of Modern Languages at Melbourne in 1882. Moves to create and advertise the position increased in tempo when the leading local candidate, headmaster EE Morris, was offered a chair at Adelaide. Deciding that he was their preferred candidate Melbourne cabled Adelaide to request them 98to release their newly appointed professor, which they graciously did. Morris had been active in debates about modern languages, literature, curriculum and pedagogy in the tertiary and secondary sectors during the previous decade, and had himself urged the creation of a chair in his commentaries on the university and state politics published in the Melbourne Review and the Victorian Review.

Edward Ellis Morris was born in India in 1843. His grandfather had been a director of the East India Company, and his father, John Carnac Morris, the accountant-general for Madras. After John Morris died his family left India for England, where EE Morris attended Rugby, and then Oxford. After graduating with a second in classics, law and modern history, Morris taught at various places including the Indian Civil Service training college, Haileybury, and in Berlin. Appointed headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School in 1875, Morris was committed to the ideals instilled during his education. The ADB reports that he had

However the school’s numbers began to decline at the same rate they had increased after the new headmaster’s arrival; Morris eventually resigned, evidently frustrated at being unable to ‘transport’ the Rugby model to Australia. In an essay not published until almost a century later, Morris explained his reasons for resigning, complaining that he had ‘tried in every way to work the school upon the line of an English Public School … I … can see now most clearly that this is the prime, the fundamental, perhaps the only, cause why I have not succeeded’ (84–85). Although it is never phrased quite so bluntly, Morris clearly felt that the fault for the decline lay not in the ethos he had tried to recreate, rather in the colonial population who had rejected it.

Morris was appointed to Melbourne after he had resigned from but before he had left the school, and he insisted on taking a year’s leave 99before coming to the university. He therefore did not take up the chair until 1884, at which time he introduced subjects in English, French, and German literature, lecturing in all three as well as in a Master of Arts degree. (As at Oxford, the breadth of the curriculum made specialisation impossible.) Melbourne awarded Morris its first LittD in 1899 for his Austral English, originally prepared for the Oxford English Dictionary; his study of James Cook remains unpublished, but several essays did appear in 1899 and 1900.

A lengthy obituary for Morris published in The Argus in 1902 noted that ‘his model was Lord Macaulay’ (‘Death of Professor Morris’). In his inaugural lecture at Melbourne, with the conciliatory title ‘Language and Literature’, Morris quoted extensively from Macaulay’s Minute; the passage he quoted was that in which imperialist sentiments were most fervently expressed. English, it is said,

Morris boldly asked his audience, ‘of what, we may well ask, has an Englishman better right to be proud than of the glories of English literature?’ (249). There are many other signs that Macaulay was a favourite, although it is not a simple matter of positioning Morris as a stereotypical product of Rugby and Oxford, influenced in his imperial ambitions by his connections with India. He was interested in local literature and language, a point demonstrated by his studies of Cook, and the dictionary.

When it appeared, Austral English was given a vicious review by AG Stephens. Stephens gave the book some grudging praise, but that praise lay alongside the complaint that ‘insufficient brains and labour and care and time have been applied’ (the red page). In the 1970s, the book found a defender: David Haberly claims Austral English is a landmark because it takes as its premise the idea that meaning is relational and textual, rather than inherent. He concludes that the making of the dictionary is evidence of Morris’ belief in ‘the existence of a variant of standard English so thoroughly and so profoundly altered that it constituted a 100new and distinct language’ (357). That Morris, like Macaulay, could be both a relativist and a passionate imperialist seems to be borne out in a comment made in his inaugural lecture, that ‘In the nature of things there is nothing less poetical about Melbourne than there is about London’ (237). Still we can read this comment, and the production of Austral English, not as pre-emptive postcolonialism (as Haberly might have it), but as colonial Romanticism. Morris believed in an organic connection between land, language and culture; it is entirely consistent with this view that he should argue that the English ‘race’ and language would be transformed by their transportation to a new landscape. Indeed, the risks attending such a transformation made it essential to establish schools and universities that would inculcate a love of English literature and culture in their students; inheritance alone would not be sufficiently powerful to maintain desired forms of Englishness in the colonies.

Although Morris had died in 1902, his position as professor of modern languages was not advertised until 1911; the delay was caused by lack of funding after an administrator absconded with a significant portion of funding. When a position was finally created it was decided to make the chair one in English literature, the first in Australia, although French and German were being taught in the interim. The teaching of English had been done first by TG Tucker; subsequently a lecturer, Walter Murdoch, was appointed to take charge. Murdoch was a graduate of Melbourne, with firsts in logic and classics; having done the work of the professor for nearly a decade, it was generally felt that he was in a strong position to apply for the chair when it was finally advertised. In a letter to Alfred Deakin requesting a reference, Murdoch asked if he would

101Deakin, then in the last, turbulent stages of his political career, wrote back to apologise for the delay in replying; Murdoch in turn apologised for putting him to the trouble: ‘I had thought you would just pick up your pen at some moment and jot down a few particulars – good churchgoer, fairly truthful, kind to animals & things of that kind’ (51).

Notwithstanding this light-hearted tone Murdoch was serious in his desire for the position. His first letter to Deakin noted that he did not ‘want to surrender [it] without a struggle; and I honestly believe that a testimonial from you would be without exception the strongest weapon in my armoury’ (La Nauze and Nurser, 49). Murdoch’s qualifications are worth scrutiny, as are those of the person who emerged as his rival for the position, Robert Strachan Wallace. By 1911 Murdoch had published numerous essays and reviews in The Argus, The Book Lover and The Trident, an academic journal which he edited; two textbooks and an anthology of literature for schools; a primer and an anthology of English literature (both with Tucker); and a collection of literary essays called Loose Leaves.6 I have not been able to find any publications for Wallace for the same period. But Murdoch’s high output might have counted against him, for many of his publications were for school students or general readers, or as he later termed it, ‘literary journalism’. Both Murdoch and Wallace had first-class results in their undergraduate degrees and an MA, though Murdoch’s qualifications were obtained from Melbourne while Wallace had degrees from Aberdeen and Oxford. Murdoch had been a lecturer in English at Melbourne since 1903; Wallace had taught English at Aberdeen since 1907. It was known that Murdoch had strong connections in the literary and education communities, and was a popular teacher – indeed, in a rather unusual step, several hundred of his current and former students petitioned the university council to support his application. On the other hand, again, there is little doubt that teaching in the Scottish university would have counted for more with a selection committee than experience in

102Australia. Another factor that sometimes entered the selection equation was age, but it is unlikely to have been a factor here: Murdoch was in his late thirties, Wallace in his late twenties.

The selection committee in England, consisting of WP Ker, Sir Walter Raleigh and CH Herford, ostensibly declined to make a final recommendation, ranking Murdoch equal with Wallace.7 They did note that Wallace

Referring the final choice to Australia was unusual, although the implicit preference for the British candidate was not.

Ker seems here to reverse the preference for classics evident in his comments on Brereton (above) made nearly a decade later; the (small) committee seems to have seen Wallace’s degrees in English as constituting better qualifications than Murdoch’s in philosophy and classics. This might reflect the nature of the position, in English, but such an order of priorities is unusual in this period, even more so because the Australian committee included three classicists, two of whom were almost certainly its most influential members. The Australian

103committee’s chair, Alexander Leeper, had successfully moved that EE Morris be offered the chair of modern languages in 1882, and in 1927 was again a member of the selection committee for the chair of English.8 The other committee members were Murdoch’s colleague and former teacher TG Tucker, EH Sugden and Theodore Fink.9 Murdoch himself was well aware this group was likely to favour a candidate from Britain, something even he seemed to accept, if reluctantly. He wrote to Deakin that ‘if they get a really good man from Oxford, I am not so irrational as to grumble; but what I do grumble at, and what I have chiefly to fear, is Dr Leeper’s view that anyone, no matter who, from Oxford or Cambridge, is quite certain to be an improvement on a local man’ (La Nauze and Nurser, 55–56). In their report to Council the Australian committee did not minute the reasons for its choice, simply noting that having examined ‘all the available evidence’ it recommended the appointment of Robert Wallace.10

Melbourne at large was indignant, and local newspapers received letters protesting the appointment; the matter was also raised in state parliament.11 One of Murdoch’s students wrote to The Argus to complain about the selection of Wallace (Old Student), while Basil Kilvington, who worked at the university, accused Melbourne of being ‘importers’:

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Although the Philosophy chair was filled by a graduate of Oxford and Jena the agitation obviously had some impact, as the appointee to the chair of Agriculture, Thomas Cherry, was a graduate of Melbourne – the first Australian to be appointed to a chair at Melbourne since 1886.12 Murdoch himself was clearly devastated and left the university, spending a year on the literary staff at The Argus before being offered the foundation chair of English at Western Australia.

The rejection of Murdoch seems to have related to his local training, his preference for literature over language study, the nature of his literary criticism, and his interest in Australian literature. Many of Murdoch’s newspaper essays from this period can be read as direct refutations of Tucker’s often-repeated assertion that, life being short, it was best for students and readers to stick to classical literature. In regard to idealism Murdoch was also a heretic, remarking in a letter to Deakin that

Although there has been speculation as to who on the committee opposed Murdoch’s candidature, and there is no reason to assume that Murdoch’s fears regarding Leeper were not well founded, Tucker’s role was also surely vital. Given his reputation at Melbourne, and his professional relationship with Murdoch, it seems unlikely that a strong

105recommendation from him would have been disregarded unless – as is possible – there were tussles between Leeper and Tucker for the position of senior classicist, their commonality making them rivals rather than allies.

Morris’ official successor in the chair, RS Wallace, was born in Aberdeenshire in 1882. He won a scholarship to Aberdeen and graduated with first-class honours in English; after a short time teaching he went to Christ Church college, Oxford. There he studied English with Sir Walter Raleigh, who, according to Chris Baldick, had somewhat ‘lost faith’ in the discipline during his time ‘implementing Macaulay’s cultural crusade’ in India (Social Mission, 76). Wallace graduated from Oxford in 1907, and the same year obtained a teaching post at Aberdeen. After coming to Melbourne in 1911 he taught for several years before enlisting, working mainly in educational administration.13 Behind the scenes of this appointment we might also wonder about Raleigh’s role, as Wallace’s supervisor and a member of the London selection committee – did he, for example, suggest to his former student that he apply for the position? Did he press his student’s case during the meeting of the London committee?

During the war the teaching of English again passed to a lecturer, now AT Strong, who had been doing the evening classes. On his return to Melbourne, Wallace became active in administration and, through the agency of his fellow Scot Mungo MacCallum, became vice-chancellor at Sydney in 1928. When Wallace left Melbourne, selection committees for the chair of English were again established in England and in Australia. The Australian committee members were Wallace, Dr Sugden (again), Leeper (again), Sir Robert Garran and Dr Edward Stevens, with MacCallum and Tucker ‘for consultation’. The committee sitting in England consisted of professors of English from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and University College London – as well as the ubiquitous Tucker. Again a British candidate was preferred, the London committee proposing the appointment of Leeds graduate GH

106Cowling, a recommendation subsequently accepted. The strongest of the Australian applicants had been RC Bald, whose doctoral research on Elizabethan drama had been completed at Cambridge and published by the University Press – he was one of only a handful of scholars in the period with a PhD. But the English committee concluded that although his ‘scholastic career’ was impressive, Bald – around the same age as Wallace had been at the time of his appointment to Melbourne – was ‘still a little immature for an important chair’.14 By contrast, the committee saw Cowling as ‘a ripe scholar in both departments of his subject’ – although there was no suggestion that Bald did not have qualifications in language as well as literature, and indeed there was evidence to the contrary. Cowling’s main areas of research interest were northern English dialect and Shakespeare, work that the committee suggested had ‘already won the respect of scholars in the same field’, and he was certainly prolific.

At the time of application Bald had few publications, although after a brief period at Adelaide he would go on to academic positions in the US, during which he edited numerous volumes and wrote much of what is now the standard biography of John Donne, edited and completed after his death by Wesley Milgate (see Mann). In this, Milgate replicated Bald’s own work as editor of the work of AT Strong. In this making of tribute, we see colleagues and students (as with TH Green) building the monument that is publication, as a tribute to friends and teachers which posthumously enhances their careers and reputations. Most of Bald’s own career was spent at Chicago; he also turned down a chair at Leeds. Northrop Frye described Bald as ‘a rather dry stick of a man’, though it is worth noting that when he lectured on Australian literature at Toronto in 1950, Bald’s topics included not only Barbara Baynton and Joseph Furphy but the ‘modern’ poets John Manifold, RD FitzGerald, and (almost certainly) Charles Jury, whom he may have known during his time in Adelaide (247).15 In terms of his attempts to obtain a position in

107Australia, Bald’s case is similar to Murdoch’s but perhaps worse, at least in the case of Adelaide, for which he applied in 1933. Again, a British candidate with an Oxford degree was preferred: JIM Stewart was about the same age at appointment that Bald had been when considered too young for Melbourne. Stewart’s only publication was a two-page note in Review of English Studies on Montaigne; he would go on to make his name mainly as the author of popular detective fiction.

Cowling and the Age Debate

Born in Leeds in 1881, George Herbert Cowling spent some years in business before enlisting, although he had embarked on an academic career just before the First World War and subsequently taught at Leeds from 1919 to 1927. Like Morris, Cowling was a follower of Macaulay; in his introduction to the essay by Macaulay he included in his anthology Essays English and Australian, Cowling noted with approval that ‘in 1834 he went to India as a member of the Supreme Council, where he codified the criminal law, and promoted the study of European literature and science in the schools in an endeavour to civilize India’ (116). In proposing prescriptions for Australian students in 1935, Cowling reiterated Macaulay’s views on these matters expressed a century earlier. In his essay ‘On Reading and Criticism’, from Essays in the Use of English, he was even more forceful:

Things could be worse, though, for Australians – still, at this time British subjects rather than Australian citizens – were simply Britons in the wrong place. Thus they at least had the potential to be the rightful inheritors of the ‘eternal’ cultural values and habits of mind of the English. As he continued his theme, Cowling made his case for absolute standards by referring to Shakespeare: 108

These arguments again recall those of Jackson Knight; it is not surprising to find Cowling’s textbook, The Use of English, constantly affirming the inferiority of the local.

On the other hand, it is possible that a single newspaper essay has disproportionately affected Cowling’s reputation, given that Australian literature – contrary to popular assumption – did appear on the curriculum at Melbourne during his tenure there. Cowling’s now notorious contribution to discussions of Australian literature came as part of a series on ‘The Future of Australian Literature’ in Melbourne’s Age newspaper in early 1935. The series was prompted by an article entitled ‘Australian Literature: Its Scope Too Limited’, obviously intended to whet readers’ appetites for debate. ‘F.M.’ suggested that while Australian writing had a wide stylistic range, it was narrow in its themes and subjects, focusing on ‘the bush’ at the expense of the urban (4). The first essay in the series proper was by Vance Palmer, followed by Cowling, New South Wales educator George Mackaness, thence Miles Franklin, along with a flood of letters beside each of the weekly essays.16 It is by firmly ignoring this surrounding material that critics have been able to buttress claims about the universal hostility of university-based critics towards Australian literature in this period.17

109In the first instance, the demonising of Cowling overlooks the similarities in argument between Cowling’s essay and that of the first contributor, Vance Palmer. While it is possible that some might be offended by the remarks that ‘the books that have poured out from [local presses] have been uneven in quantity [sic], and some have small literary value’, or that ‘There is no art in these, nothing of permanent worth; but they serve their purpose as sketchy surveys of country yet to be ploughed’, these comments were made by Palmer, not Cowling. Palmer implicitly took up the questions raised by the conveniently provocative F.M., arguing that Australian writing did have great variety of theme and subject, and was gathering support from local publishers and readers. He identified the real difficulty as the failure of criticism: ‘there are columns of gossip about books and authors in all our papers, but little sense of values. Criticism in Australia has lagged badly behind creative work’. The stage had been set for a reply by an academic; in the meantime several letter writers praised Palmer’s article. Andrew Millett suggested that ‘true patriots will applaud Palmer for his brilliant and visionary article and commend The Age for its progressiveness in giving the light of day to vital matters that affect the soul and substance of Australia’ (6), while Furnley Maurice applauded the ‘excellent and characteristic article’ by Mr Vance Palmer (6). Like these letter writers, Cowling sang the praises of Palmer’s article, suggesting that it was so ‘judicious and pointed’ and ‘so full of reason that it leaves little room for discussion’.

The only dissenting view was put by Millett, who suggested that the fact Australia was ‘not tainted with tradition’ was a virtue rather than a defect. It was precisely this ‘lack of tradition’ that Cowling took up, for in his eyes the most important criterion in judging literature was longevity – a polemical position given the newness of English literary studies, demonstrable volatility in the reputations of writers, and the gap between public and university taste. Nevertheless, Cowling argued that Australian literature could not be worthy of study because it lacked a Past. Thus his main objection to Australian literature was that it was set in Australia: 110

Needless to say, no contributor or letter writer commented on the ignorance of Indigenous cultures which these remarks demonstrate. Cowling did make the valid point that one handicap for writers was the limited local market for books, but he made no connection between the absence of a market and his own failure to develop the study of Australian writing to any significant extent at Melbourne. Nor did he did take up Palmer’s charge of the failure of criticism, which could only have been aimed at Melbourne English staff.

Yet how seriously should such attitudes be taken? Given the coincidence of the initials, it seems possible that it was ‘Furnley Maurice’, a pseudonym for Frank Wilmot, who wrote the first essay. Maurice and Cowling had collaborated on editing a volume of Australian essays published in the same year, and in one sense it is odd that Palmer should attack the university when he surely knew his own writing was set for study there. Nettie Palmer gives no clues in her journal, even though she records at some length the conversations she and her husband Vance had with Miles Franklin when they spent the evening together on 19 March 1935, less than three weeks after Franklin’s essay had been published. It seems unlikely the controversy would not have been mentioned, but if the fearsome-witted Franklin were not aware that the debate had been staged, that could explain the Palmers’ silence on the issue (or, more likely, Nettie’s decision not to record their conversation in her journal). It is not unlikely, I think, that Cowling was designated agent provocateur, to the delight of the newspaper. Perhaps the heart of the matter was discerned by the correspondent who remarked, ‘I don’t think there are many copies of [the newspapers] containing these articles left unsold’ (K.B., 5). For Cowling could quite easily have refuted 111the arguments about the neglect of Australian writers by universities by pointing out that Palmer’s novel The Passage was studied at Melbourne. That he did not do so lends weight to the speculation that, to a certain extent, the controversy was prearranged. It is worth noting, then, that only Franklin contested Cowling’s claims at any length. Her succinct and forceful arguments were ignored by later commentators, some of whom might have been wise to seek reinforcement for their claims.

Franklin put the case that it was not the intrinsic but the ascribed value of ‘place’ and ‘tradition’ that was at issue, particularly the idealised place that was the product of Anglophile reading practices. With typically forthright precision, she noted that it was indeed

Unlike Palmer, who had claimed that ‘the problem of the immigrant spirituality lost in a new world is largely a thing of yesterday’, Franklin asserted that the problem of the relationship between colonial cultures and the environment persisted, and should be tackled. Writing privately to American scholar of Australian literature Hartley Grattan ten days later she was more caustic, lamenting that she did

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UWA and Queensland

Walter Murdoch’s academic career was ultimately pursued at the other side of the continent – a fitting metaphor. The universities of Western Australia and of Queensland were both established just before the beginning of the First World War, and in each case there was discussion about which subject areas would be covered by appointments, and the level of appointments that should be made. The symbolic significance of chairs is clear in the public and institutional debates about these two aspects of foundation. In Perth it was decided that there was sufficient money to create four chairs and four lectureships; after agreeing that there should be a chair and a lectureship covering classics and English, debate in the university’s senate focused on which discipline should have the chair (see Alexander).

Mungo MacCallum, one of two eastern states advisers consulted, ‘most vigorously advocate[d]’ the establishment of a chair of classics, with English having a lectureship if funds did not permit two humanities chairs (Alexander, 31). In voting for the four foundation chairs, mathematics and physics (a single chair) and mining and engineering (also one) were unanimously supported by the senate. English received fourteen out of a possible seventeen votes, and therefore was the most favoured humanities discipline. In the voting for the final chair classics made an unexpectedly strong showing, tying with geology. The casting vote was made by the chancellor, John Winthrop Hackett, who although a classicist by training voted in favour of geology. Murdoch’s application had been supported in a letter to Hackett from Deakin (Alexander, 58), the latter surely keen to make up for the fact that Murdoch’s ‘strongest weapon’ had been insufficient to gain him the position at Melbourne.

Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch was born in 1874 at Rosehearty, a small fishing village on the Moray Firth, the fourteenth child in his family. Murdoch spent his childhood in Scotland, England and France, coming to Australia at the age of ten. (Although he usually wrote as an Australian, Murdoch could become Scottish as it suited.) He attended Camberwell Grammar and Scotch College, graduating from Melbourne in 1895. Following the death of his father while he was studying, Murdoch managed to complete his degree with the assistance of various 113scholarships and prizes; after graduation, he worked as a teacher. He was professor of English at the University of Western Australia from 1913 to 1939, pro-chancellor from 1941 to 1943 and chancellor from 1943 to 1948. His laconic comment on hearing that Perth’s second university would be named after him – ‘it had better be a good one’ – has become that institution’s de facto motto.

It was while teaching that Murdoch began to publish essays and textbooks, and to write regularly for newspapers. And it was through his writing for newspapers that he reached his largest audience, in a career that lasted nearly seventy years; his nephew, Keith Murdoch, was to build a newspaper empire. The first Murdoch essays on literary subjects were published in The Argus in 1899; from then until his departure for Perth, his column ‘Books and Men’ focused on literature. Like most of the literary columns written around this time, ‘Books and Men’ was basically a forum for reviewing; the gender exclusivity implied by the title is not inaccurate in terms of content. But although he was sexist, and very racist, Murdoch’s vision of culture was more democratic than that of most of his peers: early in his career he argued that ‘the nobility of a nation does not depend on its literature or its art or its culture; the nobility of a nation may be gauged by the extent to which these things are shared by all’ (Enemies of Literature, 21). Later, more general Murdoch columns included ‘Life and Letters’, another ‘Books and Men’, ‘Answers’, and ‘Afterthoughts’. By the time he ceased writing ‘Afterthoughts’ Murdoch was – like Leeper at Melbourne – ninety-three years old.

Murdoch’s social and political concerns were broad – he was a witty commentator on Victorian pruderies, and scathing of a time in which ‘the people who wept like anything over the sufferings of imaginary characters in fiction were singularly callous to the sufferings of women and children in the factories and mines of the north’ (Victorian Era, 21). He suggested that the age was epitomised by Macaulay, whom he deplored: ‘open [his books] where you will, you get a glimpse of that desperate weakness of the Victorian Era, its smugness’ (Victorian Era, 9). His former student Katharine Susannah Prichard claimed in her autobiography that Murdoch’s lectures at Melbourne 114

In his anthology of criticism The Writer in Australia John Barnes includes an 1890 essay on ‘The Characteristics of Australian Literature’, (Anon 1890) a very early piece given its academic context. The essay begins by engaging with Marcus Clarke’s claims that the keynote of Australian writing was melancholy, going on to suggest that modern writers had more or less nothing in common apart from an overindulged sense of Australianness. Barnes attributes the unsigned essay to EE Morris, literature editor of The Australasian Critic (in which it first appeared), but Morris did sign more than a dozen other contributions to the same journal that he made the following year. There is an equal possibility the essay is by TG Tucker, one of the journal’s editors (with Baldwin Spencer), not least because the claims that modern work is characterised by a ‘too conscious effort to be Australian’, and that ‘It is the chief weakness of our rising poets that they too often write for no other purpose than to be Australian’, seem ‘Tuckerish’ (48). The author expresses the conviction – several times – that there are no discernible similarities between writers working in Australia at that time.

At the end of the 1890s, Walter Murdoch took a very different line, not only arguing that there was a ‘New School of Australian Poets’, but that the very homogeneity of their work was its chief defect (4). In his first published essay, Murdoch argues that ‘a chorus of undiscriminating praise’ had made Australian writers ridiculous in the eyes of readers. He calls for ‘calm, impartial, and candid criticism’ of their work, a call that would be reiterated countless times in relation to Australian literature – as it is, for example, by Franklin in her letter to Grattan quoted above. The reassembly of lines by five different poets into one technically and thematically consistent verse was an unusual but effective critical tool for substantiating Murdoch’s claim that contemporary poetry was unoriginal. Arguing that this uniformity of subject matter and style was because all were imitators of each other, of Swinburne, and (especially) of Kipling, he suggested that 115

Critics of the essay focused on Murdoch’s questioning of the claim that these writers were ‘the spokesmen and interpreters of the Australian spirit’ and ignored his statement that poets should aspire to ‘a voice of their own.’ A defensive letter came from novelist ‘Rolf Boldrewood’, while AG Stephens devoted an entire page to an attack (‘Under the Gumtree’).

In his application for the lectureship in modern languages at Melbourne in 1903 Murdoch included the information he had been invited by Angus and Robertson to write a history of Australian literature, although if it were written, the study was never published. Three years later, in his essay ‘A Plea for Australian Literature’, he stated his belief ‘that the interpreter of the land in which we live gives us something which neither a Flaubert nor a Dante can give us – something which is eminently worthwhile getting hold of’ (4), a view again at odds with that of Tucker. But Murdoch’s attempts to engage in debate on Australian literature and criticism seem to have done him no favours: there is no question his newspaper essays were a negative element of his reputation in his application for the Melbourne chair, and it is noticeable that his wiser colleagues JJ Stable and AT Strong left their literary journalism off the list of publications in their successful applications for professorial positions made around the same time. Murdoch did not introduce Australian literature into the curriculum at Western Australia when professor and head, although a number of academics who spent time in his department went on to teach the subject at other universities, notably his MA student Brian Elliott.

Ironically, given his early advocacy of Australian literature, Murdoch was irrevocably marked as an imperial and critical anachronism by the publication of an essay on the subject in The Times in 1938, and in later 116editions of his Oxford Book of Australian Verse.19 The Times essay was part of a sesquicentenary Australia Day Supplement that had a distinctly imperial tone: there were advertisements for the work of the Fairbridge (child colonisation) scheme; essays on Australia’s economic and political links with Britain; even a description of ‘Canberra Today’ by the everpresent Menzies. (There was no mention of the protests by Indigenous people about the event.) One of the main points in condemnation of Murdoch’s essay and his Anthology was their institutional placement, critics claiming that he had failed to meet the ‘special obligation’ that publication in these media placed upon the writer/compiler.20 The Times essay is unashamedly racist, but this was not the point that came to be at issue. Once again, what Australian writers objected to was the claim that their work owed a debt to English literary culture (see for example Davison, ‘Reply to Murdoch’). Murdoch’s essay worked too hard to counter the stereotype of the colonial Philistine, with the first two paragraphs spent providing assurances along these lines: ‘Australian literature does not begin with infantile stammerings, but with highly sophisticated imitations of English classics’. These comments, at odds with others he made elsewhere, seem to anticipate a conservative British reader. Unsurprisingly they were taken badly by Australian creative writers, who were hardly pleased by the claim that they were producing ‘sophisticated imitations’ (36c).

Negative responses to the Oxford Book have a distinctly regional element, appearing mainly in the Sydney journal, Southerly.21 The fiercest of the negative reviews were in 1946, with four ‘analyses’ of the third edition, by RG Howarth, James Devaney, T Inglis Moore and Kenneth Slessor, placed one after another under the title ‘Anthology Anatomised’ – the only case, other than that of Leonie Kramer’s Oxford History of

117Australian Literature (see Croft; Elliot), I can find of multiple reviews published in a single journal. RG Howarth’s comments are indicative of the prevailing tone: he expressed resentment at being ‘represented to the English-speaking world by this poorly chosen, incomplete, and sometimes utterly unworthy selection’ (190). The main point of concern was clearly the omission of Slessor and other Sydney poets such as Christopher Brennan. These are legitimate issues, but the barrage of malice did not go unanswered, with Murdoch defended by AB Taylor and FWW Rhodes. The journal was hardly cowed: Southerly’s 1951 review of the fourth edition of what was by then the Oxford Book of Australian and New Zealand Verse (still edited by Murdoch) was titled ‘Once More unto the Breach …’ Predictably, it found that poets from Western Australia were over-represented and that ‘Sydney poets receive the shabbiest treatment of all’ (Lancaster). Revisions that Southerly had suggested in 1946, especially regarding the work of women, were now queried, and in the meantime the journal maintained its attack on Murdoch with two essays published in 1947, one of which likened Murdoch’s popular essays to fairy floss (Hadgraft). Fifteen years later, Cecil Hadgraft was clearly still irritated by Murdoch’s apparent refusal to regard either literature or being a professor of English with sufficient seriousness (see his Australian Literature, 275).

The most negative assessment of Murdoch and his work is by Geoffrey Dutton, in his account of ‘the Australian literary experience’ in Snow on the Saltbush. Dutton claims that Murdoch rarely wrote on subjects to do with Australia or Australian literature, and dismisses him as anti-nationalist. He claims that ‘there is nothing contemporary about his themes … Nothing to do with contemporary political thought, religion, attitudes to sex or drink or sport, nothing even about mateship’ (134). If we are to take Dutton on his own terms – and there are reasons to query them – we can note that Murdoch’s essays were insistently concerned with linking the everyday with politics. Indeed the classic structure of a Murdoch essay is to shift from a meditation on a quotidian object, such as a three-penny bit or tripe and onions (to take two of his more bizarre), to a consideration of some social problem or political issue. It must be said that the metaphor or moral 118is never particularly opaque, and Dutton’s criticisms hint at a lack of acquaintance with the object of his attack. This suspicion might be confirmed by the fact that the essay ‘My Bush-fire’, in the collection Dutton claimed to have examined, declares that ‘ten centuries hence it will be seen that … the ideal of mateship … has been Australia’s great contribution to civilization’ (Murdoch, Collected Essays, 119). Again, we might query the sentiment, but there is a certain irony in seeing an iconoclast under attack from a writer who claims to reify rebelliousness, even if it is doubtful that Murdoch experienced the attacks this way.

Another notable feature of Murdoch’s writing is that there is less evidence of militarist fervour than was the case for his contemporaries and colleagues. Murdoch does not seem to have been heavily involved in military promotion or censorship during the First World War, which might explain why he did not receive one of the many honours awarded to academics in English soon after (e.g. Wallace and Strong). He was generally more wary than they about Australia’s involvement in overseas military conflicts, and after travelling to Italy in the 1930s, no doubt seeking to develop his studies of Italian, he was sombrely critical of what he saw:

In the context of Murdoch’s characteristic levity, these sentiments are expressed with unusual force.

In contrast to his essay on Italy, the most obvious and consistent aspect of Murdoch’s writing is a certain easy geniality, coupled with a reluctance to pass decisive judgements. His response to a reader’s question, ‘what is meant by calling a book a classic’, and could George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede be called one, is worth quoting at length for its demonstration of these qualities: 119

Eliot fans will flinch at Murdoch’s hesitation, but the hesitancy in relation to literary judgement is notable, as is the recommendation of specialist sources for this general reader. Murdoch’s discussion of the potentially complicated aspects of the question contrasts with the kind of dismissive self-assurance more often evident in, say, Cowling’s writing, or more pertinently perhaps, that of Tucker.

The self-deprecation that pervades Murdoch’s work has been integral to the making of his reputation. It seems likely that an important source for this was Murdoch’s bitterness or shame over not being awarded the chair at Melbourne. Harold Oliver wrote a lengthy obituary which quotes Vance Palmer’s description of Murdoch as the ‘“wise uncle of our Australian family”’ (4). Although he draws attention to the variety of Murdoch’s writing, Oliver (misleadingly) plays up Murdoch’s ‘dislike of the suburban mind’. More typically, a sentimental obituary in the Canberra Times chooses to quote Murdoch against himself:

In the same vein, the official history of the University of Western Australia implies that English teaching under Murdoch was less intellectually respectable than it might have been:

The first part of this observation is a reflection of the fact that the curriculum included more literature than did that at other Australian universities, and less language. Even so the impression of intellectual lightness is not reflected in the level of postgraduate research: during Murdoch’s time in the chair nine students graduated with an MA, their theses mainly on Victorian literature. The comparable figures for Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide between 1910 and 1940 are thirteen, zero, and six respectively; Sydney, with thirteen students, was the largest department. The judgement relies, then, on an assumption about the relative scholarly value of ‘language’ as against ‘literary’ study. More generally, we can see that Murdoch’s publishing in newspapers, while it probably made him the academic of his generation whose work was most widely known and enjoyed, in the end probably diminished rather than enhanced his scholarly reputation.

The same pragmatic spirit about subject choice that ultimately prevailed in Perth is evident in debates about the founding of a university in Queensland. When a congress was held in Brisbane in 1906 to discuss the proposal, proceedings began with the recitation of a poem written for the occasion by George Essex Evans. Nevertheless advocates for the humanities were few among delegates from a range 121of public, business, and educational organisations.23 One brave voice was that of the principal of Girton College, a girls’ school in the nearby city of Toowoomba, who argued that it was important to include English literature so that women would be encouraged to attend the university.24 But the majority of speakers were more concerned with ensuring that agriculture, engineering, mining and forestry would be taught. The general mood favoured the view that the university should avoid the elitism cultivated in other institutions, and concentrate on being useful. When humanities teaching did begin at Queensland some years later it was with the awkwardly titled Chair of Arts, held by classicist JL Michie. The first appointee in the field of modern literatures was, like Murdoch, a graduate of Melbourne, and in another way quite exceptional: in 1911 Hermiene Ulrich became the first female academic at Queensland, and the first woman in Australia appointed to teach English literature. However, there is little for feminists to celebrate in the appointment, which might even signal the lack of regard in which humanities subjects were held. For although Ulrich briefly constituted the English, French, and German departments, her position was an acting one and her reign brief (on Ulrich, see D’Arcens). A year later, in 1912, JJ Stable was appointed to head a single department of modern languages.

Joseph Jeremiah Stable was born in South Australia in 1883, and grew up in Switzerland. He attended school in Geneva and university in England, graduating in mediaeval and modern languages from Cambridge, with a specialisation in English. Stable was fluent in French and German, had studied at Bonn, and taught at the commercial University of Cologne. Like several others of his generation he was school teaching in England at the time of obtaining an appointment in Australia. The pass and honours courses he developed at Queensland were based on changes made to the curriculum at Cambridge at the same time.25 Stable’s teaching was interrupted by the First World War, during

122which he gave just one weekly honours lecture as he, like colleagues in other states, worked as an interpreter and censor. In this latter position Stable was ‘accused in the Queensland Parliament of stifling modern languages in general and the Australian one in particular’, after he had, in response to an order by the then Prime Minister, seized all the copies of a speech against conscription made by the state premier TJ Ryan (Gregory, 146). Stable ‘continued to report to the Federal government after the war on organisations thought to be subversive’, and was district censor for Queensland from 1939 to 1942 (Gregory, 147). This might seem to position him with colleagues like AT Strong, but in his application for the chair, Stable includes the information that he had refused an MBE, noting simply and enigmatically that he ‘did not see [his] way clear to accept this honour’.

Ulrich, who had resigned in order to marry, returned to the department to take over most of Stable’s teaching during the war, although the study of German was halted. After the conflict in Europe had ended there was no demand for that subject, but teaching loads in other areas remained heavy. In his application for the newly created McCaughey Chair of English language and literature (funded by the same bequest received by Sydney), in July 1922, Stable noted he had

The selection committee presumably accepted this reasoning, and Stable became the first holder of the McCaughey chair (in 1932 retitled the Darnell chair; now defunct). But notwithstanding his claims Stable was heavily involved in cultural activities: he was a member of the city’s historical society, dramatic society and repertory society, as well as being on the board of the state’s art gallery and president of the Queensland Authors and Artists Association from 1921 to 1931. He did 123not publish any major works of criticism although he did edit several anthologies of poetry, collaborated with HH Alcock on a short history of the university, and was general editor of the Australian Students’ Shakespeare series published by Oxford University Press. He was a regular contributor to Brisbane’s Courier, and received an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1950. When he retired in 1952, Stable was made the University of Queensland’s second professor emeritus.

Stable’s life and work show the influence of three strands of thinking current at the time: belief in the primacy of classics; imperial commitment to English literature, particularly for schools and the reading public; and the importance of language over literary study in the teaching of modern languages. In his inaugural address as founding president of the English and Modern Languages Association, he repeatedly referred to the study of English literature as an essential instrument for education (5). He was critical of the ‘practical’ training given in English schools that he claimed was resulting in ‘a growing section of the middle classes [being] intolerant, narrow-minded, self-centred, money-worshipping, and in a state of educated ignorance’. He enjoined his audience to acknowledge and promote the study of classical literature, claiming that this was essential for effective understanding of English literature. The focus was on the importance of Matthew Arnold’s ‘best that has been thought and said in the world’ (see chapter five, section two). Australian literature was not mentioned in Stable’s address, but in the following year he co-edited with AEM Kirwood an anthology of Queensland poetry, published to mark the centenary of white settlement in 1823. Stable’s introduction confidently expresses judgements about Queensland verse; only two paragraphs in fourteen pages are needed for writing by women. He subsequently edited two other anthologies used in schools, including the widely used collection The Bond of Poetry; the ‘bond’ of the title is the bond of empire.

The anthology is divided into three sections – narrative, descriptive and patriotic poems – each section then arranged in increasing order of difficulty beginning with Australian poems and ending with English ones, although Stable claimed that, by putting them first, he had given ‘pride of place’ to works by Australians. In his introduction, Stable 124claimed that the main reason for compiling the book was to combat ‘distinct national development’, to close the gulf, ‘gradually widening, between English life to-day and Australian life, and therefore between English and Australian sentiment’ (viii). He told his readers that time was the only sure test of literary greatness: ‘Never for one moment should the claims of art that has survived the test of time … be set aside for an untried standard’, for ‘The work of those who have stood the test of ages has a claim to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend’ (ix). At one level such claims seem to acknowledge the longevity of the English literary tradition, yet in the light of the newness of the discipline, they take on a slightly different cast. Indeed, this more or less constant emphasis on longevity, tradition, precedent, and the authority associated with the passing of time encourages students to memorise (and memorialise) a history which has only recently been made; put another way, in a sleight of hand, the history of creative texts is substituted for, and thus becomes, the history of the discipline. That longevity is being used to signify an almost transcendent value is not surprising, but laying claim to a kind of predestined pre-eminence obscures the volatile and contested nature of value judgements about literary texts. Whilst reassuring, this is also unfortunate for students, because it undermines their capacity to understand the nature of critical contestations about value, leaving them to feel that their ‘failure’ to appreciate such texts is a kind of cultural lack or emotional or intellectual incapacity rather than a matter of their different position in a debate.

Strong Men

The fortunes of English at Adelaide tended to fluctuate in accordance with the interests of the person appointed to the chair of history and English. Certainly there was no specialist until AT Strong became the first holder of the Jury Chair in 1922, but English did receive enthusiastic support from historian George Cockburn Henderson. The dismissal of Robert Douglas in April 1902 had meant an opportunity for Henderson, who was literally ‘just passing through’ Adelaide later that month but had a modest record of publication, including a published lecture 125outline (on citizenship). Henderson, whom vice-chancellor William Mitchell had met when he was in Oxford in 1899, was interviewed for, offered, and accepted the chair on 30 April 1902, subject only to the offer being made in writing.26 His referees were MacCallum, Edward Caird and AL Smith. Smith had succeeded Caird as master of Balliol, and was also chair of the Adult Education Committee in Britain (Great Britain, Ministry of Reconstruction).

Henderson was born in Hamilton, near Newcastle, now a suburb of that city, but attended the selective Fort Street High School in Sydney. After completing his BA at Sydney in 1893 he was appointed as a lecturer for the university’s extension scheme. His undergraduate career had been highly successful, and after a year of lecturing he was awarded the James King of Irrawang travelling scholarship. He completed a further degree at Oxford (Balliol) in 1898, graduating with second-class honours. Henderson subsequently became an outstanding member of the university extension lecturing staff in England, teaching history and philosophy. In 1899 he was appointed acting professor of history at Sydney, and the following year acting professor of philosophy. After this he returned to England, and to extension teaching, until his appointment to Adelaide. Henderson, like his predecessor Douglas, was divorced in 1911 but he did not resign from Adelaide until 1923, and then because of health problems. He was made professor emeritus, and began a series of trips to research publications on Fiji. He committed suicide in 1944 (Casson, n.p.).

Henderson’s English literature course reflected his preference for the patriotic and the imperial. He spoke ‘convinced of the value of his literary, history and philosophical views; these advocated a high moral idealism, opposed materialism, and stressed nature’s beauty and bounty’. Henderson’s public lectures on literature, which the ABD once called ‘fervently evangical’ [sic], proved so popular that they had to be moved from the university to the town hall, and even then people had to be turned away. These, and lectures for the university extension movement, resulted in the publication of numerous outlines of lectures on topics related to literature, history and imperialism. A recurrent topic is the

126British navy, perhaps reflecting the influence of JA Froude, biographer of Carlyle and proto-imperialist, who was Regius professor of history at Oxford from 1892 to 1894 (see Symonds, 50). We can also discern the influence of the idealist philosophy discussed in the previous chapter, and its proponents, in keeping with Henderson’s time as a student at Sydney under MacCallum and at Balliol.

As well as English Henderson taught colonial history, in the belief (in the words of the ADB) that ‘Australian universities should foster interest in Australian history and undertake a “systematic and scientific” history of the British Empire’. Henderson himself had undertaken such a task with his study of Sir George Grey, another passionate believer in Macaulay and himself a renowned imperial administrator. Henderson noted Grey’s good advice: ‘Secure your outposts on the frontiers of civilization’, he said in 1894, ‘and not only by military force, but by museums, libraries, and schools for civilizing the people’ (quoted in Henderson, Sir George Grey, 7). Henderson also praised Grey’s meshing of race imperialism with Christianity: ‘like Cecil Rhodes, he was profoundly impressed with the possibilities of the Anglo-Saxon race, and he regarded the British empire as a great and beneficent power in the world by which the influence of Christianity might be extended’ (Henderson, Sir George Grey, 8). Apart from teaching and research, Henderson’s politics were expressed through his honorary membership of the British Empire Club and Oxford’s Raleigh Club, the latter described by Richard Symonds as effectively an Oxford branch of the Round Table (see below). Other honorary members included Winston Churchill, Menzies, and Jan Smuts.

Henderson’s work was part of an increasing militarism that was expressed in Australian universities leading up to the First World War, and which was criticised at the speaker’s peril. When Henderson’s predecessor, Robert Douglas, had spoken on ‘A Lost Ideal’ in a public lecture in Adelaide, he expressed concern about the nationalist ethos that he claimed had replaced the idea of a common humanity:

The lecture had only ‘a fair attendance’, and the newspaper account does not record the effusive expressions of gratitude or loud applause customary in such accounts, noting only that the vote of thanks was ‘cordial’. By way of contrast, when Henderson gave a lecture which managed to entwine fervent patriotism and an account of Oliver Cromwell for the university extension the following year, his words were greeted with ‘cheers’. The reporter enthused about his ability to ‘depict the great figures of history in a few sentences’.28

Henderson was succeeded in the ‘English’ part of the chair by a person with whom he had much in common, Archibald Thomas Strong. Although Strong was six years younger than Henderson the two were near contemporaries at Oxford, Strong in fact graduating first, in 1897, and Henderson in 1898. Both were ardent race patriots who poured their lives into education and the imperial cause, yet it is Strong who is one of the dominant personalities in this history, not because of his wit and longevity (as with Murdoch), nor his personal warmth and scholarship (as with MacCallum), but because of the theatrical passion of his conservatism and imperialism. He was regarded as an outstanding lecturer, on at least one occasion electrifying his adult audience with the declaration that he believed in the existence of the devil!

Strong’s father, HA Strong, was professor of classical and comparative philology and logic at Melbourne from 1871 to 1884, and sometime teacher of English literature there. AT Strong spent his adolescence in England after Strong senior was appointed to the chair of Latin at Liverpool, and attended Sedbergh school in northern England (as did H Montgomery Hyde). This school, which even today advertises itself

128as a ‘stern nurse of men’,29 was then a place at which ‘he went through a training Spartan even beyond the wont of English public schools’ (Bald, ‘Sir Archibald Strong’, 104). Bald notes that, through his father, Strong was able to meet well-known scholars such as AC Bradley, Walter Raleigh and Oliver Elton, each of whom held the chair of English at Liverpool. In the words of his application for the Jury Chair,

In 1901 Strong gave up his study for the bar because of ill-health, and returned to Melbourne.

Strong became a teacher and examiner in secondary schools and a lecturer in the university extension movement. He was an active member of various organisations and discussion groups, particularly those concerned with literature, philosophy and theatre. In 1912 he was appointed to a lectureship in English at Melbourne, and was acting professor from 1916 to 1919. He applied for chairs at Western Australia (1912), Sydney (1921), and Adelaide (1922), succeeding in the latter application after being second to Murdoch in Perth and third to Brereton at Sydney. There had been six English applicants for the Adelaide chair and seven from Australia, including Stable of Queensland and ‘Miss E. Denham’ [sic].31 The latter, the first application

129I have found by a woman for a professorial position, was in fact Enid Derham, an outstanding student of Tucker’s who had taken firsts in classics and modern languages at Melbourne. She spent a short time teaching at Western Australia with Murdoch before becoming the first woman appointed to the department of English at Melbourne in 1922. She lectured there until 1941 and was acting professor in 1938 – the first woman in Australia to obtain a professorial position in English literature.32

Like many of his colleagues, including Brereton, MacCallum and Tucker, Strong wrote poetry, which he first published while very young.33 His work is distinguished mainly by sustained imperial sentiment, although this was not especially noted by reviewers. Rather, the general tenor of assessments is that, although the poems are mechanically very good, they lack spontaneity; the prevailing opinion is summed up by the cutting praise offered by the reviewer in the Daily Mail, that Strong’s work was ‘immaculately academic’.34 In regard to criticism, idealism

Strong’s academic specialities were Elizabethan and Romantic writers, and he had a particular interest in Swinburne. That said, his interests were broad: he also translated Beowulf, and completed a project begun by Wallace on the history of English literature. HM

130Green has suggested that because Strong ‘was a fine lecturer and a man of considerable personal charm … his work has sometimes been overrated by those who knew him’ (A History of Australian Literature, 712). On the other hand, RC Bald claimed that Strong was ‘certainly the most widely read man in Australia’, not least because of his command of French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as Latin and Greek (Bald, Memoir, 7, 8). AA Phillips felt Strong had a significant influence on students, because of ‘the infectious zestfulness of his loves for literature and for living’, and because ‘he felt less at home with his scholarly colleagues than with the bohemian artists and writers whom he met over the chianti flasks at Fasoli’s restaurant’ ([Self-titled essay] 45; see also John Arnold). These accounts are at odds with the severe persona which seems to emerge from Strong’s published work, notably his lectures on the war.

Strong was able to put his views through his work as literary critic for another Melbourne paper, The Herald, for fifteen years. His weekly essays were mainly on works by or about English writers from all periods, with fewer on other European literatures, and occasional essays on general topics: drama and the Melbourne theatre scene; piracy; pugilism; horror; and the British navy. The breadth of his reading across modern English, French, German and Russian literature is demonstrated in the scope of these essays which, like Murdoch’s ‘Books and Men’, function as reviews and digests of recent works of literature and criticism. In a review headed ‘Pirates and Saints’, for example, his last for the newspaper, Strong looks at The Pirates’ Who’s Who by Philip Goss, Tolstoy by Janko Lavrin, and Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf. The first book rated five enthusiastic paragraphs, while the second – bearing in mind that Strong was a devotee of Russian literature – rated just two, as did the work by Woolf. There are few references in the essays to Australian literature but there is evidence that he kept abreast of new publications by leading writers, particularly local ones.

By far the most persistent of Strong’s non-literary topics was the history and glory of British imperialism, his particular hero being Alfred. In an essay on the beginnings of imperialism he argues that ‘we must regard the wise and heroic King of Wessex not only as the man 131who deepened England’s faith and learning, drove the Danes into the sea after many a glorious victory, and founded his country’s navy, but also as the foreshadower of her vast Imperial policy’.35 This imperialism shaped not only Strong’s political activities but his reading of literary texts: he goes on to claim that writers of the English renaissance ‘were as fully seized of the Imperial Idea in their own day as Lords Milner and Curzon are in our own’.36 Moving to a stately full speed, Strong argues that:

Strong was emphatic that the military and cultural tie with Britain was the essential element of Australian life. His public activities, the broad reach of his reading, and his easy Europeanism mark him as a product of the idealist thinking associated with TH Green and Oxford, but this seems to have been submerged, in his published work at least, by imperial passions.

Although there is a demonstrable conservation in his criticism and other writing, several of Strong’s essays deal with Oscar Wilde and, interestingly, express no distaste or disregard for the writer or his work. There might have been empathy because Wilde had been a resident of Strong’s college, Magdalen, and taken the same course; Wilde’s trials of April and May 1895 would have been in the news when Strong was

132a student at Liverpool, but it is difficult to imagine they were lost as topics of discussion at Wilde’s old college a year or two later. Perhaps on the basis of this, or some more personal knowledge, Strong laid bold claim to the Irish writer in his review essay on Laurence Housman’s Echo de Paris. Noting that the play deals with Wilde’s time in Paris, after his release from Reading gaol, ‘living in poverty and disgrace’, Strong comments that

Another very sympathetic essay on Wilde, which mentions the encounter between Wilde and André Gide in Algiers, was published the next year.

After he had twice been rejected for military service, Strong worked obsessively to promote Australian participation in the First World War. He described his efforts in his application for the Jury Chair:

Strong was highly critical of those who had not supported Australia’s participation, and in his essay ‘Facts to be Faced’ argued that the country ‘would be stronger and cleaner if it were purged of these people’s presence’ (Australia and the War, 54). In ‘Self and the State’ (in the same collection) he demanded that the ‘seditious aliens’ who were ‘a menace to our national honour’ be ‘stamped out utterly from among us’ so that Australia could remain ‘a clean and decent nation’ (70). (Strong was not actually proposing extermination here – he suggested that those who were against Australian participation in the war be deported to the United States.) More significant, perhaps, is that such information was thought, at least by Strong, to be a credential in an application for a chair of English. The claims signal clearly the divide which opened, in the wake of both wars, between those who placed primary value on having sacrificed advancement in their academic career in order to engage in some kind of service, and those who continued their study and teaching. We might wonder whether Strong was aware that at Adelaide, both the numbers of German students and the intensity of anti-German sentiment seem to have been higher than at any other Australian university.

Strong made reference in his propaganda to the consequence of defeat for England. In an essay with the title ‘Life and Death’, he suggested that it ‘might conceivably mean the subjugation of herself to the race of devils who have just been perpetrating unnameable atrocities upon Belgian boys and women’ (22). His metaphor of the rise and fall of the nation calls forth, as Dowling argues it must, the image of a male polity whose integrity and security are constantly under threat from effeminacy. This highly sexualised division lies at the heart of Strong’s imperial rhetoric and, I would argue, the discipline of English in many of its most influential configurations, notably the bifurcation of scholarship and teaching. For while England itself is feminised,

134‘the great country which is the Mother of [our] being’, the exercise of imperial or military power is a strictly masculine affair. For Strong, then, in his essays in Australia and the War, the rhetoric of valour is emphatically masculine, disloyalty obsessively female:

Femininity could be astonishingly mobile as a pejorative – in Story of the Anzacs, Strong described the ideology of the socialist party in Melbourne as being made up of ‘feminism, anti-militarism, general faddism, and everything except true socialism’ (11). In his reply to Bernard O’Dowd’s address to the Melbourne Literary Society on ‘Poetry Militant’, Strong argued that the poetry of ‘passion, patriotism, and nature’ was at least equal, if not superior, to the poetry of social concern: ‘Is poetry, a queen in her own right, to abdicate and to become the kitchen slut of science and socialism? I think not.’39 (Perhaps surprisingly Strong was accorded a ‘hearty vote of thanks’ by his hearers at the socialist club on at least one occasion, and seems to have addressed the group regularly.40)

135Elsewhere, writing on ‘Women and the War’, Strong sought to remind women that ‘by virtue of their sex they [were] the first guardians of civilisation’ (Australia and the War, 73). He is caught in the logical dilemma that marks not only his imperialism, but English studies: women are everywhere, as novelists, poets, students, quiet researchers, unexpected applicants, strong characters in drama and fiction, even monarchs, giving their names to two of the most studied periods of English literature, the Elizabethan and the Victorian. ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women were regarded as the natural producers of culture. They contributed hugely to imaginative writing and, as the larger body of readers, arbitrated upon literary taste’; fear of effeminacy is therefore pervasive in the discipline, and its status also permanently diminished by the high proportion of women students and academics (relative to other disciplines). This ‘effeminacy’

Fear of feminisation, coupled with the use of effeminacy as a term of denigration, runs through criticism, reviewing, and biography for decades. This prevalence suggests that it is doing valuable ego work for those who produce it – that it is something more significant in understanding the structuring values of the discipline than ‘a product of its time’. But there might have been other reasons for Strong’s obsession with German perfidy.

As Frank Turner notes, ‘From the [eighteen-]twenties on, British students, scholars, and clergymen visited Germany and studied German philosophy, theology, science, philology, and classical scholarship’ (The Greek Heritage, 105). Intellectual, cultural and personal links between 136Germany and a number of scholars working in Australia were strong: MacCallum’s wife was German, he himself had studied at Berlin and Leipzig for two-and-a-half years, during which time Germany became, in his words, his ‘spiritual home’. Likewise, Holme spent time at Berlin in 1905, and his papers in the Sydney archives suggest personal connections. E Vaughan Boulger spent time studying in Germany, as did Stable, who also taught there. Morris studied at a German university and taught in Berlin, while Cowling was lecturing at Hamburg in the year immediately prior to the outbreak of war. Even Strong’s application for the chair noted his specialising in German philosophy, although it did not include the information that after graduating from Oxford he had spent some months at Marburg.41 Germany was the epicentre of higher education and intellectual thought as they were understood in the west throughout the nineteenth century, even if, towards the end of that period, the German higher education system had felt itself besieged by proliferating specialisation, an influx of middle-class and foreign students, and the proposed admission of women (Mazón, 5).

Britain declared war on Germany in early August 1914 and troops engaged in combat later that month. From late 1914 Strong launched a series of ferocious attacks on German society, but no anti-German sentiments had been expressed in his work before the outbreak of the First World War – in fact, his review essays frequently touched on works of German literature and criticism. The vilification occurs first in an essay published on 14 November 1914, in which Strong declared that ‘the depth of moral and intellectual degradation attained at German Universities can hardly be conceived by those educated in free and civilised foundations’ (Australia and the War, 25). He went on to discuss the work of Kuno Meyer, a German specialist in Celtic literature and his next essay, ‘Kuno and “Kultur”’, was devoted almost entirely to documenting Meyer’s ‘treachery’. Meyer was pilloried as a ‘learned and unscrupulous foe of England’ and Strong reiterated the accusation,

137made in the previous essay, that Meyer’s visits to Ireland had been made in order to encourage anti-British feeling. Some thirty years before, Meyer had co-authored a history of German language with HA Strong, when the two were colleagues at Liverpool (Meyer had also received an honorary DLitt from Oxford in 1911). Strong the younger seems to have whipped himself into a frenzy over his father’s ‘collaboration’, and perhaps over his own dense network of connections to Germany. But if this is the case, then the invective is at odds with that personal loyalty Strong clearly values when discussing Wilde in Paris (see also Bald, Memoir, 12) – although it is possible that he felt betrayed by Meyer’s own sympathy for Germany and for Ireland.

For academics like Henderson, Murdoch and Strong, passionate nationalist and imperial sentiments were by no means incompatible. The argument that an imperial parliament should be established in London, to which colonial representatives should be sent, was an old one: EE Morris, in his lecture Imperial Federation given in Melbourne in 1885, had stated that he regarded this as the most important question facing Britain at that time. Morris’ lecture was delivered at the first public meeting of Melbourne’s imperial federation league. In the twentieth century there were attempts to give greater impetus to the idea through the formation of a quasi-clandestine organisation called the Round Table, established in London by young men who had served under Milner in South Africa. Its aim was to promote imperial federation by influencing the agendas of legislative, educational, religious and economic organisations. Milner, a student of Jowett, had been high commissioner and governor of the Cape Colony during what was termed by the British the Boer War. Leonie Foster describes him as ‘a dedicated British race patriot’: ‘obsessed by the Christian moral righteousness of the civilizing mission to the empire’s subject races, he was determined to prevent any decline in British supremacy. His imperial patriotism was his religion, his hell a disintegration of the Empire’ (8).42

138The Round Table, its name evoking Arthurian legend, eventually had branches in South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while the journal of the same name was published until the 1980s. The Melbourne and Sydney branches were the last to disband, with meetings held in these two cities until the 1970s. Although the all-male organisation and its objectives were widely known, the names of members were not; among those listed by Foster as members in Australia are MacCallum, Holme, Henderson, Strong, Murdoch and William Mitchell. Only the departments of English at Tasmania (where there was no branch) and Queensland (where the group was dominated by members of the clergy) were not represented among the foundation Round Tablers, who were generally prominent in political, patriotic, commercial and educational institutions.

Given the density of the networks of urban professional men in Australia, a single individual could wield considerable influence. For example, Walter Murdoch was central to the formation of the Melbourne branch, joined the Perth group on his arrival, and was a close associate of another Round Tabler, Herbert Brookes. Through his friendship with Brookes, Strong and others, connections were formed with a number of important figures in Melbourne society whom Murdoch later recruited for the Round Table. Two literary and political groups to which Murdoch belonged were the ‘Boobooks’ and the Brown Society. The Boobooks – who referred to each other as such, as in ‘Arch-Boobook Strong’ – dined together and discussed matters from literature to politics. The Brown Society met at the home of Herbert and Ivy Brookes to discuss the work of TE Brown, later becoming a general literary gathering whose members included leading Melbourne figures such as Brookes, Ernest Scott, Robert Garran, Alfred Deakin and Bernard O’Dowd. For these intellectual elites, the support of imperial federation reflected their desire to retain their connection to empire – in one sense, it was a means of rejecting, not embracing, their status as ‘colonials’ – but they sought equality with, rather than separation from, Britain. The inculcation of a form of nationalism that buttressed (rather than opposed) imperialism was pursued in South Australian schools in 1936, when the following 139material was included in the student magazine The Children’s Hour:

These remarks come from Murdoch’s school primer The Australian Citizen, that had been published nearly a quarter of a century earlier. As Murdoch’s argument implies, the distinction between imperial and colonial becomes crucial in this period: ‘imperialism’ implies emotional and cultural links between the metropolitan centre and its colonies, rather than exploitative economic ones – not subordination, but partnership, for displaced English men.

Members of the Round Table ‘believed in education as a “civilising force”’, and used university extension and worker education movements to promote and disseminate imperialism (Foster, 55). The aims of the Sydney extension movement, for example, were (in their own words)

Morris, MacCallum, Holme, Strong and Henderson were involved in the extension movement, surely convinced of its value in spreading the imperial message. And we should not assume that the kind of imperialist sentiment we see in Murdoch’s prose, recycled in 1936, was unusual. A Queensland school inspector writing during the war observed that in his jurisdiction, 140

The frankly assimilationist aims of such teaching were articulated even more clearly by one of Farrell’s colleagues, probably referring to the northern part of the state where there was a significant community of people from Mediterranean countries, including Italy and Spain:

But as Foster notes, it was probably in universities

Needless to say, in many cases the students at university assumed key roles such as that of school teacher, school inspector, publisher, or

141writer, and Round Table members were active in the formal codification of knowledge about Australia and its culture in other ways. Arthur Wilberforce Jose, a reader for Angus and Robertson and an editor of their Australian Encyclopedia (1925), was a member of the organisation, and it was possibly he who arranged for AT Strong to write the article on ‘Literature’. Strong was also the author of the essay on ‘Cultural Development’ for The Cambridge History of the British Empire; the Australian section of that work was edited by Ernest Scott, a Round Table member. It is surely no coincidence that sixteen of the twenty-three essays in the Australian section were written by fellow Round Tablers. In his essay on ‘Cultural Development’, Strong pre-empted Cowling in suggesting that the landscape was a hindrance to literature in Australia:

This quotation sums up the anxieties about the ‘broken and incomplete’ succession, the disrupted paternity of Englishness – or is it failure in the duty of maternal care, as ER Holme would have it? – that academics sought to repair through their teaching and criticism.