In the context of considering influential figures, formations and institutions I have argued that some people, places or ideas develop a disproportionate authority as others – just as disproportionately – lose authority. In the interwar period, English institutions like Oxford began fundamentally to transform themselves from national to international institutions, and to increase the emphasis given to research. This change involved a kind of broadening of horizons, and placed new pressures on disciplines to answer questions that might seem almost painfully exposing: for example, what would ‘research’ in English literature look like? How might one teach and test this subject at postgraduate level?

In one sense, this reconfiguring, along with later twentieth-century debates about a ‘crisis’ in the discipline, reflect a failure to grasp a large nettle: to state, to believe in, and to institute teaching and testing practices which reflect the sheer difficulty of textual interpretation as a practice; and to state, to believe in, and to institute teaching and testing practices which identify cognate areas of knowledge which validly underpin that research and teaching. While it might seem obvious that proponents of English could reasonably declare it ‘a training in the capacity to read complex texts’, more often critics have sought what seems like moral shelter in neighbouring disciplines, philosophy and foreign languages being the most favoured sources of ‘rigour’. Unsurprisingly, then, just as there were heated debates in England about the teaching of English, there have been heated debates in Australia about teaching Australian literature, debates in which collective anxiety about intellectual credentials is palpable.

This chapter considers the early history of the teaching of Australian literature in Australian universities. But we might keep in mind the earlier 227chapters, and implicitly compare the respective fates of two national literatures, in an attempt to understand why it could be thought that while teaching one group of texts, Australian, was an act of barbarism, not teaching another group (English) equally was thought the mark of an impoverished culture. The chapter will then move on to consider the careers of a collection of those often termed poets and professors, AD Hope, Vincent Buckley and James McAuley, before concluding with a discussion of Commonwealth, later postcolonial literature, into which Australian literature has been and is usually subsumed, particularly when taught overseas.

‘dangerous work’: The Meanjin Debate

Into the 1970s, and perhaps later in some places, an interest in Australian literature was more or less perceived as the equivalent to having a ‘tragic flaw’, as AC Bradley would argue of Shakespeare’s heroes of the tragedies. Outstanding students in the second half of the twentieth century were generally directed into work that mattered, like Shakespeare studies, or later, theory: fields in which a high-tensile masculine mind could be stretched to its limit. In fact, research in Australian literature had long been conducted: George Barton’s history of the literature of New South Wales was published in 1868 when Barton was on the staff at Sydney, as noted. But it is notable that Brian Kiernan reaches page thirty-seven of his forty-seven-page history of criticism of Australian literature before discussing any other work written by an academic working in an English department. On the other hand, continued insistence that Australian literature has been excluded from the academy has meant that the history of the debate about its entrance to the universities has been obscured. This section begins by reinserting that early history, which helps to position participants in debates about the teaching of the subject that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, debates that have received more attention.

In most cases, advocates of the study of Australian literature in the academy were either students or junior members of staff, like Murdoch at Melbourne, whose lack of control over curriculum and higher subjects restricted the field’s development. Some formal study 228of Australian literature might have been done overseas, repeating the pattern of English literature. In 1934 the professor of English Language and Literature at Bonn, Gustav Hübener (a former student of Edmund Husserl), travelled to Australia. George Mackaness, in his essay on Australian literature in The Age, says that the journey was to make contact with writers, and to buy books for the course of lectures in Australian and Canadian literatures he had established. Another source suggests that Hübener was planning to write a book about ‘empire literature’ – that of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa – with Jean Hamilton, his co-researcher and co-teacher at Bonn (Simmonds, Series 3). It may be that this interest was generated by Hamilton (who married Hübener in 1938). A West Australian, she had taken a first-class degree in languages at UWA in 1926, and a PhD from Bonn in 1931, going on to have a distinguished academic career teaching German in the north America after the couple had sought refuge there in the late 1930s (Simmonds, Biographical Sketch).

Nettie Palmer notes that during his week in Melbourne Hübener joined her for a discussion of Australian literature on the radio (Her Private Journal, 135–36); Vance Palmer, in his Age essay, claimed that Hübener was the only academic to attend the unveiling of a memorial to Joseph Furphy held around the same time. But the negative pressures of the academy seem to have been considerable: in a letter to the American critic Hartley Grattan, Miles Franklin claimed that after just one week in the hands of the staff at Sydney, Hübener ‘had thrown over his own point of view and echoed the tepid and general anaemia of the University crowd’ (Roe, 315). Whether Hübener really had changed his opinions in the course of seven days or was merely trying to be polite is unclear; I have not been able to find other evidence of his interest in the field, and he died suddenly in 1940. It would seem that Jean Hamilton did not pursue her research in comparative literature, instead pursuing a project on academic responses to Nazism that was never completed.

Although a number of people claim to have pioneered the study and teaching of Australian and Commonwealth literature in the period after the Second World War, the subject established by Hamilton and Hübener would have been the first official one if it were ever taught. 229That said, it is also evident that FW Robinson at Queensland, Enid Derham at Melbourne, Brian Elliott at Adelaide, Brereton and HM Green at Sydney, and Joyce Eyre at Tasmania all taught at least some Australian literature in universities in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. It is likely that during this period, these and other academics supervised honours theses in the field, although Deirdre Moore recalls being told by a disbelieving AJA Waldock that there was ‘so little there’ that her intellectual capacities would be wasted if she were to write a thesis on Australian literature (92). The contours of honours study, although central to academic training, are difficult to trace as there are few details of subjects and theses are often not kept except by supervisors – a disaster for historians. Nevertheless, the evidence that does survive suggests that a more flexible, unit-based curriculum, in conjunction with the option for research on a topic chosen by the student, facilitated concentration on Australian subjects at that level – evidence that student interest could respond to local concerns in defiance of the protocols of the discipline.

Frederick Walter Robinson was largely responsible for the development of research and teaching of Australian literature at Queensland. Robinson joined the university in 1923 as a lecturer, after having been unsuccessful in his application for the chair advertised at that time. He was one of a handful of scholars of his era to complete a PhD but evidently found it difficult to obtain a permanent academic position (Robinson). As with others at the time, his appointment to Queensland came after an intervention from a senior politician, who recommended Robinson on the basis of his service in the First World War. And like AK Thomson, late in his career Robinson seems to have felt disappointment with the lack of recognition given to his seniority in the university.

Robinson’s work included the creation and expansion of the library of Australian literature named after Denis Fryer, a former soldier and English honours student who died early in 1923.1 And again like AK Thomson, Robinson was highly regarded as a teacher of Australian

230literature; one former student remarked that many of his lectures demonstrated his fascination with Aboriginal bora rings.2 During 1946 he gave lectures in Australian literature at Sydney and New England, and in 1948 applied for study leave to complete a massive research project on ‘Australian literature to 1850’. He planned to ‘deal especially with the growth of “Australian” ideas, and of writings pertaining to Australia beginning from the theories of Antipodeanism held by Greek geographers’.3 Robinson’s application evinces some urgency and hints at an awareness of a ‘rival’ project being undertaken, probably HM Green’s History of Australian Literature – although this was to cover very different ground, being a reference work.

Although Robinson looked to antiquity in investigating the idea of the antipodes, in his application for research leave he emphasised the need for detailed study of the history and culture of Australia and stressed the significance of colonisation:

Robinson planned a series of publications: a book on Australian literary history 1788–1850; a companion anthology covering the same period; reprints, with critical introductions and notes, of the work of Alexander Harris (including his Convicts and Settlers), Barron Field, Charles Tompson and Charles Harpur (complete works), as well as studies of early magazines and of ‘Imagined Voyages to Terra Australis Incognita’. The application was approved but no publications ever appeared – and indeed, it is hard to imagine how the projects could have been completed without years of full time work. Only in the late 1980s did a

231range of publications on nineteenth-century Australian writing began to appear that match Robinson’s ambition.4

Scholarship in Australian literature was strong at Sydney during Brereton’s tenure in the Challis chair (1922–33); librarian HM Green was the leading historian of the subject, although it would be decades before his History was published. Both Brereton and Green delivered lectures on the subject to undergraduates, Wesley Milgate recalling Brereton’s lectures on the poetry of Brennan (Riddell). ‘A letter from Kylie Tennant’s husband, LC Rodd, describes attending a series of lectures by Green on Australian literature as part of the English courses in 1930, and it is hardly likely that this was a single instance’ (Green and Burchill, 65).5 However Australian literature was not listed in the university’s calendar, and no textbooks are listed before 1940. At this point it comprised a section of the first-year subject, and so lectures might have preceded the setting of texts by many years. It is possible that these were not a formal part of the syllabus but were the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) lectures, discussed briefly below.6 At Tasmania the study of Australian literature was begun by Joyce Eyre, who was appointed to the university in the mid 1940s (see Spaulding). A press clipping from the Sun in 1946 noted that Eyre had visited Melbourne in order to buy books, and to arrange for visitors to give CLF lectures in Hobart (Visitor Here).

In Adelaide, Brian Elliott was designated lecturer in Australian Literature in 1940, and thus had the first specialist academic position in the subject. Elliott established a section on Australian literature in the first-year subject, which had a general introduction and then dealt with fiction, literary journalism and Australian language, as well as poetry;

232a similar pattern was followed at other universities. A decade before, though, at Melbourne in the early 1930s, two Australian texts appear on a course list for English II: Vance Palmer’s novel The Passage and Percival Serle’s An Australian Anthology.7 It is likely that, as at Sydney, some Australian literature was studied even earlier than this, but lecture notes for English II from the late 1920s on the Oxford Book of Australasian Verse also suggest that those who taught it in this period – Enid Derham and (later) HG Seccombe – were at best ambivalent about its worth. The unknown lecturer quoted by Alexandra Gouldthorpe was prepared to offer some bold hypotheses about why Australian writers had achieved so little:

Apart from poverty, ignorance and dipsomania, the lecture notes refer to the ‘problem’ that many writers lacked a classical education and an audience that was ‘cultivated and sympathetic’; an additional impediment was nature, which had to be struggled against. However, the lecturer was prepared to suggest that Australian literature was important because it was an expression of the local culture and landscape.

The particular sensitivities and insecurities which surrounded the teaching of Australian literature at universities surfaced perhaps most fully in a forum run by the journal Meanjin some two decades after The Age debate. It is a marker of other kinds of changes, notably the expansion of the universities and perhaps the increasing prominence of the opposition between creative writing and academic criticism, that the topic should be the rather more specific ‘Australian literature and the Universities’. The main contributors were all professors of

233English, and heads of their respective departments. The participants in this debate registered the same unease about the subject that marks the work of the first holders of the chair at Sydney. And like George Cowling they avoided the issue of teaching, although they differed from him in seeming to think it impossible to take issue with the proposal that Australian literature should be taught. They deflected questions about the implications of such study for pedagogy and criticism by taking up the ostensibly bureaucratic question of where in the degree such a subject should fit.

The question of introducing a separate subject in Australian literature had been raised by Bruce Sutherland in 1950, in a brief essay that gave details of his course in ‘Dominions Literature’ at Pennsylvania State University. Sutherland cautiously advocated the study of Australian literature: like Hübener and Hamilton before him, he was in the position of teaching a literature that was not a formal subject of study in its own country. Sutherland reiterated his argument in 1952, like so many attempting to steer between the Scylla of standards and the Charybdis of local relevance. His second essay concluded with the suggestion that universities should receive extra funding to develop subjects, a suggestion never likely to be unpopular however devilish the detail of where and by whom those subjects should be taught.

In the intervening year Geoffrey Serle had published a brief note that described the amount of Australian literature being studied at the universities. Although Serle claimed that some Australian texts were being taught in all Australian universities except New South Wales, he was perhaps misled by his informants. In fact most of the ‘courses’ trotted out were the CLF lectures thinly disguised, although attendance at them was compulsory for students in some institutions. Even the most serious commitment to Australian literature was strictly limited: at Tasmania it was an option in third year; at Queensland, poetry was a special subject in English I. Only Melbourne was unapologetic about its lack of interest: ‘a few Australian novels and poems are included in one of the four pass subjects, though only incidentally’. The comment is significant because it demonstrates that the inclusion of Australian texts cannot be taken as a sign of institutional ‘success’ in research and teaching of the subject, a 234point that was made at the time (see Hutchinson, 20). In the same way, having a separate course in a particular field can be counter-productive if it is positioned institutionally so as to exclude particular groups of students.

Sutherland’s arguments about Australian literature were taken up by Allan Edwards, who around this time travelled to the United States to lecture on Australian literature.9 Reflecting a classically Leavisite alertness to educational policy and pedagogy, Edwards drew attention to the way in which essays, examinations and secondary school curricula could be positively influenced by proponents of Australian literature, as well as describing the way in which the CLF lectures had been integrated into the regular coursework of English students at Western Australia. Clem Christesen urged further consideration of the ideas discussed by Edwards in his editorial in the same issue, being critical of what he saw as ignorance of and even active hostility towards Australian literature. Like Franklin and Edwards, Christesen understood that proposals for teaching the local literature raised questions about the methods and purpose of literary study:

235Christesen, along with Miles Franklin one of the most passionate, persistent and articulate advocates for the teaching and criticism of Australian literature, repeatedly wrote privately to academics expressing these kinds of views, berating them for neglecting Australian literature (see Strahan; Armstrong).

When Christesen decided to have a forum and wrote to solicit contributions from heads of department in January 1954, Edwards was more reluctant to express his views. He replied suggesting that Christesen ask a proponent of the study of Australian literature to outline the case against the universities, or failing this, for the Meanjin editor himself to formulate a set of questions that contributors could answer. Edwards claimed that at UWA ‘we’ve grown used to the idea of Australian literature as a subject of study’, but admitted that the subject had a low profile. This problem he attributed to ‘the dullness and mediocrity of most Australian writing’, particularly when compared to contemporary work from the United States and England.10 However he was obviously keen to see the subject discussed and about three weeks later wrote to Christesen again, suggesting a means of generating debate:

236In the end, contributions were made without this ‘red rag’, but the remark gives an indication of the low status of Canberra University College and perhaps also of Inglis Moore, who, for the purposes of staffing, was to be designated ‘Senior Lecturer in Australian Literature’.

As professor and head of the department at CUC, the institution at which the subject in Australian literature was being proposed, it was logical that the first contribution to the forum would be made by AD Hope. Hope stated his agreement with those who have ‘a vague feeling that Australian literature is not good enough or that it is not well enough established as a separate branch of literature, or again, that there is not yet enough of it to justify its having a course to itself’ (166). He did not directly take issue with Edwards, nor even mention his contribution, simply stating that Australian literature should be studied, as an adjunct to English literature. It should only be available to those students who had already studied or were studying ‘one of the major world literatures, preferably that of England’ (169). Hope summarily dismissed the possibility of establishing a major in Australian literature: ‘the man who graduates BA honours (Aust. Lit.), would be like a doctor setting out to practise medicine after having dissected the knee and the liver’ (167). A letter to the registrar at Melbourne reveals Hope’s concern that the teaching of Australian literature not ‘go too far’ on his watch:

Although the letter is unsigned, the reference to ‘our subjects’ is one of several indications that it is from Hope.

237The most significant aspect of this letter is the point that the subject in Australian writing should ‘never make one part of a major in English’: students could not gain credit for its study as literature in English. A letter written about a decade later, shortly after Inglis Moore retired, offers further insight into Hope’s views and confirms his reluctance about the subject of teaching Australian literature:

Unsurprisingly, the eventual ‘replacement’ for Inglis Moore was not a specialist in Australian literature – far from it. George Russell’s field was early English literature and language. When the question arose of the designation of Hope’s own chair, Hope indicated that ‘I should prefer Chair of Modern English Literature’, the duties to include ‘general oversight of English literature from the Renaissance onwards, including other branches such as Australian and American literature.’ Far from being a strong institutional supporter of the subject, then, as is so often claimed, this evidence suggests that Hope exerted strict control over the development of the study of Australian literature, first at CUC and then at the ANU. He moved to quarantine the subject from English literature in the degree structure and, ten years later, to assimilate Australian texts into courses on English literature without comment, and to do away with the specialist teaching position.

In the following issue of Meanjin, AN Jeffares (Adelaide) and Wesley Milgate (Sydney) replied to Hope’s comments. Both began their essays by pointing out at some length that their own departments were active in the study of Australian literature, and both noted that they

238had recently moved ‘the section on Australian literature’ (i.e. the CLF lectures) from the first-year course to the third-year one, on the grounds that it was best matched with nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature. Milgate explained his rationale for this change in more detail:

Like Hope, Milgate was concerned about the potentially damaging effects of studying Australian literature and believed it was essential for students to become familiar with English literature first: ‘I do not think, as some critics of universities seem to think, that this can be regarded as an un-Australian activity’.

There was unanimity between Hope, Milgate and Jeffares on the point that knowledge of English literature was an essential prerequisite to study of any other literature in English, on the grounds that it was ‘parent’. However, Milgate and Jeffares clearly disagreed with Hope about the difficulties of including Australian literature in the existing English courses, although only Jeffares took up the argument explicitly. He claimed that Hope’s objections to including Australian literature in current courses were neither ‘valid [nor] even realistic’, but at the same time suggested that the most appropriate place for the extended study of Australian literature was outside universities completely (434). The universities should be left to the task of fostering ‘a greater historical sense, a stronger understanding of the continuous process of transmission and conservation so necessary to the growth and development of a culture’ (435). This approach is grounded in a radical separation of criticism from literature: literature worthy of study is by definition that which lies at a distance. (Temporal distance underpins respectability – old literature is reliable – whereas geographical distance underpins a lack of respectability.) Jeffares’ view was that undergraduate courses should include ‘a minimum of Australian literature, for stimulus 239purposes’. Remarkably, given these arguments, Jeffares then concluded with the assertion that Australian studies were ‘bound to become an integral part of English studies in this country in the future’, entirely contradicting the rest of his essay. He also drew attention to Hope’s error in claiming that the ANU was the first university to offer Australian literature, although he did not correct Hope’s other mistake, that the course had been offered not by the ANU, but by CUC.

There was no formal contribution to the Meanjin forum from George Russell at Queensland. Although willing to contribute, Russell was cautious about putting his ideas about the Queensland department so early on in his tenure as professor. But his views are expressed in a letter to Colin Roderick written around the same time which outlines ‘arrangements for teaching Australian Literature’. He notes that at Queensland the subject was being taught at first- and third-year levels, mainly the former:

There was also said to be an attempt to give students a sense of the history of Australian literature. In these respects, the approaches at Queensland were quite different and far more positive. This might be explained by the fact that whereas at other universities there had occasionally been individuals interested in the field, at Queensland there was continuity. Interest in Commonwealth literature and comparative approaches were fostered by Russell’s successor AC Cawley, as well as by

240the holding of the 1968 ACLALS conference for which a reading group in Commonwealth literature was convened.15

The final, brief contributions to the Meanjin debate were made by Vance Palmer and E Morris Miller, neither of whom was an academic in the field although both had made significant contributions to it. Palmer ‘admitted’, though with some hint of sarcasm, that it would not be possible to reduce the current offerings – ‘English literature, with its abundance, its comprehensiveness, its Gothic atmosphere is a world in itself’ (591). In defiance of all but Jeffares he proposed that literature be established as part of an Australian studies major, so that it could be considered in relation to its social and historical context. (Such a proposal confirmed the worst fears academic critics had about the incompetence of advocates from outside the university, who did not understand the dangers of the distractions offered by studies of history and society.) Allan Edwards, writing to Christesen to explain his failure to contribute to the later forum, made the following comments that sum up views in the academy about the teaching of Australian literature on any significant scale:

241In reply, Christesen agreed that some of those Edwards mentioned ‘just are not critics: dull, semi-literate clots’. He argued, though, that the academy should take the blame for this:

Forced, in a public forum, to demonstrate commitment to Australian literature, contributors of essays to the Meanjin debate produced arguments riddled with contradictions, which arose because of the conflict between a genuine desire to act on the neglect of Australian literature (or, at least, to be seen to be doing so), and a widely shared belief that the study of the literature of England was and should remain the exclusive concern of the discipline. In terms of degree structures, the choice was seen as being between complete exclusion; confining the study of Australian literature to the postgraduate level; developing a separate subject that might or might not be part of Australian Studies; and including some Australian texts within English literature without any comment. None of the participants in this symposium answered Christesen’s challenge to rethink the discipline in the light of Australian cultural and intellectual conditions. There was lip-service paid to the idea that Australian literature should be studied in Australian universities because it was ‘the chief record of our culture’, as Milgate put it, but all contributors clearly felt that English literature had to be studied because it was the best available. No contributor seriously raised the possibility that the literature of England might, like that of Australia, be grounded in its own history and need to be read and taught in that context, although Vance Palmer’s comment (quoted above) could be read in that way. Those best equipped to think through the issues of locality and theory, Allan Edwards and Vincent Buckley, produced no sustained interrogation. An intellectually easier route was taken: the work of historians (‘sociologists’) was deplored for missing the theoretical

242boat, the walls around the English component of the curriculum were fortified against the barbarians, and advocates of Australian literature faced an unhappy choice between exile or assimilation.

AD Hope in Canberra

Being seen to have participated or driven the inaugurating moment of a field or even a discipline is an important means to academic authority, one that in turn authorises presence at other important forums, other inaugurating moments. In relation to Australian literature, the conventional belief that ‘A.D. Hope began AusLit’ validated his presence at the inaugural conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), where he delivered the keynote address. Hope also delivered the first address as founding President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) in 1967, the first Annual Lecture of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1970, and the first Annual James McAuley Memorial Lecture in 1979.18

Alec Derwent Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales. After spending part of his childhood in Tasmania he attended Leslie House School in Bathurst, and the selective Sydney public high school Fort Street (where James McAuley would later be school captain). He obtained his BA from Sydney as a student of ER Holme and John le Gay Brereton. There he won two university medals, in English and in philosophy, as well as the James King of Irrawang travelling scholarship, which funded his time at Oxford’s University College. Hope returned to Australia in the midst of the Depression and was unemployed, but then spent time as a high school teacher, and worked as a psychologist in the Department of Labour and Industry.19 His first appointment in a

243tertiary institution was as a lecturer in English and education at Sydney Teachers’ College, a position he held from 1937 to 1945. He was then senior lecturer in English at Melbourne, until becoming foundation professor of English at Canberra University College in 1950. On the ‘merger’ of CUC and the ANU in September 1960, he moved to the ANU.20 Hope received a number of honorary LittDs, as well as an AC and an OBE; he published widely as a poet and critic, and was heard on ABC radio as ‘Anthony Inkwell’ in the children’s series The Argonauts. Hope’s memoirs, Chance Encounters, were published in 1992 (see also RF Brissenden, Art).

Former students and colleagues of Hope’s have sought to monumentalise his life and work; others have implicitly challenged these accounts. The battle over his reputation began as early as 1964, at a seminar on Australian literature held at the University of New England, when former Angry Penguins editor Max Harris proposed that the influence and credibility of Hope as a critic and academic would be a proper subject for enquiry. Harris commented at some length on Hope’s work, suggesting that he was ‘a far more complicated and unsatisfactory kettle of fish’ than his colleague McAuley:

If Harris’ opinion needs to be placed in the context of Hope’s vicious reviews of his own work, he is nevertheless not alone in his evaluation. In his doctoral thesis, Alan Lawson has been critical of various aspects of Hope’s work, arguing that Hope’s power ‘depended upon the congruence of his magisterial rhetoric with the publicly perceived need for criticism that was mature, sophisticated, serious, discriminating’, rather than on any single and sustained piece of writing that demonstrated

244those qualities (125). The foci in my discussion of Hope’s work are his essay ‘Standards in Australian Literature’, his inaugural lecture delivered at CUC, and what is perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Australia’. First, however, it is worth noting in a little more detail the circumstances in which Hope came to be associated with the national literature and the national university.

Hope was one of a group of four appointees to chairs at CUC, then a somewhat struggling offshoot of Melbourne. The nature of the agreement between Melbourne and the college forced the latter to go cap in hand every year or two to seek renewal of its agreement to award degrees; academics at the northern outpost were not permitted to offer their own subjects, nor to set exams.21 Hope, then at Melbourne, was in a prime position to obtain the chair not least because of his familiarity with the workings and syllabus of the ‘parent’ institution. Until then the teaching of English had been led by Leslie Allen, who had come so close to the chair at Sydney awarded to Brereton. Allen had been joined by Tom Inglis Moore, who moved from teaching in Pacific studies to English. Allen retired at the end of 1950 and Hope’s appointment to the chair became effective the following day.22

When AD Hope had applied for the chair of English at CUC in 1949 his referee was Ian Maxwell. Maxwell wrote a long letter summing up his view of the applicants; as head at Melbourne his view was likely to carry particular or even decisive weight. In his customarily authoritative fashion, Maxwell writes of one candidate that he (Maxwell) had heard that a second-class result from Oxford had meant he was out of favour in his own institution.23 In contrast, Hope’s own result at Oxford – a third – is at once explained and taken out of the equation. Maxwell merely notes that Hope had walked out of an exam in Gothic. It is an interesting detail, which in one sense seems like a historical fact (although at this distance we cannot know whether or not the claim is true, even if Hope himself has also made it). But if there is a selectivity

245in thinking about the ‘origins’ of the discipline which leaves languages and literatures like Latin and Old Norse venerated, while ‘barbarian’ [Catholic], ‘emotional’ or ‘feminine’ literary ancestors like the Celts are ignored or derided, then both walking out of a paper in Gothic, and dismissing the significance of doing so, become not (or not only) truth claims, but symptoms of critical sensibility. In this moment at least, the action does not matter in the way that walking out of a Latin exam might.

In his letter, Maxwell is adamant that Hope was the most impressive academic of his acquaintance. That was to change with Kramer and Goldberg coming onto the scene, but the endorsement of Hope is so forceful that by the time Maxwell comes to suggest that Hope would be no more than barely competent as an administrator, and probably would not publish much, these seem merely addenda (teaching is not addressed).24 On the matter of publications, Hope himself had been offhand:

Hope’s rival, as far as Maxwell was concerned, was a Melbourne colleague, of whom Maxwell wrote that ‘His knowledge, modesty and integrity are part and parcel of his work. He is at his best with classes, as distinct from audiences – a good teacher rather than an impressive lecturer.’ This presentation of William Scott as a modest and shy man is at odds with the views of Boyce Gibson, professor of philosophy, who likewise wrote for Hope and for Scott, but who described Scott as ‘younger, breezy, immensely energetic, very good company, versatile, to a degree (he is a good actor and has a first rate knowledge of music), he has poise and address, handles people sympathetically and adroitly and

246would develop into an excellent administrator and organizer.’26 The most obvious explanation for this difference of view is just that – difference of view – but it would seem that whereas Hope’s reticence was a virtue, Scott’s was a handicap. A third reference for Hope – shorter, strong, but restrained – came from RM Crawford, who notes that Hope was in the year behind him at Sydney and at Oxford.27

Hope’s rise to the chair was by no means rapid, but being appointed to what was then a small and modest institution was to prove fortuitous. In the postwar period Canberra had a peculiar situation in which the undergraduate-only CUC co-existed with the Australian National University (ANU), an institution whose founders dreamed that its research would drive federal policy as public servants took PhDs and then moved back into administration (see Foster and Varghese). It was one of only a handful of institutions in the world to limit its student body to postgraduates – indeed the aim was to have only doctoral students. It might be thought that in these unusual circumstances – one institution in the relatively small national capital not taking undergraduates, the other not taking postgraduates – a proposed amalgamation would make sense. But it was not sense but sensitivities that seem to have run high, for the different cultures and aims of the two institutions, not to mention differences in funding levels, meant that there were differing and strongly held views about mission and status. Those working at the university were determined to protect their position (and their money); those at the college were alert to insinuations that their research and teaching were of a lower standard. Certainly there were vast differences in function and size: just over 150 CUC staff, compared to nearly 700 at the ANU, although the university had 111 PhD students (that is, around six staff per student!) whilst the college had 665 students (almost the reverse ratio). Only 133 of the CUC students were full time, but the large proportion of part-time students was, to critics, proof that the college

247lacked the quality that was the raison d’être of the national university (Foster and Varghese).

In January 1958 the CUC principal, Herbert (‘Joe’) Burton, had told Hope it was unlikely that a merger would proceed.28 Against this prediction, 1959 saw a shotgun wedding. Thus Hope and his counterpart in history, Manning Clark – who had also come from a senior lectureship at Melbourne – were transferred to chairs at the ANU. The college remained isolated within the ANU as the ‘School of General Studies’ – not, perhaps, a name that suggested reverence or scholarly seriousness. That an awareness of the different histories died hard at the ANU is suggested by a letter from TM Owen, then registrar, to a journalist who, in 1990, erroneously reported that AD Hope had been a staff member at the ANU since 1950.

The ticking off is concluded with the peeved remark that this is not the first time the registrar has had to send such a reminder, making it somewhat ironic that the plaque on the AD Hope Building at the ANU gives his years of work at the university as 1951 to 1968.

Although the influence of various colleagues in literature was clearly important for Hope’s career, notably Maxwell, perhaps it is Burton who played the key role at CUC and at the ANU. Hope’s staff file indicates a close friendship: Burton approves numerous requests for travel and leave, often made close to the departure date (usually the day before); he writes in strong support of some unusual requests, including the extension of a twelve-month study leave period to nearly fifteen months, and he ticks off the then registrar (Owen!) for daring to

248specify the date of return from that leave. This extension, the granting of which contravened the university’s regulations, was done in order that Hope be an ‘academic delegate’ to a conference that Burton himself was attending in Canada. When Hope’s initial five-year appointment at CUC was due for renewal, Burton wrote to the registrar endorsing Hope ‘in the strongest possible terms’. Whilst noting the presence of others, he claimed that ‘Hope’s own work has been mainly responsible for the high standing of the English Department at the present time’, the professor having ‘worked untiringly and unremittingly’ for the department and the college: there was ‘no member of staff whose permanent appointment I would support more readily and wholeheartedly’.30 There is no evidence, in the file, that any other view was sought, and presumably as principal the decision was Burton’s alone.

Among academics, perhaps the most coveted aspect of working in a university is study leave, during which one is relieved of teaching and administration and expected to focus on research. Access to study leave, in turn, underpins publication, the latter the main measure of academic achievement, as JJ Stable indicated in his application for the chair at Queensland. Preparing to apply for study leave in April 1956 soon after his tenure had been renewed (a leave later deferred), Hope wrote to the CUC registrar that ‘Dr Todd’s recent and very thorough report on English teaching in British and American universities relieves me of the obligation I should otherwise have felt to investigate this subject’ whilst on leave, implying that a different project would be developed in any future application.31 But the following year Hope took a different tack after he had been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship, his application for which had been warmly supported by Burton. He wrote to the registrar to inform him that the Fellowship was

249

Todd’s ‘recent and very thorough report’ was forgotten, and the fact that it was Tom Inglis Moore, not Hope, who was establishing the course not mentioned. Nevertheless, Hope received the extension to his leave in order to accommodate the journey to north America.

In the case of Hope’s career, it is clear that standards that are invoked for other candidates, colleagues, and even students are set aside. We see that flexibility in the application of criteria, that subtle infiltration of personal preferences, which permeates Maxwell’s long letter about the candidates for the original appointment to CUC, and which allows Burton to shift position from institutional enforcer to distributor of patronage. The effect of Burton’s support is difficult to gauge, but his patronage was direct, assiduous, and effective, even after the move to the ANU. When Hope retired he was awarded a ‘library fellowship’ on an annual salary of £5000, only fractionally below his salary as a professor. This, in turn, helped to buttress Hope’s authority and achievements within the field of Australian literary studies. And that both Hope and Goldberg were able to have such appointments at ANU signals the wealth of the institution, relative to Australian counterparts.

In his inaugural lecture at Canberra Hope begins by expressing his intention to ‘survey the nature of the subject for which the chair was established’; he goes on to describe problems in teaching, curricula and criticism. He claimed that English studies were ‘in danger of becoming another Tower of Babel’, and suggests that it is necessary to reintegrate the study of the English language with English literature. Although he

250parodied the methods and concerns of language study, Hope seems to conclude that ‘no student at University … can be said to have studied English literature unless he has been taught something of the history of the English language’ (The Study of English, 6). But it is difficult to pin Hope down about values as opinions are forcefully stated and then undercut and/or contradicted. What is defined is the ideal student – one whose ‘own writing shows something of the grace and mastery of prose, the elastic force of fine syntax and that delicate perception of the range and value of words, which have allegedly been his concern in the course of his studies’ (7) – and the ideal teacher, clearly a poet: ‘One cannot teach imaginative insight to the student of English any more than one can teach creative imagination to the artists and the poet. One can only display it and hope that it will catch by a sort of contagion’ (8). And bodies on display were clearly on Hope’s mind: the most consistent feature of the lecture is its boorishly jocular sexism.

Probably the most important publication by Hope, measured in terms of the institutional authority that is the main concern of this book, is his article ‘Standards in Australian Literature’. The essay was first published in the Current Awareness Bulletin in 1956, then revised and reprinted as the lead essay in Grahame Johnston’s Australian Literary Criticism. Amidst generally hostile reviews of the collection, Hope was usually spared: AA Phillips offered a clear-sighted critique that drew attention to the anthology’s narrow agenda, but says that Hope’s essay exhibits his ‘usual intelligence and unpretentious lucidity’ (22). For John Barnes and WM Maidment, Hope’s essay is uncontroversial. The consensus among reviewers seems to be that Hope had said nothing that was not common sense, nor even commonplace, but had said it well. A former colleague was critical of the essay, but years later (see Green, A Lively History).

In the longer version of the ‘Standards’ essay, Hope describes the purpose of literary study as having been ‘to transplant a tradition and to encourage it to take root here, to promote closer ties with the homeland. In other words, it was a sort of missionary enterprise’ (14). But while the metaphor seems to recall Leavisite thinking, Hope also claims that there is ‘very little in the way of a coherent body of literary theory by which 251we may judge books, and no set of rules by which their composition may be judged’ (1). Like many of his contemporaries, Hope is careful to differentiate between the work of Leavis (of which he approves) and that of his followers (of which he does not), and there are specific debts to Leavis and his thinking in the ‘Standards’ essay. For example, Hope argues that universities are the crucial force in constructing (controlling) literary tradition: they are places where ‘scholars devote themselves to the continual reassessment and discussion of the classics of native literature and keep the traditions alive by forming the taste of the reading class who come to them to study the masterpieces’ (2).

The conflict that Hope so often attempts to resolve in his work is not that between England and Australia, although recuperation of English and classical cultures is ostensibly an important part of his intellectual endeavour. Rather, it is a conflict between the authority of the spatial (place, landscape, locality, creative writing) and the authority of the temporal (history, tradition, and the university as guardian of these things). In his ‘Standards’ essay he is critical of the obsession with place in Australian writing, arguing that to speak of what is universally ‘human’ one must transcend the local. But the essay ends with an image from the Australian landscape to explain his understanding of the value of the ‘truly’ ‘great’ writer: there is a description of the summit of Mount Buller rising above the surrounding mountains into the sunlight, into ‘another and altogether different world’, a view that produces ‘an effect of unforgettable majesty and beauty’ (15). Hope is drawn to the landscape to produce a memorable metaphor for literary achievement.

Hope’s feelings about the Australian landscape are clearly complex, and can be explained in part through reference to his affection for classical literature. The spare Mediterranean climate and landscape of some parts of the country brought to mind, for some, the belief that antipodean culture might be made classical in temper. Hope, like Charles Jury, was imbued with a sense of the authority of ‘the classics’, and his best-known poem, ‘Australia’, which has been repeatedly anthologised since the 1950s, can be read as expressing that distinctive version of utopian vision that is informed by nostalgia for classical cultures. The last two verses are frequently quoted or referred to as evidence of Hope’s 252intellectual, sentimental and aesthetic commitment to Australia itself, Geoffrey Serle taking the title of his study of culture in Australia from the last line of the penultimate verse:

To read these lines as an endorsement of Australia society and culture is to forget the earlier references in the poem to ‘drab green and desolate grey’, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’, ‘the rivers of her immense stupidity’, ‘monotonous tribes’, ‘five cities, like five teeming sores’, populated by ‘second-hand Europeans’ who are ‘without songs, architecture, history’. ‘Australia’ can be read as a rejection not of the ‘European civilization’ of the past, but of its contemporary incarnation, the ‘lush jungle of modern thought’. Australia is preferable only because the possibility remains that it will inspire and cause to evolve a culture that is biblical in austerity and grandeur, classical in temper.

The metaphor of Mount Buller, the poem ‘Australia’, and indeed the ‘Standards’ essay itself, reflect the tension between the demands of the local, and those of tradition:

253This final appeal to cultural specificity and to place is undone by the fact that Hope had already declared that ‘the centre of civilization’ lies in England; he gives no sense that civilisation could mean anything other than the culture of Britain and Europe.

There is ultimately a profound and even bitter sense of displacement reflected in Hope’s critical attacks, and particularly in his reviews of the work of fellow creative writers. Hope’s authority raises the question of how he overcame an inauspicious start to his academic career to lay claim to a central place in the study of Australian literature. The first and one of the most important elements is the cultural and social background into which one is born. In Hope’s case, he was at pains to emphasise the value of the literary education gained in his father’s library, and he has documented the importance of his immersion, as a child, in ‘all the English poets’. He suggests that this formed a lasting element of his ideas and assumptions about culture and place, ideas developed ‘on an island [Tasmania] thirteen thousand miles away from the sources of the tradition in which I had been educated’ (Teaching, 160; see also his Meet Nurse!).

Bourdieu suggests that social capital also accrues through personal links and through a kind of cross-fertilisation. Not only does capital in one aspect of one’s life – here, writing poetry – transfer to another – in this case, criticism – but a reputation in each enhances the other. Hope’s status as a poet was not passively congruent with his role as an academic, and certainly it did not represent the disabling conflict between ‘the poet’ and ‘the professor’ that Hope presents it as being in his inaugural lecture. Rather, the reputation gathered in one role enhances the reputation in another, no matter how unrelated: thus his referee Boyce Gibson suggests that it is his ‘eminence as a critic and a creative artist which is Hope’s strongest claim’ to the chair at CUC, phrasing which merges the two fields of achievement.33 Reputation is only brought into question by those with equivalent (or greater) expertise: most of us, most of the time, are forced or choose to take claims to competence at face value. And whereas deep knowledge often causes one to question

254underlying values or conclusions, relatively superficial knowledge often produces self-confidence. Social convention and the protocols of institutions make it all but impossible to assail the reputation of someone determined to make good without a moment of firm interrogation that is always read, by some or many, as a personal attack. Harris’ comments quoted above could be read as doing that, as could James McAuley and Stewart’s own trickery of Harris in the Ern Malley hoax (see below), or so it would turn out.

This effect, of exchange or cross-fertilisation in achievements in different spheres, and of the power of institutional authority, can be discerned in reviews of Hope’s work: writers almost always refer to his status as a poet when reviewing his criticism, and to his status as a critic when reviewing his poetry. It is emphasised that Hope is not a ‘typical’ academic, in the most pejorative sense of the term.34 While there is an open move to dissociate the poet from the professor by Hope and his reviewers, this has the effect of invoking the authority that is ostensibly being disclaimed. Judah Waten’s introduction to his review of one of Hope’s collections of criticism, The Pack of Autolycus, is typical:

Like Hope himself, Waten is caught in the tensions or collisions between taken-for-granted ways of speaking about literature and the academy.

255There is the imperative that applauds work that is ‘both original and scholarly’, and in which the position of ‘professor’ at ‘the Australian National University’ is one of prestige. There is the rhetoric of value that operates outside the academy, which devalues academics as ‘stodgy’. Similarly, there is the appeal to national value – in the first sentence, and in the reference to the ‘Australian National’ university – and the appeal to international precedents which signify quality: poets have held chairs of English in England and France; Waten also notes that Hope’s work has been translated into twelve languages.

As the title of his collection implies, Hope’s reputation also rested on his reputation for savagery, leading me to wonder whether any students or writers were ever afraid of AD Hope.35 Even today, discussions almost breathlessly record as fact the claim that one of his reviews was so critical as to cause the author to commit suicide. Such rumours, if they are true – and if a writer did indeed kill themselves after having a book reviewed by Hope, is it likely there were no other factors at work? – become part of a celebration of the will to power. No such myth circulates about the academic whose rival was said to have hanged himself in the study of the colleague appointed to the chair of English. Why is one story public, the other private; one constitutive of reputation as a critic, the other suppressed in formal and informal histories?

As with the discussion of Ian Maxwell, this section on Hope interrogates reputation, an interrogation that runs counter to the many works which respect and honour academics and their careers. Maxwell was honoured with a Festschrift, a collection of essays generally written by present or former colleagues and students, edited by Gabriel Turville-Petre and John Stanley Martin, and opening with a poem by ‘A.D.H.’ (in the contents, AD Hope). EOG Turville-Petre, more usually Gabriel, was at the time professor of Old Icelandic at Oxford. I have made the argument, in this chapter, that it was largely through the work of patrons such as Maxwell and Burton that Hope’s third-class

256degree was massaged from handicap into qualification, enabling him to obtain a professorial position, thence to become an icon of Australian literature. My argument could be taken to imply that it would have been impossible for a student with that result to obtain a senior academic position at a more prestigious institution than CUC. It is worth noting, then, that listed among Hope’s classmates who obtained a third-class pass degree in English in 1931 was EOG Turville-Petre. The point is not that achievements such as honours grades determine careers, although they often do; it is rather that, at specific times and in specific ways, there can be flexibility in the way they might or might not be invoked as measures of academic merit.

McAuley, Communism and Quadrant

James McAuley is perhaps most famous today either as a Cold Warrior or as half of ‘Ern Malley’, a hoax in which poems by a ‘deceased garage mechanic’ were submitted to Angry Penguins, edited by a young Max Harris. The aim of the hoax was to demonstrate that critics who were aficionados of modernism could be fooled into lauding nonsense, and from their own point of view McAuley and Stewart succeeded for a time as Harris published the poems with a splash, and then bore the brunt of first public ridicule (which was the intended outcome) and a trial for obscenity (which was not).

In contrast to Hope, who was ostensibly apolitical – although internal university correspondence shows a sharp institutional mind at work – McAuley was an openly and avowedly political figure. Later views of McAuley have differed. Stuart Macintyre concludes that

Susan McKernan has stressed the profound impact that his experience as a lecturer in government at the Australian School of Pacific Administration (1946–60), combined with his frequent trips to New Guinea, had on McAuley’s idea of the relationships between colonialism, politics, culture, and education (70–95). McAuley’s biographer, Peter Coleman, likewise stresses the interrelationship between his subject’s colonial experience, his poetry, and his political beliefs. These are characterised by what Coleman describes as a sense of

The echo of idealism can be heard in this summary, although one notes that truth and goodness are replaced by usefulness and meaning.

James Phillip McAuley grew up in Sydney and attended Fort Street High, winning a scholarship to Sydney (McKernan, 70). On completing his masters degree, McAuley was not offered the university position that McKernan suggests he had expected, and he became a school teacher. In 1943 McAuley became a member of the Army Directorate of Research of Civil Affairs headed by Alf Conlon. Afterwards he obtained a position at Australia’s ‘Colonial Office’, the School of Pacific Administration, set up to train Australians to work in Papua and New Guinea. In an essay tellingly entitled ‘My New Guinea’, McAuley outlined his explanation for the failure of the ‘great enterprise of European colonialism’:

The view that being able to establish sexual relations with indigenous women was one of the most effective means by which colonial rule could be established and maintained attributes political agency to (those few?) women who gave consent, while erasing the violence which so often has accompanied conflict and occupation (against which widely held view, see Strobel, 1–16; Callaway, 3–29). That McAuley should offer such an argument belies his reputation as a brilliant thinker.

Another aspect of these assumptions about former colonies and those who inhabit them is McAuley’s belief that education too, corrupts, and that even (and perhaps especially) colonised elites were unable to cope constructively with the devolution of political authority. In his essay ‘Liberals and Anti-Colonialism’, McAuley claims that ‘Asia and Africa knew nothing of nationalism until their westernized intellectuals learnt about it in Western schools and universities and began to use it as a weapon against their masters’ (169). It is a claim contradicted by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, which argues that the nation is not a distinctly European political form at all, but arises from the conditions of anti-colonialism. McAuley’s views were structured by his obsession with opposing communism, which led him to believe that movements for independence were not responses antagonistic to occupation, but part of the communist menace. In McAuley’s view, this threat was not appreciated by liberal intellectuals who were ‘conditioned to an exaggerated guilt-feeling’, a ‘pathological’ guilt, ‘induced in us by Communist propaganda’ (170).

Notwithstanding what many claim was a strong commitment to the colonial mission, McAuley wanted to leave the school and at the end of the 1950s ‘applied to his academic friends’ for help in obtaining a university position (McKernan, 90). Although McKernan does not

259name them, one of these was almost certainly Hope, as the two men were long-time friends and correspondents, and the professor and head of department at Tasmania where McAuley gained his position was a former and junior colleague of Hope’s at the ANU, FM Todd. In defiance of the bans on academic appointments to Tasmania that were part of the fallout over the dismissal of Sydney Orr, McAuley accepted a poetry fellowship at the level of associate professor in 1960 – a rare kind of appointment, at the time perhaps the only one in Australia for a creative writer.37 It was also unusual for anyone to enter the university system at such a senior level, but McAuley’s rapid rise did not end there. Todd died at the end of that year, and at a time when Tasmania was finding it all but impossible to fill academic positions, the new poetry fellow was appointed to the chair and became head of department, thereby moving from lecturer at a small training college to professor in less than two years. During this period McAuley also became chair of the academic board, a position of considerable institutional power; it is a rise of astonishing swiftness, unparalleled in the discipline to date.

In his inaugural lecture at Tasmania McAuley engaged in a ‘revaluation’ of the work of Edmund Spenser, whose poetry he compared to the novels of George Eliot – Spenser had been moved down the literary league ladder by Leavis, and McAuley referred directly and indirectly to Leavis at various points during the lecture. But he began by reiterating a version of Eliot’s ‘tradition and the individual talent’, suggesting that ‘it belongs to a full human culture to extend our awareness of the past, as well as to have regard to the future’ (1). A central theme in the lecture was the idea or ideal of a pure moment of encounter in which the text itself becomes fully ‘realised’ or ‘immanent’:

260These (contradictory) methods are set aside, for McAuley ultimately endorses a curious passivity: ‘we cannot know unless we are docile; we cannot understand unless we are willing to let works of art first speak to us on their own terms’ (21). This idealist view also emerges in a lecture to English teachers:

The approach is somewhat reminiscent of Arnold, specifically his assertion that the critic must stand aside and simply allow the text to be, but it is somewhat at odds with McAuley’s approach in other fields. For students it was known that certain kinds of literature were valued over others: a former honours student at Tasmania remarked to me that ‘everyone knew that you could not get a first if you wrote on a twentieth-century writer’ when McAuley was professor in charge of English.38

In 1955, on the suggestion of Hope, McAuley was offered the editorship of Quadrant, Australia’s best-known conservative journal. Quadrant was established with the specific intention of countering Meanjin, regarded by some of the more fervent Cold Warriors as the mouthpiece of communism, a charge which helped to exacerbate the constant difficulties over funding and credibility experienced by the then editor Clem Christesen. The other and more explicit opponent was Overland, which unlike Meanjin had and still has an explicitly leftwing brief. The first issue of Quadrant was published under McAuley’s direction in December 1956, in an era of intense Cold-War conflict – Overland had begun publication in 1954. Peter Coleman notes with satisfaction that ‘All the poems [in Quadrant] were in metre and rhymed’, continuing the campaign against modernism that had been conducted successfully for decades (72). However McAuley, and the journal, were damaged after it was revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom,

261which had supported the journal financially, was funded by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).39

McAuley’s vision of an undergraduate education in English was outlined in an editorial in Quadrant in 1975, under his regular heading ‘Commentary’. The argument manifests precisely the anxiety about the methods and scholarly reputation of English studies that idealism prompted in earlier generations, and McAuley suggested that changes would be needed to turn what he termed a ‘mush subject’ into ‘a genuine study’. These reforms were not ‘a matter of arbitrary demand, reactionary or snobbish views, or elitism: they simply exist as inescapable’:

The plan calls to mind the kinds of studies in modern languages conducted nearly a century before at Sydney and Melbourne. The terror of faddism conceals just how recent the study of English was, while McAuley’s constant efforts to ‘stiffen’ study with language come to seem almost comical. The notable absences are philosophy and psychoanalysis, which had done, and would subsequently do, so much to influence literary study in English.

One of the more instructive documents on McAuley’s ideas about the study of literature is his essay ‘Textbooks and Morals’, delivered as

262a presidential address at a national conference of the AATE, quoted above. In this lecture, McAuley reveals his commitment to the idea of an unyielding core culture, and looks back with nostalgia at those European societies which, he claims, had once had

McAuley believed that English teachers had a particular responsibility to combat ‘treason, sodomy, abortion, fornication or ungodliness’, the advocates for which were, he feared, over-running high schools. Elsewhere he suggests that moral and intellectual perversion were rampant in the universities: many academics were

These views led McAuley to become involved in the formation of organisations such as Peace with Freedom, which aimed to combat ‘the politicisation of teaching, of staff appointments, and of post-graduate patronage’, and ‘defend and develop the principles of traditional education against the education radicals and demagogues, and to resist the politicisation of universities, colleges and schools’ (Coleman, 106). Peace with Freedom, whose members were usually academics or students, was formed ‘to prepare plans to make war [sic] on the Left in the universities and colleges, for elections, for the press, and for meetings’ (Coleman, 106). At about this time McAuley found that he 263had cancer, but after recovering from an operation, he returned to the fray,

For McAuley and the members of Peace with Freedom the ‘continuing danger was the politicisation of teaching’, and what they saw as the threat posed by the Whitlam government’s plans for the ‘egalitarian transformation of Australian society by eliminating from schools any inegalitarian [sic] emphasis on excellence and standards’, a program, in McAuley’s view, ‘for undermining the free society’ (Coleman, 115).

What makes McAuley important to this history is that he illustrates a particular, often unspoken dimension of debates about criticism: the charge that critics operating outside the universities, or in disciplines other than English, had a covert leftist agenda. Some might see a sinister plot against legitimate authority in the fact that, at early conferences of ASAL, all delegates were addressed as ‘professor’, but it is difficult to discern a coherent leftist program in the work of critics of Australian writing, taken as a group. If there is a common thread that connects academics who have taught Australian literature, it is that, whatever the ironies, many who had strong reservations about the value of Australian literature as an academic subject are closely associated with the development of the field. The work of an earlier and parallel generation of critics working outside the discipline and the universities – among them many women, like Zora Cross, Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Judith Wright – has received less attention than it should have. 264

Making Canons: Vincent Buckley

Although no critic really took up Clem Christesen’s questions about methodology raised in the Meanjin forum, some of the issues were taken up by Vincent Buckley in his essay ‘Towards an Australian Literature’. Here, Buckley claims that ‘the trouble with this symposium was that it wasn’t an exchange of views at all. Everyone politely agreed with Professor Hope [Jeffares had not]. The result was that some of the issues never became properly canvassed’ (64).

Buckley’s main contention is that the study of Australian literature suffers from the lack of a canon and effective criticism. Thus it is the responsibility of critics to establish at least a ‘provisional’ canon, ‘if only to stop the swamping of our literature by sociological interests and criteria’ (64). This concern reflected of the activity in the field of Australian literary and cultural studies in the previous two decades: Harry Heseltine documents more than twenty studies published in the years 1938 to 1958, and there are others he does not mention. Of the former, there were few that did not belong to the school of cultural nationalism: certainly Buckley’s own Essays in Poetry, Mainly Australian (1957), and Wilkes’ New Perspectives on Brennan’s Poetry (1953) are exceptions, but almost no others would have passed muster as criticism as it was understood in university English departments at that time. And if Buckley’s dismissive conflation of those who paid attention to Australian literature in its social and historical contexts and ‘literary nationalists’ is broadly accurate, it is also somewhat unfair, for this was a position taken up against the universalist rhetoric used by Anglocentric university critics. Among the cultural nationalist studies which he deplores, the ones Buckley was responding to directly were Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties (1954) and AA Phillips’ The Australian Tradition (1958). Importantly for Buckley, neither author was a university critic, although Cecil Hadgraft, who published Australian Literature in 1960, was. But perhaps the greatest threat to disciplinary integrity, as some critics saw it, was historian Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1959), which in its title dipped its lid to Palmer, and remains an influential study. Ward’s stereotype of the bushman was 265so compellingly sketched on his first page that many readers perhaps went no further.

As a Leavisite who was to some extent familiar with theoretical debates of the nineteenth century, Buckley rejects the assumption that the reasons for studying Australian literature should be ‘sociological’ ones. He argues that it should be possible to steer a course between ‘Australian studies’ and simply including Australian texts in English literature courses without commenting on the nationality of their authors. The solution is to bring to Australian works the same critical rigour that had been applied to English texts. Clearly feeling that the Meanjin debate and incursions in the universities signalled an inevitability in the development of the field, Buckley is anxious to see that the ‘right’ kind of materials are selected for reading, and implicitly, the right kind of people selected for university teaching and the writing of criticism. His solution is at once quite conservative, and significantly radical: setting up a parallel but smaller collection of [fairly] ‘great books’ by Australian writers. The model is conservative because it accepts the Leavisite injunction to create a canon without rethinking canonicity, radical because it acknowledges that some Australian texts do deserve to be read and taught at universities.

It was this agenda, establishing an Australian canon, which was taken up in and by GKW Johnston’s Australian Literary Criticism (1962), the first collection of essays on Australian literature by critics working in the discipline of English, clearly intended to function as a textbook and guide to great works as well as authoritative ways to read them. Johnston wrote to Clem Christesen on 7 May 1961 requesting permission to reprint some essays from Meanjin but Christesen seems to have refused, on the grounds that he planned to publish his own collection (although none appeared). On 6 June, Johnston wrote again, explaining the ‘genesis of the book’:

Thus Buckley passed the task on to Johnston. Christesen himself claimed that he refused permission for the reprints on the grounds that Johnston cut the request to four essays without consulting him.41 Whatever the reason for the absence of contributions from Meanjin, the selection of critics and writers in Australian Literary Criticism demonstrated a certain circularity: Judith Wright on John Shaw Neilson, Alan Brissenden on Wright; Hope on ‘Standards’, McAuley on Hope, Buckley on McAuley, Buckley on Xavier Herbert and Patrick White, with six of the essays drawn from Quadrant (edited by McAuley) and Kramer, herself a contributor, reviewing the volume for The Bulletin.

In the first sentence of his introduction, Johnston asserted that he had collected what he regarded as ‘the most rewarding Australian literary criticism now available’ (vii); his aim was to bring this criticism to a wider readership. Essays had been selected on the basis that they avoided the ‘defect’ of ‘literary nationalism’, and demonstrated their authors’ fine sensibilities: ‘What is not widely enough known is that in recent years … serious appraisals of Australian writing have appeared in which interpreters of intelligence and taste have markedly advanced understanding and judgement’ (vii; emphasis added). The second aim of the collection was ‘to assist that common pursuit of true literary judgement which is necessary if we are to have a clear, well-founded notion of the relative worth of Australian poetry and fiction’ (vii). The echo of Leavis, who in turn drew his title from Eliot, is no doubt intentional: The Common Pursuit was first published in 1952, and reissued the same year Johnston’s anthology was published.

Ken Goodwin greeted the essays as demonstrating an attitude ‘derived from Leavis crossed sometimes with the more theologicallyminded of the New Critics of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians’ (314). Despite the book’s own claims to a Leavisite agenda, however, John

267Barnes complained that none of the contributions showed ‘that awareness of the particular work in relation to the larger whole, which is so admirably demonstrated in the criticism of someone like F.R. Leavis’ (83). His review protested the exclusion of AA Phillips, just as Phillips, in his review, protested the exclusion of Vance Palmer, Douglas Stewart, Jack Lindsay and Tom Inglis Moore. In fact, Australian Literary Criticism attracted a wave of unsympathetic reviews, the longest and most analytical being WM Maidment’s in Southerly, which ran to more than twenty pages. The titles are indicative of the prevalent tone: ‘Counting the Swans’ (Barnes), ‘Charmed Circle’ (Elliott), ‘A Snuggle of Critics’ (Martin) and ‘Criticising the Critics’ (Phillips) (for other reviews see King; Mair; Matthews; Sutherland). The book that was supposed to end arguments about the value of specific texts and approved methods of reading them increased the tempo of debate.

Perhaps the most lasting impact of Australian Literary Criticism, like that of Leavisism in general, has been in helping to perpetuate the belief that any respectable national literature should have its own agreed-upon list of ‘great books’. It is worth noting, then, that Australian Literary Criticism established the following writers as canonical: Christopher Brennan, John Shaw Neilson, RD FitzGerald, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, AD Hope, James McAuley, Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Martin Boyd, Xavier Herbert, and Patrick White. The emphasis on poetry is clear, as is the preference for male writers over female. A modern critic might protest the exclusion of Stead and put a mild query over several of the male poets, but would be more inclined to question the premises of the exercise. The influence of the collection is difficult to measure precisely, but university calendars indicate that the contents of Australian literature courses taught in 1970 tend to parallel the preferences of the anthology, with just three regular additions: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under Arms, and the then new work of Randolph Stow. But it would be drawing a long bow to suggest that the relationship was a causal one, for in many cases the critics ‘making the canon’ through their contributions to the anthology were the same people who had already drawn up the lists of texts. It is likely they would have 268written their best criticism on writers whose work they were teaching – teaching does influence research, although it is generally believed that influence operates in the other direction. At the same time, the narrowness of Johnston’s collection was countered by Geoffrey Dutton’s much larger and more eclectic collection The Literature of Australia, which itself became a widely used text.

Although the attempt to create a canon was taken up with fervour, twenty years later Buckley himself had altered his thinking on the nature of universal value and the role of English literature. By the late 1970s Vincent Buckley was not only a lapsed Catholic but a lapsed Leavisite as well. In 1982, he argued that Australians were ‘more in danger from imperialism than from nationalism’ when it came to literature, because ‘the influence of English or American poetry on ours is not returned in kind, and Australian poetry is denied any parity of treatment – any possibility of parity – with English and American books on the international market’ (A Later Note, 4). Elsewhere, he reflects on the problems with his earlier dismissal of literary nationalism:

As Buckley himself asserts, the challenge posed by a dominant Anglophile universalism restricts advocates of Australian literature to facile questions about what is ‘genuinely’ Australian (for critique of which, see Hodge and Mishra). The terms of this debate obscure the problem and presence of the imperial power, while the discourse of universalism masks the Anglophile nature of its literary aesthetic. Buckley claims that the almost unassailable authority of England is entwined with an appropriation of tradition, and the operation of institutions like universities, but comments astutely that 269

Buckley was the youngest of a trio of poet-professors who are closely identified with the academic study of Australian literature in the postwar decades, the other two being McAuley and Hope. Buckley was born in 1925 and died in 1988; McAuley was born in 1917 and died in 1976; both were outlived by the eldest of the three, Hope, who was born in 1907 and died in 2000. Perhaps in part because of his age and longevity it is Hope who is most persistently identified as the ‘founder’ of the study of Australian literature, although it is almost certainly Buckley who has made the more important intellectual contribution, and McAuley who had the most substantial political impact beyond literary studies. And all three, in a sense, were ‘outplayed’ in the public sphere by Kramer, who made a strong contribution to the public reputation of Hope and McAuley in particular through her scholarship and teaching.

This discussion of debates about the relationship of Australian literature, which I understand as being a field within the discipline of literary studies, demonstrates the fears that were held about letting Australian subjects into the academy. Allan Edwards’ claim that it was ‘dangerous work’ seems pure hyperbole, but fairly represents the views of many at the time. The assertion raises the broader or perhaps the deeper question of what it was that academics so feared about teaching or writing about Australian literature. Although we might speculate on the extent to which writers of this time were presenting images that did not accord with prejudices about Australian culture, in the end the only plausible answer can be that thinking seriously about Australian writing meant not only calling into question some of the foundational tenets of Leavisism and New Criticism, not only reorganising curriculum and researching new lectures, but risking one’s authority as a critic and teacher. Risking one’s professional dignity to say: yes, this is valuable. Such a claim returns us to Bourdieu, although perhaps a more poignant and powerful example can be provided in a novel by Christos Tsiolkas, in a parable about taste and authority 270

Much remains to be written about the ways in which popular music, like literature, shapes our sense of what is right, what is real and what is meaningful in our social and physical environment. But Tsiolkas’ key point – that taste should never be the basis for an ethics or a politics – might be no bad credo for those who argue for the value or otherwise of any literary text, whether English, Australian, or uneasily both, or neither. It can be claimed this is a false analogy: what could be at stake in a casual conversation in a train? As Bourdieu is at pains to show, professional identities are shaped by social encounters, and the expression of taste in these encounters, whether in a casual setting or an institutional one – and at conferences, for example, the two can be impossible to separate – carries with it precisely that charge, that weight of careless but decisive judgement, that Tsiolkas is contesting.

271

Commonwealth Literature

So far I have represented the debate about the teaching of Australian literature in the academy in the terms by which it was usually understood by its participants.43 There were, however, other paradigms through which creative writing by and about Australians might be read, notably (at this time and earlier), that of ‘Commonwealth Literature’. Debates about what was, in its earliest stages mainly comparative criticism and teaching intersect and overlap with debates about Australian literature. It is useful here to define the term ‘comparative literature’, which in the United States, for example, refers to the study of European literatures (or in this book, modern languages). As it is used in Australia, comparative literature can refer to the study of literatures from other English-speaking countries. In the eighties ‘postcolonial’ came to be preferred to the terms ‘empire’, ‘Dominions’ and ‘Commonwealth’ literature but is now challenged by advocates of Goethe’s ‘world literature’.

Literature from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia was first taught in the 1930s and 1940s overseas, but took off slowly in Australia: it is reported that one early survey on the teaching of the subject was filed in the rubbish bin by a dubious Harold Oliver, although one distributed in 1978 by Peter Pierce and others received more sympathetic treatment from other recipients. Commonwealth literature at this time was taught most frequently at Adelaide, Flinders, Macquarie, Monash, Murdoch, New England and Queensland universities (Pierce at al.). The absence of four of the five oldest institutions – Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and Western Australia – could be an indication of greater resistance to the new subject there.

In terms of institutional positioning, there are differences between Australian and Commonwealth literature: the chair of Australian literature at Sydney was established in 1962, but until the 1990s there was no chair in Australia (or any former Commonwealth country) in postcolonial or Commonwealth literature. Journals which regularly publish material on Australian literature, such as Southerly (1939),

272Meanjin (1940) and Overland (1954), predate those of Commonwealth literature such as World Literature Written in English (then the WLWE Newsletter, published by the World Literature Section of the MLA, 1961; now the Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL, 1965), although Australian Literary Studies (1963) is contemporaneous with these two. On the other hand, the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) was formed at a gathering in Leeds in 1964, whereas the inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) was not held until May 1978. The term ‘Commonwealth literature’ has been maintained through structures such as ACLALS and its various regional organisations, publication of conference proceedings, and JCL (see Chris Tiffin). The suggestion to found JCL seems to have come from BD Swami, who in a letter to AN Jeffares at the end of 1958 suggested that all Commonwealth countries ‘should have a periodical magazine of English languages (Literature) so as to continue our touch with the world’s language and its men of letters’.44

The leading figure in the teaching and research in development of Commonwealth literature is Alexander Norman (‘Derry’) Jeffares, who has been mentioned in several earlier chapters. Jeffares spent a relatively short period in Adelaide but had a lasting impact on the discipline in Australia and elsewhere, particularly as general editor (at various times) of A Review of English Literature, the Writers and Critics series, Writers and Their Work, Biography and Criticism, New Oxford English, Fountainwell Drama Texts, York Notes, York Handbooks, and then York Classics, York Insights, the Macmillan Histories of Literature, and the Macmillan Anthologies of English Literature (co-editor). This involvement meant that the connections with Australia were lasting, although Anna Rutherford – founding editor of Kunapipi – did much to maintain the momentum of Jeffares’ initial work in Europe and Britain whilst teaching in Denmark.

273When in Adelaide, Jeffares had proposed the foundation of an institute of Australian studies. The terms of his proposal were in accordance with the views expressed in the last sentence of his essay in Meanjin, but not with the sentiments of the rest of the contribution. The proposal reflected Jeffares’ position that, if it had to be included in course offerings, then Australian literature should be studied at (contained to) postgraduate level. It could be that that idea came from TG Strehlow, as the same folder in the Adelaide Archives in which the copy of the proposal is kept contains an undated letter from Strehlow proposing the foundation of an Australian institute for anthropological and linguistic research. Jeffares’ proposal, dated 6 October 1952, is more elaborate, suggesting that Brian Elliott, Douglas Pike and Strehlow all be promoted to the position of reader to staff the centre, which would provide advanced studies in a variety of disciplines. The rationale was that the centre would encourage study in Australian topics, rival Sydney and Melbourne, consolidate resources and facilities at Adelaide, and ultimately serve as a focal point for overseas students and academics who were at present being turned away. But Jeffares was clearly concerned about some aspects of the proposal:

But Jeffares returned to England, and the proposal lapsed. That said, Jeffares’ interest in and promotion of Commonwealth literature was in many ways radical, in a career that is unparalleled in breadth and in energy. However, the arguments he made for Commonwealth literary studies were imperialist ones: some years before his formal involvement in advocacy of the kind quoted above, he had suggested that

The Leeds conference on Commonwealth literatures of 1964, which Jeffares convened, was said to mark the ‘beginning’ of Commonwealth literary studies, a claim that overlooks the long history of the teaching of Commonwealth literature and the important (albeit few) works of scholarship that had already been produced (see McLeod [1961]; John Matthews [1962]).46 The Leeds gathering was envisaged as a carefully directed intervention into academic and literary culture that would ‘clarify’ approaches to Commonwealth literature, ambitions which parallel those of the Johnston anthology. The phrase ‘our common culture’ is used twice in Jeffares’ opening address and recurs as ‘our common heritage’ and ‘a common, yet infinitely diverse, culture’, as well as being incorporated into the subtitle of the proceedings of the conference (xii, xviii, xiii, xvii). The event was sponsored by the British Council, the BBC, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, active globally in this period.

What colonial literature provided to the metropolitan critic was energy: new texts, new perspectives, which would refresh rather than challenge the imperial centre. The ‘language that is not renewed, that does not develop, can easily die’ (xiii). But the vigilance of the metropolitan audience was essential to prevent the literature from becoming ‘too local in interest … too unacceptable throughout the world’ (xiii). Jeffares asserts that ‘In the cold light of judgement one reads [Commonwealth writers] for the supranational qualities in their work … The standards of judgement are not national standards. Standards of the critic must be cosmopolitan; only the best should be praised’ (xiv). The inspiration for this address is Macaulay:

Jeffares refers to Macaulay and his Minute again in his opening address to the Queensland ACLALS conference in 1968 (published in 1970), an address in which he envisions the study of Commonwealth literature as a means of forming an imperial cultural ‘federation’ within the discipline of English studies, for ‘The real thought of a country – what it conserves from its past, what it makes of its present, what aims and ideals it forms for its future – is expressed in its literature’ (xiii). The old ideology of imperial federation is reflected through Jeffares’ writings on Commonwealth literary studies, to the extent that he later published an article in the Round Table on the dangers of ‘Throwing the Nurse Out with the Bath Water’, by which he meant replacing English literature with literatures in English. Here, he adopted the patronising tone that postcolonial intellectuals have railed against, designating English the parent, American literature a teenager and Commonwealth literature a mewling infant.

It would be some time before Commonwealth literary studies would break free of the critical modes that underpinned its foundation. But perhaps because it seemed less obviously a threat – apparently reinforcing imperial ties rather than calling them into question – debates over studying and teaching Commonwealth literature, as with debates over American literature, seem to have been conducted in a much more seemly fashion than those over Australian writing. Conceptually, the field was significant in offering a way of thinking about the cultural and historical specificities of literatures produced in English-speaking cultures that was not based specifically on nationalism, a fact that was clearly recognised by the group of younger academics associated with the foundation of the journal new literature review. Comparison was a crucial critical tool, particularly in this early stage, and some of the founding works operate on a comparative principle. Indicative of this trend, it is significant that unlike Australian literary studies, which critics attempted to inaugurate with a book, ‘Commonwealth literature’ was legitimated by a gathering together of scholars in the field, and the 276opening up of dialogue between national specialists. ‘Place’ itself would come to be a recurrent concern of this criticism.

The aim of this chapter has been to demonstrate that the institutionalisation of Australian literature is a complex and ongoing process, one that has been and remains responsive to local, institutional conditions. It is not and never was a single moment at which ‘battles’ could be declared to have been ‘won’. The most successful short-term strategy for those working within universities was to argue for incorporation of the new subject into old frameworks, applying existing conceptual tools to new materials. Those frameworks did not immediately crack under the strain of this application; on the contrary, they showed a remarkable rigidity, or flexibility, or longevity, particularly in teaching, in ‘accommodating’ Australian texts, without acceding to demands for restructuring of existing conceptual categories of value. There was an obvious alternative to assimilation – isolation – and this strategy seems to have been chosen by those who wished to be seen to accommodate Australian literature whilst leaving all other aspects of literary study unchanged. The long-term negative effects of this strategy can be clearly demonstrated in regard to the Commonwealth Literary Fund Lectures which were established in 1940.

It has been argued, correctly, that the CLF lectures did much to increase the status of Australian literature, and to make it more widely known. A combined audience of three thousand people heard lectures given by four different Queensland writers at Queensland in 1956, including 500 who attended Judith Wright’s lecture on ‘technical aspects of poetry in Australia’.47 Similar-size audiences heard the annual lectures over the next three years. At Queensland it seems to have been customary to allocate at least some of the lectures to writers, but elsewhere this was less likely to have been the case. The trend of allocating the lectures to academics in preference to writers seems to have begun in the early 1950s; creative writers refer frequently to giving the lectures during the 1940s (see letters in Ferrier). Clearly, writers took the lectures both more and less seriously, by which I mean that they took Australian literature

277more seriously, and lecturing less seriously, than most academics. But as interest in Australian literature developed and the lectures gained a higher profile, the writers, for whom they often provided a welcome income as well as the chance to focus their reading and refresh contacts, were replaced, the lectureships seem to have been shared out among academics in English studies, who had less familiarity with and minimal regard for Australian writing. Harold Oliver was accused of ‘snobbery’ by Frank Dalby Davison, in an exchange of letters in Meanjin, while Alan Brissenden has described a well-known incident in which JIM Stewart lectured on Lawrence’s Kangaroo, after having declared that there was no worthwhile Australian literature (Introduction, xi–xii).48 Professors of literature could point to the existence of the CLF lectures as evidence of their commitment to Australian literature – as Edwards, Jeffares and Milgate did – without acknowledging that these courses had no place in the degree. They thereby avoided taking on the responsibilities that inclusion of Australian literature as a subject would have necessitated – the kind of rethinking advocated by Christesen. In practical terms, the establishment of the lectures outside of the regular curriculum of English departments, usually as work that was neither compulsory nor assessed, gave a clear message to students and staff that the study of Australian literature was of a different intellectual order to that which was the subject of formal study.

The 1950s and 1960s were a time in which the reputations of critics of Australian literature like Wilkes, Kramer, Hope, McAuley, Johnston and Buckley were made. The connections between these critics are also important for their careers, especially those between Hope, McAuley and Kramer. Hope played the mentoring role but there was frequent support: Hope and Kramer wrote introductions for each others’ books, while Kramer wrote criticism of the poetry of both, and edited the volume on McAuley in UQP’s Australian Authors series. Many of the frequent reprints of Hope’s and McAuley’s work have been in volumes edited by Kramer, such as the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature and the two-volume My Country, both published in 1985. McAuley was

278instrumental in the foundation of the AATE as chair of the UNESCO committee that led to its establishment, and Hope, Kramer and McAuley (in that order) were the first three presidents (Pascoe). The reputations of those who are thought to be the first conquerors of the ‘new territory’ show an unassailability, because they act as magnets and mentors to students who remain loyal to those who have helped and guided them. At the same time as aspousing ‘disinterest’, the intensely personal dimension of reputation-making is shown in these careers.

Debates about Australian literature played out in decisions made by students about which topics they could productively research, bearing in mind the burgeoning numbers. The table over the page presents numbers of research MA theses in English literatures in the first seven decades of the twentieth century. That forty percent of theses completed at Sydney and a slight majority of those at Queensland in the 1960s should be on Australian literature, but five percent – one of twenty – at Melbourne in the 1970s reflects the local factors which saw the simultaneous rise of cultural nationalism and Leavisite criticism. By the first half of the 1970s, postgraduate research in Australian literature had all but halted.

The impact of the founding of the chair of Australian literature at Sydney on postgraduate research is visible but not marked – in fact, there is a decline in research activity in Australian literature at Sydney in the 1970s, as there was in all other universities except Tasmania, New England and Newcastle. But these three universities were not sites of great activity, as together they awarded only five research degrees for Australian literature during the decade. Research flourished briefly at Sydney in the 1960s: double the proportion of students there, compared to Melbourne, completed a thesis on Australian literature. Melbourne and UWA are the universities at which students were least likely to do work on an Australian topic, Sydney the most likely. These statistics give us another, competing measure of the health of the subject; so too would surveys of criticism or, even better, research into students’ experiences. One wonders in what ways or even whether these students were aware of conflicts over, and the perceived dangers of studying a ‘national’ literature at the time they were conceiving and conducting their research. 279

Research Master of Arts Degrees in Literature in English49

Legend: Literature in English other than Australian / Australian Literature; Mon (Monash) and New (Newcastle).