One of the imperatives in writing an historical account is to balance the demands of generalisation – finding larger patterns – against the need to account for contradictory or complicated evidence. The first published version of this study paid undue attention to the pattern of imperialism at the expense of drawing out competing narratives about how the history of the teaching of literature in Australian universities might be understood. The cases considered here as ‘variants’ offer what I hope can function, if only implicitly, as commentaries on other methodological aspects of the study. Their placement in separate sections hints at the tensions inherent in attempting to create a narrative organised around intellectual movements and chronology, further segmented by individuals and institutions.

It is easy to lose sight of the point that the discipline is being made by those institutions and individuals: through the processes of scholarship and teaching that are described here. But amidst these practices and pressures of the disciplines and their conventions, there are cases of individuals and institutions which suggest that the broadly discernable patterns described above can be decisively broken; that factors beyond the discipline – individuals, local circumstances, or even global events – can decisively configure or reconfigure careers and curriculum. For example, in relation to the latter, arguably a separate study is needed to consider the effects of the First and Second World Wars on literary and language study, for these were profound. Not the least of these was the reshaping of the male student body in the most dramatic way possible, by death, disfigurement and illness, as it gave added responsibility and prominence to women students and academics, and gave birth to movements in literature and criticism. At times, then, events that affect the discipline or its practitioners do not fit accounts which focus on 143intellectual movements or historical periods; competing themes jostle for ‘chapters of their own’.

In the first section of this chapter an example of the way in which local institutional factors can bear – or overbear – on a single discipline to which they are not directly related is considered. In the second, the slightly differing functions of three recurring ‘icons’ of ‘English’ are analysed: a critic (Matthew Arnold), a tertiary institution (Oxford), and a literary author (Shakespeare). Any one of these three might have been the subject of a separate study, or have been used to organise this book thematically. In the third section an even more complicated case (at least for those seeking chronology) is considered: a field which lays claim to a position at the very beginning of ‘English’, but the emergence of which belongs historically to the 1940s. Finally, in defiance of this uncertainty, the final section in this chapter makes some bold generalisations about the first seventy-five years or so of the teaching of English in Australian universities, in a kind of retrospective which adds demographic data to consolidate the main lines of argument.

Tasmania and the Orr Case

The self-effacing beginnings of the University of Tasmania might in hindsight seem like a warning of the problems ahead: three foundation lectureships were advertised, a modesty of aspiration that reflected the troubled and precarious beginnings of the university itself. Unusually, advertisements were placed only in Australian and New Zealand papers, perhaps because it was felt, probably realistically, that the lowly paid positions that required the appointees to ‘take evening classes, travel outside Hobart, give extension lectures to non-matriculants [and] set and mark examinations for schools as well as for the University’ (Davis, 23) would not appeal to anyone not already in the colonies.1 Nevertheless, the three appointees were all graduates of Cambridge.

The first occupant of the chair of classics and English was William Henry Williams, who was born in 1852 and graduated with a first

144in classics from Cambridge in 1876. After teaching at a school in Cambridge for eight years he was appointed headmaster of Newington, a private boys’ high school in Sydney. He was forced to resign eight years later when the school council decided that the post should be filled by a clergyman. In 1894 Williams was appointed lecturer in classics and English at the University of Tasmania, becoming professor in 1896; when classics became an independent subject Williams was able to teach solely in English. His main area of interest was Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan language. He edited numerous literary works, mostly from the early modern period, including, it is claimed, five plays by Shakespeare, although I have only been able to find one, The Tempest.

Lecturing staff were, initially, not permitted to become members of the governing council, but Williams later became a council member elected by senate. After he was ‘finally forced to resign’ in 1925 (when in his mid seventies) Williams remained a quiescent voice, perhaps in part because of his financial dependence on the university (Davis, 87). The historian of the university, Richard Davis, and WH Eddy, who is less sympathetic to the institution, both indicate that relations between staff and the university’s administration had always been troubled; both attribute this to the council’s undue influence on academic matters. The conflicts eventually led to a royal commission, but nearly three decades earlier, assertions made by council members – that the staff were ‘the servants of the Council’ – caused resentment among academics when they were reported in the press (Eddy, 2). There were various uprisings, but Eddy records that

145Although Williams seems to have left before the worst of the ructions, Davis’ account of his career implies he was among this group. He was also one of two academics who requested to go on record as opposing the appointment of Tasmania’s first female staff member.

When Williams retired he was replaced by a thirty-one-year-old Oxford graduate, AB Taylor, who held the chair until his own retirement thirty years later, in 1957.2 Albert Booth Taylor was born in Manchester but he was educated in Auckland. A Rhodes Scholar in 1918, he graduated with a first in English language and literature from Oxford, after which he lectured in the same subject at Leeds from 1920 to 1921 and at Armstrong College in Durham from 1921 to 1925. Taylor edited The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth for the Australian Students’ Shakespeare, as well as a Middle English romance. His major work of scholarship was An Introduction to Medieval Romance, an introductory survey of the main themes and characteristic styles of poetry of England and Europe. Notwithstanding what unfolded during their careers, both Williams and Tylor were made professor emeritus, something which demands the support of senior members of the university executive.

Richard Davis describes Taylor as having been ‘a radical exponent of academic rights and staff-student relations’ who was ‘intimately involved in academic politics’ (90) – although ‘radical’ is probably too strong a term. Davis suggests that it was the strain of this involvement that led to Taylor’s simultaneous resignation from his positions as president of the staff association and the chair of English in 1957. Taylor had been president during the 1955 royal commission that had been prompted in part by Sydney Orr’s open letter to the premier of Tasmania about conditions at the university, a letter co-signed by thirty-seven staff. He had also supported Orr with an official letter from the staff association that was published in the student magazine, Togatus (Eddy, 15).3

146The royal commission had been preceded by lengthy debates about the government of the university, debates in which Taylor played a leading role: he was one of the staff representatives in an early meeting with the state premier to discuss the possibility of an enquiry. In earlier generations, the role of government and benefactors in university decision-making had become an issue for academic staff, as we have seen of Adelaide and Melbourne, for example. Academics were pressured by the commission, as they were denied funding for legal representation by a university council that did approve such funding for itself. Eddy suggests that the enquiry became adversarial, even inquisitorial, and his description of Taylor’s participation suggests it was very stressful for him:

This account seems to euphemise personal failings, but Taylor did stay in his position long enough to urge that the findings of the commission be fully implemented. There was trouble over this, and worse to come.

Taylor was still at the university in 1956 during one of Australia’s most sustained and bitter academic controversies, one that Eddy argues was not unrelated to the royal commission and its outcomes: the dismissal of a charismatic professor of philosophy. Sydney Orr – middle name Sparkes – was sacked after a sexual harassment charge was filed by a student, the procedure used to dismiss him subsequently being protested by academics in Tasmania and elsewhere. The case received international attention and the repercussions were felt in the university and in Tasmania more generally for years. Apart from vehement personal animosities generated by conflicting views about 147Orr’s behaviour, and the response of the university’s administrators and council, the university was subjected to an international boycott of the chair of philosophy, a discipline characterised by a strong professional solidarity. That boycott was subsequently extended to include all academic positions. For Taylor, and perhaps in an earlier time for Williams, survival became the first priority, particularly towards the end of their careers.

I think we should not underestimate the destructive effects such an environment might have on the capacity to do research, which requires high levels and long periods of concentration, not to mention mental equanimity. The change in pace of Taylor’s own research career was palpable, indeed devastating: after having produced four books in his first decade at Tasmania, he had no publications after 1937 except a letter to Southerly. And there is evidence that student culture and teaching were also adversely affected. The first MA was not awarded until 1953 and numbers of postgraduates did not match those of other institutions until the 1960s. That said, it is difficult to be certain about what can be attributed to institutional and what to personal factors. For example, there is a general pattern of decline in research output across the course of an academic career: it is during their climb to the professorial position that academics tend to publish most. This might reflect the fact that the early years of a career can be productive because postgraduate study offers a platform for subsequent publication; such a concentrated period of research is rarely available during a career that includes teaching and administration. The failure to publish might also reflect the impact of increased demands commensurate with seniority or, in some cases, the fact that for those who have obtained a chair, there might be little incentive to add research to essential duties. Alternately, it might reflect the fact that scholars feel able to take time to do their best work when not under the pressure of trying to obtain tenure and promotion.

Tragically, Taylor’s successor in the chair at Tasmania, FM Todd, who also became president of the staff association, passed away after just four years in the position.4 A press report at the time refers to

148an illness which occurred just before Christmas, and Todd was then transferred from Hobart to St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, where he died just before the end of the year (‘Professor Todd’). Like Taylor, Todd was originally from New Zealand, and also like Taylor, was appointed to the chair at the age of thirty-one, although he was unusual among his contemporaries in having completed a PhD, a degree that was, significantly, taken at London rather than Oxford or Cambridge. This suggests that he might have been seen as an agent of reinvigoration at the university, not least because his major publication was a study of Wordsworth, based on the PhD. Unusually, he also had a number of reviews and lectures on Australian literature to his credit, an essay on Henry Lawson being reprinted three times. But such was the longevity and intensity of the dispute over Orr’s sacking that not only Todd but his successor, James McAuley, ultimately became involved in further controversies and attempts to mediate them (Coleman, 101).5 What we might call the microclimate of the institution at Tasmania seems to have had a more decisive impact on the shape of the discipline there than any larger trend, and to have seriously impeded the development of a culture of scholarship.

Arnold, Oxford and Shakespeare

Tasmania was briefly the home of Thomas Arnold junior. Thus his daughter, later known to readers of novels as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the novel featuring the fictionalised version of TH Green, was born in Tasmania. These direct connections between the Arnold family and Australia are secondary, though, to the influence of Thomas Arnold’s son Matthew, as poet, critic and educator. For many, Matthew

149Arnold is still popularly regarded as a founder of English studies, and his espousal of ‘disinterest’ perhaps the most famous critical credo in the discipline. In fact, Arnold is something of a peculiarity, historically; few of his contemporaries or those of the next generation would have regarded him as a leading scholar, despite his widespread influence in public debates about education and criticism. He was a poet and perhaps what would now be termed a ‘public intellectual’, who aimed to simplify and disseminate rather than refine complex ideas. To a certain extent Arnold’s motives in relation to education were practical, and his assumptions about critical method were essentially exegetical – he expresses belief, at least in his criticism, in a timeless text, its meanings immanent and unchangeable. More complicatedly still, the author of one of the great Victorian poems about loss of faith (Dover Beach), in the twentieth century almost perversely became associated with the opposite of what he represented in his own lifetime: elitist and idealist in his promotion of the value of the study of English. Arguably, if the former version of Arnold had not existed, those who seemed to be his spiritual descendants would have had to invent it.

One of the most famous of Arnold’s collections is Culture and Anarchy (1869), which begins with the essay ‘Sweetness and Light’, and also includes his famous dissertation on ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’. In ‘Sweetness and Light’, a phrase often used as a metaphor for refinement or high culture, Arnold makes an argument which owes its premises equally to Plato and Christian faith.

In such a statement we can see Arnold’s desire to reject the critical idealism which was beginning to find purchase at Oxford, which was turning to questions of context in considering written texts, and which was attempting to theorise the value of art. To choose Arnold as ‘father’ is to 150choose Christian faith over philosophical reason, absorption of English tradition over study of European scholarship, Jowett over Green.

In perhaps the most quoted essay for critics of English literature, ‘The Function of Criticism’, Arnold defined criticism as ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’ (Lectures and Essays, 283). Again, we can note here the implication that the emphasis should be on absorption and reiteration, or in university terms, training rather than research. This is not usually pointed out by followers of Arnold; nor is it generally noted that he immediately followed his declaration by arguing that very little of English literature should be included in ‘the best that is known and thought’. In fact, this is a key point that is reiterated throughout the essay, for Arnold was no nationalist when it came to literature: like so many of his generation, he accepted the cultural and intellectual authority of the Greeks. But what is crucial is that, just as the selection of (a version of) Arnold as progenitor tells us much about the time in which that choice is made, so too do Arnold’s ideas about history tell us something about his own time. Frank Turner is at pains to argue that Arnold’s appropriation of Greek culture and thought was highly selective, perhaps even ill-informed. As Turner’s broader argument shows, while Greek and Roman cultures had great authority, it was an abstract and idealised ‘ancient world’ that lived in the minds of the cultural elite and which was used to authorise their own dominance.

If invoking Arnold offered a kind of guarantee of academic authority to literary critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, so too did possessing an Oxbridge degree. In the nineteenth century, colonial universities had often served as places for preliminary education. Those who studied Arts at Sydney or Melbourne, and later Adelaide or Tasmania, might then proceed to Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh to complete a degree. Educator Charles Pearson, who collaborated on a number of translations with HS Strong, commented in the late 1870s that

151It has been noted that, at about the same time, there were some thirty Australians studying medicine at Edinburgh (Gardner, 114). When Australian universities set up their own professional degrees this movement slightly decreased, so that those students who did still travel to England were not so much upper-middle-class students in search of professional qualifications that would allow them to earn a living, but upper-class ones like Charles Jury (or Patrick White) who sought in a way to solidify their cultural credentials. The exceptions are those able to obtain scholarships, particularly a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, or the James King of Irrawang travelling scholarship from Sydney.

In a period in which Australian universities might have been expected to have become more independent in curricula and staffing through growth, they and others in the Empire moved very deliberately to strengthen relationships with British universities. A formal alliance was mooted at a conference in 1903 and an association for universities across the empire was formally constituted at a second conference in 1911, with enthusiastic Australian support. At this meeting, it was said by the vice-chancellor of McGill (Canada) that the representatives from the colonial universities could feel ‘like children gathering round the family hearth’ (Community of Universities, 9). But like the Round Table, this community was ultimately a political one:

An important element of this strengthening of ties was the development of postgraduate study in British institutions that had previously been committed mainly to undergraduate teaching. There were pressures from universities in what were termed ‘the dominions’ (like Australia) on Oxford and Cambridge to increase postgraduate teaching. Most Rhodes scholars, for example, had already taken degrees and therefore wanted to take a postgraduate qualification rather than 152taking a second undergraduate one, as earlier generations had been content to do. More importantly, demand for postgraduate degrees in England was accelerated after the First World War, because it was expected that German and Austrian universities would no longer be attractive to the English-speaking students who had generally travelled there for further study. At a small conference held in May 1917, the radical suggestion was made that some postgraduate qualification be introduced to British universities. The proponents of the idea, including members of the British Foreign Office, had the dual aims of taking over the role previously filled by the German-speaking countries, and thereby strengthening links between England and the rest of the English-speaking world.

When a larger conference reconvened a year later, with representatives from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it was resolved that action to develop the degree of doctor of philosophy be commended to British universities. This shift was ‘crucial in the history of British higher education’ and for universities throughout the Empire (Community of Universities, 17). The conference aimed to make Britain the centre of cultural and intellectual development in the English-speaking world.6 When the second congress of the universities of the British Empire was held in 1921, it was claimed in the opening address by the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (Lord Curzon) that the defeat of Germany and the destruction of her universities had provided ‘a rare opportunity’ for Britain (4). It should therefore

The unspoken rival, of course, was no longer Europe but the United States. The apparently self-satisfied statement from this product of Eton and Oxford, a former Viceroy of India, can also be read as a ‘radical’ challenge to those of his colleagues who thought that the very idea of taking a postgraduate degree was shabbily materialistic.

Regardless of the actual mode of study, Oxford positions its students and academics as embodying intellectual and related forms of authority. Arguably this is even more the case in the discipline of ‘English’, with which Oxford is almost literally synonymous because of its dictionary, its press, and the university’s perceived relationship to English culture. Conversely, the institution’s almost ostentatiously arcane rituals, that might in other contexts or other cultures be seen as authoritarian or simply foolish, are an essential part of its mystique. They acquire gravity by virtue of their longevity, as well as the seriousness about which they are spoken and with which they are performed. What is distinctive about Oxford is not so much a reputation in teaching and research, but the tensile strength of the institution’s norms, and more specifically in the case of English, the capacity of those who reverence the university’s authority to set aside the institution’s long history of opposition to the discipline, as well as criticism of the unimaginative forms which English literary study subsequently took there.

In the early decades of the discipline, Oxford offered not so much an elite education as training in ritual and response. It is an assimilative model, or as PA Barnett, a professor of English in South Africa, put it,

154This ‘immersion’ enables ‘practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction or, a fortiori, explicit co-ordination’ (Bourdieu, Logic, 58–59). More simply, the student is not directly coerced into taking up a set of cultural values, but experiences their assimilation as higher learning.

There was, however, lasting resistance in Oxford to the idea of becoming a postgraduate destination, not least in the discipline of English. In a paper given at the fourth congress of the imperial organisation in 1931, David Nichol Smith suggested that there was considerable ambivalence towards the PhD, sometimes (pejoratively) termed ‘the American degree’, notwithstanding its much longer association with the universities of Germany (Untitled Paper). Nichol Smith, Merton Professor of English at Oxford, suggested that the preference was for students seeking more advanced qualifications to do the BLitt. Ironically enough his own reputation in the discipline owed a great deal to the fact that he was the first person to graduate from Oxford with DPhil in English, but in 1928–29 only two candidates were awarded the same degree, compared to thirteen who graduated with a BLitt; numbers were similar the following year. The effect of these developments in Australia was to retard the development of research degrees: the first PhD in English in Australia seems to have been submitted in 1954, and the awarding of the degree was not widespread until the early 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, as in the decades around the turn of the century, it would be young men with sometimes modest formal qualifications received from British universities who were best placed to compete for one of the rapidly increasing number of positions created by the dramatic expansion in the number and size of Australian universities (Schonell).

Oxford was by far the preferred destination for postgraduate students, although a handful of those who later obtained professorial positions before 1975 – David Bradley, Vincent Buckley, Clive Hart and George Russell – went to Cambridge. The influence of the idea of Oxford can be seen in the work of Australian-born and educated intellectuals who, like ER Holme, were inspired by but had not actually studied at the 155university. An example is provided by Harold Oliver, best known as an editor of Shakespeare.

Born in 1916 in Sydney, Oliver graduated from Sydney with a university medal in English before proceeding to a law degree. He spent only a year in his legal studies before being appointed to a tutorship in the Department of English at Sydney, where he remained for twenty-three years. He subsequently became the first professor of English at New South Wales in 1960, remaining there until his retirement in 1982. The department at the old ‘University of Technology’ had been established in 1949 and had long been staffed by women, but Oliver was credited by his Sydney colleague GA Wilkes with ‘establishing a new department’ when he arrived (Harold James Oliver, 93). Wilkes noted that Oliver’s commitment to ‘standards’ ‘may have left him at times feeling besieged’ by movements to allow democracy in administration, not to mention options between subjects (94). David English has written of Oliver that ‘the name of FR Leavis caused him to go speechless, and nineteenth-century character appreciation was itself the kind of amiable chat reserved for relaxation after tutorials on plot and textual variants’ (56). Despite this, Oliver was by no means averse to the task of evaluation: in a review of Helen Gardner’s The Business of Criticism, for example, he is dismissive of her argument that judgement is not the concern of the critic, and endorses the dogmatism of another male critic: ‘Miss Gardner’s book, then, is pleasant in a gossipy sort of way, wandering, rarely provoking, and to be honest, thin; Mr Bowers’ is overstated and impolite, heterogeneous, often provoking, and not to be missed’ (Theory and Practice, 57; see also his Shakespeare and Surveyors). It is hard to imagine a better example of the ways in which stereotypes could structure the gendered selection of adjectives, presented as ‘disinterested’ academic judgement.

As David English’s account of Oliver’s methods suggests, the kind of training which Oxford now offered and which was copied by Australian universities was radically different to that envisioned by idealists like Green. (A much more ambitious, pedagogically driven and politicised version of English would re-emerge, but at Oxford’s great rival Cambridge: see chapter six.) The Oxford BLitt, by contrast, offered 156training in ‘research methods’ based on precisely that positivism and scholasticism that Green and his associates deplored. These included studies of ‘Elizabethan handwriting, the relation of manuscripts, the establishment of texts, the history of English editing and of English studies, bibliography, [and] the resources of the Bodleian’ (Nichol Smith, Untitled Paper, 86–87). This empirical version of English emerges in – and was shaped by – the journals published by Oxford’s own press: Review of English Studies, Essays in Criticism and Notes and Queries. A postgraduate student’s first publication was often a contribution to the latter, a short comment on some textual or interpretive point (the latter usually grounded in some new ‘factual’ discovery), a biographical note, or a correction or citation for the Oxford English Dictionary. Contributions had modest titles, such as ‘The Date of Donne’s Birth’, or ‘The Building of the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street: Some Details of Finance’. Gustav Cross (see below) more or less made a career out of contributing to this journal, having twenty-four notes on John Marston published in Notes and Queries between 1954 and 1963, leading up to his appointment to a chair, along with a range of other essays in that and other journals.

FW Bateson, an original subscriber and frequent contributor to the Review of English Studies, described that journal as a ‘general diet … of biographical discoveries, attributions, sources and influences’ (201). He concluded that although his preference was for Review of English Studies (over Essays in Criticism, that name signalling the ‘lighter’ or ‘softer’ version of the discipline), it was also necessary to acknowledge that the Review represented a ‘fundamentally non-humane ideal of scholarship’ (201). Professors of English in Australia who published in the Review of English Studies (in chronological order) were Brereton, Cowling, JIM Stewart, Colin Horne, Waldock, Oliver, HW Piper, SL Goldberg, John Colmer, Ian Donaldson, Ralph Elliott, Tony Gibbs, JD Hainsworth, JP Hardy, AN Jeffares, Johnston, Harold Rogers and William Scott – of whom thirteen were graduates of Oxford. Their contributions focus mainly on early modern English writers, and there are none on the work of a woman writer. 157

This new, ‘scholarly’ version of Oxford English came to Australia in the 1930s. Its first professorial representative, fittingly, was a holder of the Jury Chair at Adelaide, JIM Stewart. James Innes Mackintosh Stewart was born in Edinburgh in 1906 and educated at the Edinburgh Academy. After taking an MA at Oxford, Stewart briefly held a lectureship at Leeds. He was recruited from there by Adelaide’s assiduous vice-chancellor, William Mitchell, who had had consultations with David Nichol Smith before making the offer to Stewart. After a decade at Adelaide, Stewart left Australia for a position at Queen’s, Belfast, eventually returning to a fellowship at Oxford. His best-known contribution to literature was some sixty detective novels, published under the pen-name Michael Innes, twelve of which were published when he was in Adelaide. During Stewart’s time in Australia he also published two studies of literary education, Educating the Emotions and Study and Experience. These books indicate an interest in the kinds of issues that we might associate with followers of Leavis, or Cambridge English, signalling the permeability of boundaries between the two approaches.

Stewart’s autobiography, Myself and Michael Innes, is sprinkled with derogatory clichés about Australia, and demonstrates that the policing of accent described in chapter one was actively pursued in Adelaide during his period in the Jury Chair. From Stewart’s perspective, the demand to maintain a certain kind of speech was surely tied closely to his sense of maintaining an identity which entwined his past and his profession:

Stewart’s discussion of his time in Australia begins with an anecdote about a visit to Darnley Naylor, who had been professor of classics at Adelaide. At the end of an otherwise relaxed visit, the Englishman Naylor hisses a dramatic warning to Stewart and his wife: ‘Let nothing except penury take you into exile’ (97). Needless to say, Stewart’s chapter on 158Adelaide ends with the same warning, his time at Adelaide represented as a wearisome and unfulfilling apprenticeship, during which he and his wife had been dogged by ‘a persistent home-sickness which at times had threatened to deepen into a nostalgia proper’ (114). At times, more pernicious emotions took hold. On seeing the Western Australian coast for the first time, Stewart claims to have imagined himself ‘gallantly but forlornly awaiting engulfment by some status quo ante in which an almost empty continent would again be thinly roamed by obstinately primitive persons with sticks or bones through their noses’ (99). He modifies this appalling remark, in part: ‘Although this first impression was, of course, extravagant, something of it was to remain with me, and in retrospect seems arguable still’ (99). It is a strange rhetorical move by which a supposedly sparse population, ‘obstinately primitive’, function as proof that the country is a ‘cultural desert’: the disappearing fragment (as Stewart describes them) somehow threatening to overwhelm. As Stewart experiences them, Australia’s people are always at risk of lapsing into a different and primitive past.

Only on his return to England did Stewart return to publishing criticism, mainly on Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. Following his departure the chair was occupied for several years by Charles Jury, then for a year by the person who had presumably recommended Stewart for the position, David Nichol Smith. Nichol Smith was in his mid seventies at that stage, having retired in 1946 after some forty years teaching at Oxford. Following his departure from England he took up a series of professorships at universities including Smith College in Massachusetts, Chicago, Cambridge, King Faud I in Cairo, Edinburgh, Adelaide and the University of New Zealand, spending about a year at each. He is remembered in Australia by the David Nichol Smith seminars at the ANU, and Canberra also benefited from donation of his books to the National Library. Nichol Smith was often consulted during the search that preceded the advertising of chairs in Australia, was a member of the selection committee for his successor and a referee for the successful candidate, co-supervised the BLitt thesis by Melbourne academic SL Goldberg (albeit that Goldberg was a Leavisite), and was subsequently one of Goldberg’s referees. 159

Another form of institutional influence associated with Oxford has been the university’s press, including the branch based in Melbourne. The Oxford University Press imprimatur has been given to some controversial collections of ‘Australiana’, notably Murdoch’s Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse, as well as GKW Johnston’s Australian Literary Criticism and Leonie Kramer’s Oxford History of Australian Literature (discussed in chapter six). These publications are significant not only because they have been overt exercises in canon-making, but because publications like The Oxford History and ‘Writers and Their Work’ are ‘standard’ texts that aim to play a role in shaping initial impressions – impressions that are surprisingly difficult to dislodge. The connection between Johnston and Frank Eyre, manager of the Australian branch of the press, made Oxford University Press important in Australian literature, as GA Wilkes explains in discussing the ‘entrepreneurial’ role played by Johnston:

Johnston had begun his life in scholarship as a medievalist, but like several academics turned to Australian literature more over the course of his career. He regularly reviewed Australian writing, including issues of journals and new poetry, particularly for the Observer. A graduate of New Zealand and Oxford, Grahame Kevin Wilson Johnston was recruited by George Russell to Queensland from a teaching post in New Zealand, leaving Queensland at the same time Russell did. After teaching at Canberra University College (CUC) from 1957 he was appointed to the Robert Wallace Chair at Melbourne in 1962, when still in his early thirties. From Melbourne he returned to Canberra, as 160professor of English at Duntroon (the Australian army college, later absorbed into the Australian Defence Force Academy) from 1966 to 1977. Johnston provided a preface to James McAuley’s collection of essays The Grammar of the Real, and ironically, his last publication before his own death (in his late forties) was an obituary for McAuley (A Sort of Lifeline).

Like Adelaide, Melbourne University had strong connections with Oxford. After George Cowling’s retirement the university tended to appoint to chairs its own graduates who had completed higher degrees there, a pattern which began with the designation of HG Seccombe as acting professor during 1944 and continued with the appointment of Ian Maxwell.7 From the early 1950s Oxford connections began to manifest across Australia, the university’s graduates having been represented in the 1930s by just three professors: Taylor at Tasmania, and Strong and Stewart at Adelaide. This influence was by no means limited to the older metropolitan universities: in 1968, ten out of nineteen full-time staff in the English department at New England in Armidale were Oxford graduates, as was the visiting professor.

The other great ‘signature’ of authority in the discipline of English is Shakespeare. Just as ‘Shakespeare’ plays a central role in relation to popular ideas about English literature and culture, so too does Shakespeare scholarship play a central role in the history of the discipline of English. The importance of ‘Shakespeare’ to Australian literary and academic culture in the first century of the discipline can scarcely be over-estimated: from the turn of the century to the 1950s, during which time the discipline consolidated its position within the academy, some reputation in Shakespeare scholarship was all but essential. ‘Shakespeare’ played a significant role in the careers not only of early teachers like Williams and MacCallum, and MacCallum’s students such as Brereton and Waldock, but for successive generations of professors of English literature including David Bradley, ON Burgess, Cowling, Ernst de Chickera, SL Goldberg, JP Hardy, Derick Marsh, Harold Oliver, HL

161Rogers, Nichol Smith, Stewart, Taylor and GA Wilkes; Arthur Brown, John Colmer, Gustav Cross, Ian Donaldson, JD Hainsworth, Murdoch, Raymond Southall, Stable, Strong, Tucker and Wallace also had at least one significant publication on Shakespeare’s work. Put another way, half of those who held chairs in English in the first century of the discipline have at least one publication on Shakespeare, while a quarter could fairly be regarded as specialists.8 The dominant figures are those who gained or consolidated their reputations with studies of Shakespeare’s work, notably MacCallum.

The reification of Shakespeare and of his plays was based on the recuperation of character or ‘nature’, the view that Shakespeare was not (just) a great writer but an exemplary man [sic]. Thus Alma Hartshorn remembers Queensland academic JJ Stable choosing ‘Shakespeare the Man’ as the theme for her fourth-year English honours class. The approach was surely influenced by one of nineteenth-century Britain’s leading figures, Thomas Carlyle, particularly his essays in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (one of which was on Shakespeare). In his inaugural lecture delivered in 1884, EE Morris quoted and then commented on Carlyle to argue that recognition of the universal value of Shakespeare and English literature was essential to the maintenance of cultural connections between England and Australia:

The community that is able to reconstitute Shakespeare as a living presence legitimises its claim to commonality with the metropolis. Morris, like MacCallum in New South Wales and Boulger in Adelaide, was founder of the Shakespeare Society in his state. The Melbourne society became the largest in the world, with over 450 members (Stewart, 15). AT Strong was president for 1913–14, and a supporter of Alan Wilkie, a touring thespian who attempted to keep Shakespeare performance ‘alive’ in Australia.

Claims about the resemblances between Shakespeare the human being and the authorial sensibility evident in his work are often strongest in readings of his (last?) play The Tempest, and specifically, in interpretations of the play’s protagonist, Prospero. In part this is because Prospero’s final monologue, in which he asks the audience to set him free, is often read as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the theatre. Readings which take the relations between Prospero, his daughter Miranda and his slave Caliban as a metaphor for colonialism have become commonplace since Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1956), but for students reading English in Australia, The Tempest has more often been represented as a parable about the dangers of barbarism than the dangers of colonisation. An extract from lecture notes held in the Enid Derham papers is symptomatic of these interpretations of the play, and of the way this interpretation slides from veneration of Prospero the character to veneration of Shakespeare the exemplary man. At the same time, questions about power and politics are set aside in favour of a supposed ‘universal human value’ that is a thinly disguised stereotype of British benevolence: 163

This pity for ‘lands [and people] still dark to knowledge’ buttresses the position of student and teacher who, in their appreciation of the fineness of Prospero/Shakespeare, are made members of a ‘common humanity’ whose values transcend time or place. In lecture after lecture the same movement occurs: sources or performance histories are mapped with careful detail, then Shakespeare and his work are suddenly made ‘timeless’. But the claim about ‘lands still dark to knowledge’ reverberates with Stewart’s fear of being overtaken by blackness. Repeatedly, the fear that the discipline of English will not find traction or permanence is expressed as a fear that colonisation will be reversed: in the terms of colonisation itself, that white will succumb to black, civilisation to barbarism, knowledge to ignorance.

It is important, then, that Shakespeare seems to belong to the precolonial era (at least in British terms): that the colonisers come bearing his books, that unlike colonial writers he is not charged with making meaning in the new place. The critics constantly shuttle between seeing his work as an expression of its time and place, and as a verification of timeless human values. The methodological difficulty produced by this contradiction is clearest in the work of Mungo MacCallum, who resolves this conflict (in part) by confining his discussion of ‘history’ to literary history.10 As his study of the Roman plays showed, he was indefatigable

164in tracking sources. For example, he observes that there were three contemporary accounts of the Virginia wreck that might have been the catalyst for The Tempest, and proposes numerous possible sources for the story-line.11 He points out that in the Annals of Genoa (1477) it is recorded that the Duke Prospero was deposed by his brother Antonio, and that Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (translated in 1591) describes the retreat of a hermit and a powerful tempest. The name of ‘Setebos’ is traced to a translation of Magellan’s Voyage to the South Pole (1577), the convention of ‘strange noises’ to the Travels of Marco Polo (1579). But this careful contextualisation is set aside when the detail of the text comes under scrutiny: the hermeneutic circle is snapped. (I think this must have confused students, who could reasonably wonder how the discussion of context they had heard could be ignored when they were coming to a reading of the play.)

MacCallum now argues that The Tempest is, above all, a refutation of Montaigne’s argument that ‘men call that barbarism which is not common to them’. In his unexpectedly politicised reading, The Tempest becomes an emphatic argument that the difference between civilisation and savagery is not a matter of context, as Montaigne would have it, but is absolute, and intrinsic. The ‘critical’ aspect of idealism is discarded so that the connections with historical texts and events that MacCallum himself has painstakingly pieced together, which offer such strong evidence of Shakespeare’s reference to the dramas of colonisation being played out in his lifetime, are discarded. Instead, The Tempest is ultimately read as a statement about culture and barbarism that fits with – is in part produced by – MacCallum’s own reading position. For someone who saw himself as a cultured man of letters, albeit in exile, MacCallum assumes and endorses culture over barbarism, metropolitan over colonial, beliefs which give value not only to the literary text but to those who teach it. In effect, his reading of the play constitutes a passionate defence of his own life and work as a Shakespeare scholar.

165That MacCallum concludes with the observation that ‘fallen’ members of the ‘civilised race’ such as Stephano and Trinculo are morally even more culpable than the likes of Caliban, who knows no better, could serve only as a warning to teachers of literature of both the precariousness and the importance of their mission.

A quite different reading of the play was offered to students at Adelaide by Charles Jury. Jury, drawing on Lytton Strachey, suggests that Prospero ‘is a man who makes himself studiously unpleasant, at one time or another, to nearly every other character in the play’. Whereas MacCallum reads the play as a coherent refutation of Montaigne, Jury rejects the argument that it is possible to find a ‘systematic and consistent allegory’ in The Tempest. What is intriguing is that Jury, much more likely to be regarded as an ‘unscholarly’ figure and only sporadically associated with the academy, produces a more tentative but also more nuanced and potentially more persuasive reading. He qualifies this reading with an acknowledgment that he was offering his own, not the interpretation:

Jury’s lecture on The Tempest is also distinctive in that it explains the play in terms of performance, and suggests that it is not a naturalistic work. As this brief example shows, we cannot presume the techniques, erudition or otherwise of any critic or teacher without access to evidence, evidence that is only rarely available. MacCallum was the renowned Shakespeare scholar and Jury easily presented as a dilettante, but it is the reading by the latter which offers a more nuanced account of the play.

166

Old Norse myth: Maxwell at Melbourne

In the nineteenth century a small group of assiduous enthusiasts argued that the ‘origins’ of the English language, the progenitors of English literature, and the masters of literary scholarship could be found not in Germany but further north. England had, of course, experienced various waves of invasion and immigration, but a certain degree of selectivity often pertains in accounts of that history. Heather O’Donohue’s ‘short introduction’ to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature suggests that for some nineteenth-century British readers, the sagas

These claims for the pre-eminence of the northern cultures do not seem to have gained academic respectability in the nineteenth century, even during conflicts which made the search for an alternative to German scholarship and literature urgent (see Wawn, 371). The editors of Corpus Poeticum Borealis of 1883 give the game away when they assure their readers ‘it is the amateur scholar, “earnest and devoted”’ who pursues his or her interests ‘without any desire for reward or fame or publication’ who ‘every writer must cherish as furnishing many of his best readers’ (Vigfusson and Powell, cxxi).

The assumption that the study of the English language was institutionalised before the study of English literature, and that language study is therefore, in some profound sense, ‘foundational’ (see Clunies Ross, 5), cannot be correct, for the historical order in which texts have been written is no useful guide for understanding the history of their study. But claims about the value of a specific field of English are related, in complicated ways, to claims about the value of a particular body of texts – something that would profoundly shape early academic discussions of Australian literature.

The veneration of Old Icelandic is part of a larger debate about the origins of English literature itself, as well as the English language. The 167earliest major work of English literature is generally taken to be the poem Beowulf, thought to have been written before or after the tenth century; Geoffrey Chaucer, generally regarded as the first major English author, was born in the early 1340s and died in 1400. The sagas were probably written in the intervening period. Beowulf is now thought to mix various dialects from what is now England, although it is set mainly in what is now Denmark and Sweden; by contrast, the sagas use a language called Old Norse or, sometimes, Old Icelandic, and are set in Iceland. By claiming them as antecedent, a more complex, non-Germanic origin is posited for ‘English’. It seems clear that early claims for the significance of Old Icelandic rested more on political debates than their actual place within the history of either language or literature. In England, one modern commentator suggests that the sagas became popularly associated with ‘political liberty, democracy, legal freedoms and the independence of the individual’, along with physical bravery, and a refusal to fear death (O’Donoghue, 121). This faith in violent, quasi-mystical charismatic leadership – often thought the mark of a primitive society – was, in O’Donoghue’s view, marked by Carlyle’s positioning of Odin as the first ‘great man’ in his Great Men of History (126).

A sense of the kind of disdain these sentiments could provoke among scholars emerges in a set of testimonials for an applicant for the chair of Anglo-Saxon and Northern Antiquities at Oxford around 1876. The Reverend Frederick Metcalfe had just one reference from an academic working in Britain, a reference which began by noting that the writer had been in the same form at school as Metcalfe, ‘now a good many years ago’ (Holland, n.p.). If that hint of distance were not sufficient, TE Holland, Chichele Professor of International Law, noted with slightly too much humility that ‘I feel painfully my incompetency to weigh the special merits of the candidates for the chair of Anglo-Saxon and Northern Antiquities’ (n.p.) – perhaps more telling than that, thirty-three of the thirty-five leaves in this collection of testimonials are blank. The only compliment Holland could muster, in the third and final sentence of his reference, was that Metcalfe had ‘a vivid interest in his subject’. (There are more enthusiastic references from academics 168in Norway and Denmark, and one sentence from the author of Norse Popular Tales.) Whilst we can of course attribute Holland’s difficulties to personality, it is telling that the first British scholar appointed to a university position in Old Norse-Icelandic, John Sephton, was probably at Liverpool (O’Donoghue, 128, 129). O’Donohue gives no details, but his publications suggest that Sephton spent a considerable time at the university. As with English and Australian literature, more ‘peripheral’ institutions seem to be more adventurous in terms of curriculum; this of course has the effect of confirming the marginality of the subject in more prestigious institutions, who have less reason to invest in innovation as the means of developing their reputation.

More troublingly, according to O’Donohue, in Germany itself, those who had taken up the same field helped to fuel insidious versions of nationalist passion. In this respect, the study of Old Icelandic language and literature demonstrates – as Martin Bernal has argued, to the discomfort of his colleagues – that the study of language and literature has, in various periods and in different ways, helped to provide the intellectual architecture of racism in the twentieth century. This is rather different from the common sense view that while literary studies is in danger of becoming captive to ideological (that is to say, ‘cultural’) values rather than scholarly ones because of its lack of rigour, those who use more ‘rigorous’ methods of ‘language’ study are, by virtue of their attachment to detachment, protected from the influence of those values. However the discourses of language study, as much as if not more than the discourses of literary study, have helped to shape a world in which the welding of imaginative literature or language, national character, and the racialised contours of society, are brought together in ways that ostensibly make sense of the veneration of bold and brave white men. For which language is studied matters, deeply, to students and teachers. One participant in the debate about the inclusion of English literature in the curriculum at Oxford, for example, complained that ‘An English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’13

169A more successful case for the study of Icelandic was later made on the basis that England and Iceland had ‘common origins’, as well as ‘a common geographical situation … and both had an indigenous literary culture with a similar history: a Germanic, oral literature transformed, in complex but parallel ways, by the coming of Christianity’ (O’Donoghue, 135). As an indication of the importance of political contexts, it is noteworthy that Old Icelandic did not consolidate its institutional presence until during the Second World War. This is perhaps why the proliferation of popular translation in the nineteenth century is under-represented in the Melbourne and Sydney libraries, although both universities have been strongholds of the field internationally.14 John Martin’s enthusiastic account of Icelanders in Australia suggests that the teaching of Old Norse began at Melbourne in 1944 and at Sydney a year or two earlier. As Martin describes it,

Lodewyckx retired in 1949, after which the teaching was taken over by Keith Macartney and then, in 1954, by Ian Maxwell (Martin, People, 103).

Ian Ramsay Maxwell was born in 1901, and like Walter Murdoch attended Scotch College and then Melbourne University, from which he graduated with honours in English and a law degree. In 1926 Maxwell was admitted to the bar, where he worked until the onset of the Depression, at which time he left the law and returned to university. This time, however, he went to Balliol College, where he took a BLitt

170in 1935 after first entering the university in 1932. After graduation he obtained a position at the University of Copenhagen, where he lectured for several years before obtaining a position at Sydney. Maxwell commented late in life that the hardest workload he encountered was in Denmark, although he was head of department and dean in Melbourne (Maxwell, Interview).

Maxwell was among the first of more than a dozen male academics from Sydney’s English department to obtain chairs at Sydney and elsewhere, taking up a chair in his home city in 1946.16 He remained there until 1968, and is one of the most influential figures in what was a formative period in the discipline. In terms of publications his output was not large, as he himself observed: three or four articles, and one book. In the acknowledgements to the latter, Maxwell thanks his supervisor at Oxford and, interestingly, Walter Murdoch, whom he says read a draft, and suggested that a monograph would be feasible. The subject and tone of an interview with Maxwell in the archive of the National Library of Australia seem to reveal a man who enjoyed the timbre and precision of his own voice, who placed particular emphasis on the spoken word, and who believed strongly in enthusiasm for writers and writing as the foundation of good teaching. The aesthetic preferences which emerge are for poetry (particularly the sagas); for Milton (whom he defends against Leavis, without naming him); and for Walter Scott. In all, for literature which reveals the souls of great men (the term is Maxwell’s). The interview is equally revealing for the fact that no women are mentioned, as writers, colleagues, family or friends. And although he is now identified primarily as a scholar of Old Icelandic, Maxwell notes that he did not learn the language until entering his fifties; his first major publication was not until ten years after his appointment to the chair at Melbourne.

Maxwell was described by AA Phillips as his ‘most intimate university friend, and one of the most engaging and colourful personalities I have ever encountered’:

171

Notwithstanding this friendship with the author of ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Maxwell was unsupportive of Australian literature, something which emerges in the interview where he notes his concern that no member of staff should ever specialise in the subject. His correspondence indicates that he was prepared to sacrifice the journal Meanjin in order to use the money which funded it, the Lockie Bequest for Australian literature, to provide a position in the English department for Vincent Buckley.18

There is a sense in which Maxwell occupied a place at the periphery of the academy in terms of his relatively slender output of published work and his absorption in a new and marginal field of study. But there were counterweights, one of which might have been his speaking voice, the exactness of which is peculiarly redolent of Menzies (who also had a career in the law in Melbourne). So, too, a certain self-confidence, which falters, in a rather moving way, at the end of the interview as he notes his increasing distance from the department at Melbourne, a distance assuaged by his continuing to read the sagas with former students. For during the fifties and sixties Maxwell enjoyed a position at the very centre of the discipline in Australia, a position hinted at and consolidated by his authorship of the essay on ‘English’ for A Grenfell Price’s volume on the humanities in Australian universities. More specifically, Maxwell’s

172influence was felt in his supplying of references for the many students of Melbourne English who entered the academy, references that are preserved in the university’s Archives. These testimonials – which like the Meanjin archive were a rich source for this study – make fascinating reading, being nearly always positive, judicious, detailed – and late. They tend to begin by discussing the applicant’s qualifications and abilities in teaching, and often mention looks and accent. Comments on female students, later senior scholars, express measured disapproval of what is characterised as disorganisation or lack of discipline in style. Reading them as a group, it would seem that ‘eccentricity’ of view or interest was more tolerated in men than women.

Maxwell’s views on postgraduate study, which affected the way in which he evaluated the achievements of his colleagues and students, are expressed frequently in the references and were made public in his essay on ‘English’:

The ‘if they take it at all’ reflects the lingering effect of views like those expressed by Nichol Smith, who objected to ‘professionalising’ literary study. Maxwell himself was part of a generation who were directed to the BLitt, and in one reference he expressed approval that a student has decided to enrol in this degree rather than a PhD – although this might also be connected to the fact that the person concerned was female. Clearly, it is culture and not scholarship that was gained in overseas study, hence the remark that there would be ‘strong objections to awarding the degree to a candidate of purely local experience’. In several references, Maxwell notes that the applicant is ‘handicapped’ by having researched only Australian subjects – or, as he expressed it in one letter, ‘Good men should not be confined to Aust. Lit’. 173

The Story so Far

The commitment to imperialism was energised, intellectually, by a critical idealism remoulded in the colonial environment as a duty and mission to maintain and transmit a wholly British literary aesthetic to students. The ambivalence about the value of Australian education and culture that we can see in some writing from this period is a symptom of the difficulties many experienced in trying to instil faith in the supposedly universal values of English educational institutions. Classics had long reigned supreme in the universities, but English literature came to increasing prominence in a period when ‘Englishness’ itself became a prized virtue. More specifically, what was coveted was that ideal Englishness shaped in a British university, preferably Oxford or Cambridge, ideally Oxford. With a first in Literae Humaniores and some teaching experience, it was possible to ‘parachute’ into a chair at a relatively young age. MacCallum, a graduate of Glasgow, is the exception, but his teachers and mentors, who would become his referees and patrons, had close connections with Oxford.

Aided in part by packed curricula, and in part by extensive periods of study and travel in Europe, almost all the academics teaching English in the early period were multilingual: German, French and Latin seem to have been regarded as a bare minimum, to which many added a little Greek, and at least one other modern language: for Murdoch, Italian, for example. Many professors of English, such as Cowling, Douglas, Henderson, MacCallum, Murdoch, AT Strong, Waldock, and Williams had active and lengthy careers in research and popular writing. They produced monographs, collections of critical essays, anthologies and scholarly editions, as well as publishing articles in scholarly journals and newspapers. These first two generations of scholars were also, and perhaps most notably, breathtakingly active in community groups, usually those devoted to literature and drama. Many of the group named above reviewed regularly for the metropolitan newspaper in their state, reading half a dozen new books in a range of European languages and reporting on them every week or every fortnight. They can by no means be characterised as cut off from the literary culture of their time: on the contrary, in many respects, they can be seen as that 174culture’s epicentre, in their home city at least. And they were social elites in a time when political and educational institutions were much more obviously committed to providing resources for that elite, and when the rewards of belonging to that elite were high.

For local candidates, the path to a chair was very different, and longer, than for their English colleagues. An important accomplishment was scholarship in medieval or Elizabethan literature, ideally with a classical slant. Publications were valued, but not to the extent that Oxford or Cambridge degrees were. Taking these degrees produced surrogate Englishness, an attribute necessary at all universities except Sydney. There, the lasting influence of MacCallum was central to the establishment of an independent tradition, but one that was still greatly indebted to an idealised England. The other exception is Western Australia, where Murdoch obtained the chair of English with the direct support of a former prime minister, Alfred Deakin. Put simply, would-be Australian-born academics needed a mentor of sufficient status and will to ensure their appointment was made; only through such strong intervention could the hegemony of ‘Englishness’ be challenged. It is ironic that some of the most influential male names in the history of the discipline owe their positions to what might be termed ‘positive discrimination’, even as they scorned the writing and scholarship of women. A precise measure of the hierarchy of English and Australian can be seen in the time which it took for an Australian-born academic to obtain a senior position. Those appointed to chairs from England in this period had an average age of twenty-eight; the average age of British candidates working in Australia at the time of their appointment to a chair was forty-two; the average age of Australian-born candidates who obtained a chair was forty-seven.

If academic staff were de facto required to be graduates of an English university, students and others could vigorously protest this policy. Just as students at Melbourne petitioned the university’s council in 1911, Sydney undergraduates petitioned the senate to appoint a graduate of Sydney to an assistant lectureship in classics advertised in 1890. There were also complaints about the dominance of English over Irish or Scottish (see M.F.H.), and of British over European (see Thibault). The 175Scottish is a more complicated case, for several senior figures in the discipline were Scots – notably Mungo MacCallum, also Robert Wallace and, more tenuously, Walter Murdoch. Three Scottish universities were founded in the fifteenth century – St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451) and Aberdeen (1495), while Edinburgh dates from 1582.19 During the nineteenth century these institutions could fairly lay claim to greater credibility than their English rivals and as a consequence the Scottish ‘minority’ seems to have been a more powerful force than any other. On the other hand, claims about ‘the Scottish invention of English literature’ risk overlooking the collisions which occurred between those of Scottish descent or accent, and the intellectual influence of Europe in the nineteenth century: whilst Robert Crawford, who coined the phrase, avoids overstatement, not all commentators who cite his work do.20

Despite the significant differences between the universities, Bachelor of Arts courses were relatively standardised in their structure. Study of other languages was often compulsory. There was usually no choice of subjects within a degree until the final year of study, and perhaps not even then. English courses included a large component of language, except at Western Australia. Ironically it was Adelaide – the home of non-specialists – which gave most emphasis to language. Many courses relied upon various editions and volumes of the five-volume collection of English Prose edited by William Peacock and published by Oxford University Press in its ‘World’s Classics’ series. Texts tended to be arranged chronologically, an indication of the emphasis on a historical approach to teaching. Against chronology, Shakespeare was often ‘done’ twice, in first year, and then again in honours, although at Sydney in the interwar period his work seems to have been studied every year. Changes in senior staff almost invariably resulted in a reshuffling of the content of courses, while genre and period often remained fixed – King Lear would replace Hamlet or a history play; a novel by Thackeray one by Meredith or Trollope; students would read Macaulay’s essays, rather

176than Hazlitt’s or Lamb’s. In terms of nationality and gender, the texts are overwhelmingly weighted towards male English writers. George Eliot, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë make occasional appearances, though they are not consistently represented; the number of texts written by anonymous writers, mainly the Bible and Middle English epics, outnumber those written by women.21 There were some courses in nineteenth-century literature, but the poets and novelists listed on them tend to vary. George Meredith was highly regarded by AT Strong, Mungo MacCallum and Walter Murdoch – who rated him the most important novelist of the Victorian period – but was rarely studied, and was not highly regarded by TG Tucker.22 Non-fiction prose was given greater emphasis than became customary in the second half of the twentieth century, fiction less. Two popular writers were Thomas Carlyle (especially Sartor Resartus) and John Henry Newman (Idea of a University). Apart from the odd anthology of Australian poetry, only English writers are represented in the first five decades of the study of literature in Australia. That said, we cannot be sure how closely these lists reflected what was actually taught, and therefore cannot measure the level of Australian content with certainty. It is clear, though, that there was little impetus to diversify or modernise curricula, particularly while library resources were strictly limited and examinations demanded recapitulation rather than interrogation. Above all, the revolutions in English, American and European literature known as modernism that would profoundly alter creative and critical writing were more or less invisible in formal study, notwithstanding the involvement of students in what would become landmarks of Australian modernism, notably the magazines Barjai in Brisbane (see Hatherell) and Angry Penguins in Adelaide (see Miles).

177The upsurge in imperial sentiment that accompanied the First World War and the concomitant denigration of all things Germanic severed some arteries of literary study, vital sources of intellectual rigour and imaginative richness. If the war made (German) idealism and (German) philology suddenly vile, so too did it damage the reputation of (German) Hellenism, (German) Romanticism, and most damaging perhaps, (German) philosophy. Another important effect of the war was to disrupt or cut personal ties between teachers of English and German universities: the withdrawal from these relationships is indicated, symbolically and practically, by the fact that many took on roles as censors. Nevertheless, it seems that some of these connections were maintained in the teeth of the hysteria which swept through Australian universities and which led, at Adelaide, to the absurd proposal that graduates with German ancestry have their degrees rescinded.

The First World War, however, had ‘positive’ consequences for the influence of British universities and for the study of English literature, for in more or less destroying Germany as a destination for postgraduate training, and the popularity of the rival field of modern languages, it created institutional ‘space’ for the emergence of the British universities in postgraduate study, and for English as a vernacular study. During the First World War some women were hired on a temporary basis, as many staff and students left university to enlist, but the exclusion of women from senior academic positions was all but absolute. This majority was in a real sense invisible. A male Arts student at Adelaide commented that

The perspective of a female student at Adelaide around the same time was rather different: ‘In our day, women were only tolerated by the men. We were not allowed into the Sports Union, or even recognised as University teams’ (Duncan and Leonard, 63). It is not surprising that the 178women students who obtain firsts tend to disappear from calendars and histories, while male students with lower results resurface as part-time or temporary tutors, sometimes going on to obtain full-time academic positions. Women, as mothers and teachers, were entrusted with the work of inculcating ‘proper’ accents and sensibilities in children, and in many respects they were understood as embodying and guarding imperial and racial virtue. But although maintaining the pre-eminence of the British race and empire was central to the mission of universities like Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in particular, reason ruled in matters of selection of staff – the appointment of a gentleman of high moral purpose to senior positions was regarded as essential, if not always achievable.

In the period around 1920 there began to be subtle but significant shifts in critical discourses: universal values came to be English and not classical. As representatives, in some sense, of an earlier period, teachers like Brereton, Henderson, Holme, MacCallum and Strong drew (in different ways) on an idealism that proved mobile and long-lasting as a political, a critical, a pedagogical and a social doctrine. But intellectually, in some respects, the discipline could be said to have foundered in the interwar years. Stagnation seemed to ensue as budgets were strained, and there was little or no turnover in staff. Misogyny was exacerbated by the more or less constant fear about being seen to work in a ‘soft’ area, a fear perhaps exacerbated by war. The constant invoking of imperial authority might be understood as a form of layering of reassurance over doubts about the virility of one’s chosen profession. This would explain the pervasiveness of expressions of contempt for women writers, and especially, for women critics – as well as the seductions of a Leavisite criticism which promised a ‘muscular’ criticism. A fertile ground for Leavisism and practical criticism had been prepared – new reading methodologies developed and spread in England and the United States which seem to promise not merely rigour but vigour.