The Anthology Of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction

Title page

The Anthology of

Colonial Australian

Adventure Fiction

Edited by Ken Gelder and

Rachael Weaver

Contents

Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction

Horace Earle

The Hurricane; or, False Friends (1861)

James Skipp Borlase

Cambromatta Station: A Sticking-Up-and-Shooting-Down

Adventure (1867)

Ellen Liston

Cousin Lucy’s Story (1869)

N Walter Swan

Two Days at Michaelmas (1875)

Douglas Sladen

At the Melbourne Cup (1888)

Francis Adams

The Last of the Bushrangers (1892)

Ernest Favenc

The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer (1894)

Hume Nisbet

A Queensland Iliad (1894)

Guy Boothby

Billy Binks—Hero (1898)

Charles Junor

Dead Men’s Tales (1898)

William Sylvester Walker

Fighting the Flood (1898)

Lala Fisher

‘His Luck’ (1899)

Laura Palmer-Archer

My Visit to a Woolshed (1904)

Rosa Praed

Bushed (1907)

Louis Becke

Julius Adolphus Jenkins’s Christmas Alligator (1909)

ML Skinner

The Hand (1928)

Randolph Bedford

Fourteen Fathoms by Quetta Rock (1928)

Notes on the Authors

Publication Sources

Acknowledgements

Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction

Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

For many colonial writers, adventure fiction was the most significant popular genre in Australia, the one that most authentically resonated with colonial experience. But it could also unleash the writer’s imagination. Adventure fiction takes its characters on a journey into unknown territories and regions; it can therefore sometimes overlap with fantasy fiction, especially if it populates those regions with strange people and their peculiar customs, as a number of stories do in this anthology. Homer’s Odyssey is generally regarded as Western culture’s foundational adventure narrative, charting a hero’s elaborate journey back to his homeland and family after the Trojan War—during which he does indeed encounter many strange and wonderful people. One of the stories we have included here, the Scottish-Australian Hume Nisbet’s ‘A Queensland Iliad’, brings Homer explicitly into the late colonial scene, as a lonely shepherd finds himself in the middle of an ongoing war between Aboriginal tribes ‘worthy of even old Trojan and Greek’. But colonial Australian adventure stories generally go in the opposite direction to Homer’s epic poem: travelling away from home, rather than returning to it. Migration—the long journey out to Australia itself, whether voluntary or forced—naturally provides the source material for a great many colonial adventure stories, like Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874), which has its central character, a wrongly-accused transported convict, leaving his homeland, never to return.

The convict story gives us a grimmer, darker kind of adventure narrative, one that can systematically shut down the possibilities inherent in the journey as it comes to define its protagonists almost exclusively in terms of loss: loss of freedom, homeland, inheritance, romance, dignity, and so on. But other colonial adventure stories are more optimistic, looking less at what has been lost and more at what might be gained from the journeys that their characters take. The colonial scene substantially changes the nature of adventure fiction, giving it a new lease of life by providing it with purpose and destination: leaving one’s homeland behind, certainly, but often in order to carve out a new place for settlement and the pursuit of wealth and well-being. Adventure fiction and the colonial project are therefore intimately bound up with one another. But the relationship is often an uneasy one, and even the most positive adventure stories can be shadowed by darkness. The journeys that characters undertake are beset with danger and conflict, and the aspirations of settlement and the attainment of wealth that drive the action along are often impaired by the anguish and trauma of the journey itself. In these adventure stories, everything comes with a price.

Colonial Australian writers were influenced by popular American adventure novelists like the contemporary Bret Harte—who wrote about life on the Californian goldfields—or the earlier frontier novelist Robert Montgomery Bird, whose virulently racist tale of a Kentucky Quaker taking revenge against Native Americans, Nick of the Woods (1837), provides one of the shepherds in N. Walter Swan’s ‘Two Days at Michaelmas’ with an available model for killing a number of local Aboriginal men. ‘People don’t meet with the escapes of the Quaker’, he says, critical of the ease with which Bird’s avenging hero avoids punishment. ‘It’s one of our cheap romances, you know, and cheapness and sensationalism go together. It’s only hut literature’. The shepherd’s throwaway comment is revealing, linking an ephemeral form of literature to an early, transitional phase of colonial settlement. But his rejection of this American adventure novel is generic in another way, too, because the colonial Australian adventure narrative often claims a relationship to actual settler experience that is more hard-edged and authentic. It, too, can be virulently racist, as many of the stories in this anthology will show. Descriptions of violence against Aboriginal people can unfold in lurid, graphic detail, and there is generally no attempt to gloss over or conceal atrocities and killings as settlers defend the properties and territories they lay claim to. Swan’s story gives this a particular emphasis, as the murders of Aboriginal men are seen through mirrors or happen just out of view while the dead and dying look back at their killers. The narrative moves away from ‘hut literature’ as settlement is consolidated later on, but the newer homestead remains tainted by its history of colonial violence. ‘Two Days at Michaelmas’ is a story that reflects on its predicament, at least to a degree, even pausing for a moment as the narrator wonders about the racist use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe Aboriginal people. In other stories in this anthology, that word is used casually and often—with an insistence that might surprise some readers today. But this is merely one aspect of the colonial Australian adventure story’s overall project, to chronicle the horrors and brutalities of colonial exploration and settlement and to confront readers with these accounts as a matter of sheer, raw experience.

The stories in this anthology therefore take their characters into the remotest parts of Australia, where settlement barely has a foothold and where the very notion of home is precarious. The narrator of William Sylvester Walker’s ‘Fighting the Flood’ reflects this at the beginning of the story, selling his outback Queensland station, returning to England, and then migrating back to Australia once more to find the outback station ‘tenantless’ and derelict with the new owners yet to arrive. ‘If I shut my eyes’, he muses, ‘I could easily fancy that my trip to England had been but a myth, and that I was, and had been all the time, still in Australia’. Here, it is as if the return home had never happened: as if this remote station, with its immediately invoked threats of Aboriginal attack and infiltration, is his natural destination. Swan’s narrator is also drawn to his remote bush hut, an animated, defiant place that soon literally comes under attack. In Hume Nisbet’s ‘A Queensland Iliad’, a shepherd sits in a gum tree beside his hut and each day counts the number of sheep on his employer’s station, condemned, like an Australian Sisyphus, to a lifetime of drudging repetition. The setting is harsh, heat-baked and deathly, a long way, as the story notes, from the earlier pastoral verse of Nisbet’s fellow Scot, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ James Hogg. An assault on the lonely shepherd’s hut by warring Aboriginal tribes leads to an erotic encounter that sustains him even as it robs him of the few possessions he has left. This is a story about a character who gives up everything in order to defend a piece of property he doesn’t even own—someone for whom home is now barely a distant memory and the future is little more than a fantasy he can never hope to realise.

There are several stories in this anthology about lonely shepherds in remote bush huts whose mundane, chore-driven existences are suddenly jolted by unexpected encounters that test their loyalties to the squatters who employ them. Ernest Favenc was one of Australia’s most prolific colonial adventure writers, writing around a hundred and fifty short stories for journals including the Bulletin, the Australian Town and Country Journal, and Cosmos Magazine. Like Guy Boothby and Hume Nisbet, he was also an experienced explorer and traveller. ‘The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer’ looks back to an earlier time of ‘real living shepherds’ far away from civilisation. But it also marks itself out as a post-settlement story that has already survived the conflicts with Aboriginal people that Nisbet’s story had chronicled. ‘In the past days the blacks had been troublesome’, Favenc’s narrator says, ‘but now they were all gone, so there was no harm to be apprehended from them’. Favenc’s story nevertheless exploits—and reanimates—this history when a stranger tricks the hut-keeper into believing that he is seeing the ghost of a man who hanged himself out of remorse for the terrible killings that had once taken place so close to where he now lives. The adventure in this story is therefore generated not by Aboriginal conflict at all, but—as it turns out—by cattle rustlers and horse-stealers, culminating in a breathless chase on horseback. Other stories in this anthology also cut themselves free of earlier colonial atrocities against Indigenous people in order to redefine the threat to the pastoral economy, introducing a new cast of enemies and a new paradigm for adventure fiction. As colonial settlement is consolidated, the homestead moves to centre stage; yet the process of consolidation plays itself out over and over, as if it is never allowed to achieve finality. Defending the security of the colonial homestead becomes a key theme of the colonial adventure story.

We can see this especially in the stories by James Skipp Borlase and Guy Boothby. In Borlase’s story, the ‘penniless’ trooper James Brooke is called upon to save a property by a desperate young woman, who turns out to be the daughter of ‘the richest squatter for a circle of fifty miles around’. Cambromatta Station is under siege not by Aboriginal people but by bushrangers, a group of villains who have broken into the property, destroying its genteel interior and cruelly humiliating the station’s owners. Brooke and the squatter’s daughter play out an alliance between this developing pastoral economy and the law, with an added erotic charge on Brooke’s part that helps fuel the daring of the rescue. The young woman emerges as an empowered figure—an excellent horserider, for example—with a sense of entitlement that sees her fully integrated into the pastoral economy at the end. In this adventure story, the bushrangers are unruly caricatures, partly modelled on clichéd accounts of pirates and buccaneers (‘Pull with a will, my hearties!’). But another story in this anthology, Francis Adams’s ‘The Last of the Bushrangers’, gives a more reflective account of this marauding class of colonials, worth noting here. The bushranger Jim Mills is a character embedded directly into the logic of the adventure story: ‘There was in him an element of love of adventure for its own sake’. Becoming a bushranger for him is a matter of careful calculation, however, a disavowal of any form of colonial property investment as well as a distancing from earlier, cruder bushranger types:

If bush-ranging could be made to pay—that is to say, to offer a more pleasurable and lucrative career than the wretched drudgery of starting and working a selection—then by all means he would be a bushranger, and the picturesque part of the affair should be enjoyed and utilised to the full. But to merely follow in the lines of the old Anglo-Australian bushrangers—thick-headed desperadoes like Morgan, or Kelly, or Webb—was manifestly behind the times.

The modernising—and nationalising—of this bushranger, however, is what also brings his career to a close: he has no place in the emergent pastoral economy, except in an adventure story that is now a eulogy for a lost class of colonial types. Significantly, events in the story come to a climax at a massacre site where large numbers of Aboriginal people had been slaughtered years ago.

Guy Boothby’s story ‘Billy Binks—Hero’ combines and transforms a number of aspects of the colonial adventure story that we have seen so far. The married narrator is the manger of an immense outback station in Queensland. The story begins as he journeys away from the station—‘at the close of the hottest day, of the hottest week, of the hottest month, of the hottest year that ever I remember’—and comes across a dying horse-stealer and a mysterious ‘ragamuffin’ child, who the narrator adopts and brings back to the homestead. Billy Binks is a strange, feral figure who never seems to fit comfortably into the narrator’s domestic world, disappearing into the bush, going on nocturnal escapades, riding the horses to exhaustion, and so on. In the meantime, the narrator’s wife has a baby and the family’s claim on the property is strengthened. It seems as if the future of the squattocracy is at last secure. But the narrator, now heavily invested in the pastoral economy, then finds himself preoccupied by a new, emergent and particularly well-organised outside threat:

you must understand that earlier in the season thousands of the riff-raff of the colonies, calling themselves unionists, exceptionally well armed and mounted, had banded themselves together to achieve a certain result, which was neither more nor less than the destruction of the squatters. A conference was held and a general strike of station hands was ordered. Every man in pastoral employment was commanded to participate in it, and those who refused paid dearly for their contumacy. From that time forward stations were robbed, innocent men intimidated, bush-fires started, woolsheds burned, railway bridges destroyed, cattle maimed, until the stability of one of, if not the, most important industries of the colonies trembled in the balance.

The attack on the narrator’s station comes no longer from local Aboriginal people or marauding bushrangers (both have by now disappeared from the colonial landscape), but from organised union labour. The peculiar thing about this ultra-conservative adventure story is that it then uses the feral child to save the property and bring the union threat to an end. It is as if the story has reached deep into the Australian interior to pull out a kind of fantastic, sentimental solution to a real political issue: a (white) child of nature who, even more than the outback shepherds in the stories by Nisbet and Favenc, is called upon to demonstrate his loyalty to a squattocracy he has no structural connection to at all.

The bush and the station coexist uneasily in the colonial Australian adventure story. If threats don’t come into the homestead, then characters are often drawn out into the unknown and away from the security of settlement; this is where certain kinds of colonial adventures play themselves out. In Lala Fisher’s ‘His Luck’, a young man with good prospects is heading towards a family station in north Queensland, about to become its new manager. But the story temporarily diverts him, taking him instead to the outer limits of the property, where a strange encounter shakes his sense of self-assurance. Rosa Praed’s ‘Bushed’ gives us a character whose fortunes rise and fall almost indiscriminately, an unlucky speculator who is never able to settle down and who struggles to keep a job. This story presents itself as a chronicle of actual experience, albeit filtered self-consciously through a generic ‘bush yarn’ that owes much to the short stories of Henry Lawson—referencing him through passing allusions (‘Have a look at the rifle while the billy boils’) and scenes (a character plays ‘the part of bush undertaker’). The narrator knows about Lawson, too, situating his account of joining a kangaroo hunt in the framework of a readership already familiar with and receptive to colonial Australian popular fiction. ‘If I’d been wanting to write something that was going to ketch on in England’, he says, ‘like Lawson’s way of describing the bush, I reckon I could have fetched the public with that first morning of kangaroostering’. The kangaroo hunt is almost a subgenre of adventure fiction, and we find it thematised in Ethel Castilla’s ‘The Red Kangaroo’ (1907) and in Rolf Boldrewood’s ‘memoir’, ‘The Kangaroo Shoot’ (1901), among others. For Castilla and Boldrewood, the kangaroo hunt is an organised social event that is also designed to protect the pastoral economy. But in Praed’s story, the hunt involves a small group of itinerant labourers who are paid by the skin. The narrator, despite his many experiences, is ‘not a particularly good bushman’; soon he finds himself alone and lost in the bush, wandering (naked, eventually) out to the far edges of civilisation.

Colonial adventure fiction is fascinated by the outer limits of the civilised world, or rather, the outer limits of empire as the various projects of imperialism understood it at the time. Outside of Australia, a number of influential popular novelists were also taking their characters on extra-ordinary journeys away from the metropolitan centre: R L Stevenson in his South Pacific stories, for example, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Nile adventure story A Desert Drama (1898), or H Rider Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). Stevenson and Conan Doyle had in fact visited Australia; their work was widely circulated locally, and colonial adventure writers like Ernest Favenc were routinely published alongside them both here and overseas in, for example, Melbourne’s Leader and Phil May’s Illustrated Annual. Charles Junor’s Dead Men’s Tales—the title story is in this anthology—is dedicated to H Rider Haggard, and in his introduction to the collection Junor goes on to cast adventure fiction as an inevitable aspect of an imperial project that is global in its reach. It is as if there is nothing adventure fiction cannot touch. But at the same time, it exists only insofar as there remain uncharted territories for it to explore:

The difficulty is not what to write, but what not to write about. In the wilds of Siberia and Central Australia there is but little material for the novelist, and Borneo and the Eastern Archipelago have been exploited at last by Louis Becke, Alex Montgomery, and several others. So say the pessimists. But will romance suffer? Surely not. An immense extent of land and sea remains yet entirely unknown … The fact is, that though the quantity of imaginative literature may diminish, its quality will improve as its rarity and the demand therefor [sic] increases.

Junor’s spirited defence of adventure fiction is also partly an account of its exhaustion and decline. ‘Dead Men’s Tales’ perhaps reflects this, a fin-de-siècle story that begins in the last years of the nineteenth century with an explorer’s discovery in a remote part of Western Australia of the dead bodies of two prospectors. The history of those two prospectors is then related, unleashing a wild adventure that leads them deep into the remote outback, where they come across a white man who has been living with a local tribe above a pestilential lake that turns out to be full of gold and riches. This is a ‘lost race’ adventure story that mutates the Aboriginal inhabitation of remote Australia into a grotesque fantasy of tribal decadence and decline. The influence of Haggard’s She is important to note here, but in fact a number of colonial Australian novelists had also written ‘lost race’ or Lemurian narratives during this time: for example, George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian (1896), David Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896), Rosa Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1903) and William Sylvester Walker’s The Silver Queen (1908). Junor’s story combines the ‘lost race’ narrative with a more submerged story about lost explorers, another important trope in colonial Australian adventure fiction that plays out a fantasy about characters who go out into the Australian desert and never return. The key figure here is the colonial explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who mysteriously disappeared in 1848 somewhere in northern Queensland, becoming the subject of a great deal of colonial popular fiction. In Junor’s story, Leichhardt becomes emblematic of the disappearances that have now become commonplace in the Australian desert. But the dead explorer is also shown to have been absorbed into Aboriginal mythology, as if the story redeems a colonial failure by enabling it to accumulate some sort of ‘indigenous’ mystique:

Among the unreported and unofficial expeditions into the interior of Australia were many poorly organized and equipped parties whose ends have been tragic.

Leichardt’s [sic] historical disappearance has been perhaps the most prominent. According to a tradition of the blacks, Leichardt’s remains, with those of his followers, are still preserved and carried about from place to place by the aboriginals as they are driven further inland, and he is worshipped as a god.

The stories by Junor, Praed, Walker and others in this anthology relate a darker side to the colonial adventure, one involving failure, disappearance and death—the opposite of the more optimistic colonial narrative of settlement and entitlement that prevails elsewhere. The adventure story is often taken as a celebration of heroic masculinity. But in these stories, the promises of colonial masculinity are thwarted, and the predicaments that men find themselves in transform them into increasingly abject, helpless figures. Randolph Bedford’s ‘Fourteen Fathoms by Quetta Rock’ is an undersea adventure story that takes place off the coast of Thursday Island, where the masculinity of a ‘fine, big, strong world-beater of a man’ is severely tested by something more than the horrors of the deep. Other stories, however, allow their male characters to grow and adapt to local circumstances. The newly arrived immigrant, or ‘new chum’, becomes a stock character in colonial Australian adventure fiction; in these stories, the adventure is built around the gaining of colonial experience, raw as it may be. In Horace Earle’s ‘The Hurricane’, a young English farm labourer journeys out to the Victorian goldfields to make his fortune, full of optimism. But the story puts him through a harrowing rite of passage that drastically reduces his expectations. ‘New chums’, the story says, ‘are ever sanguine, and invariably feel almost heart-broken at the first goldless hole; being filled with the idea, that out of every one something more valuable than earth is sure to be extracted. They are soon, however, undeceived, and in the course of time learn to think as their seniors in digging experience do’. Douglas Sladen’s ‘At the Melbourne Cup’ gives us a metropolitan version of this kind of narrative, about a young man who arrives in Melbourne to take up a government appointment and who then spends a day speculating at the races. This is a lighthearted adventure story, but it also takes seriously the need for a man in the colonies to make his fortune in order to secure a place in the emergent class economy—to demonstrate, as another character says, ‘some guarantee of my having something to live on—in fact, of my not being an adventurer’. Sladen’s story places its characters within a local adventure story framework that plays itself out in the shadow of the late Adam Lindsay Gordon, the debt-ridden poet, jockey and gambler—a man whom Sladen had much admired. But it also allows its characters to leave that framework behind as they pursue a more respectable colonial future.

Louis Becke’s ‘Julius Adolphus Jenkins’s Christmas Alligator’ takes its new chum into the far reaches of northern Queensland to work as a ledger-keeper in a regional bank, helping to manage the colonial economy. Jenkins is an English dandy who stands out spectacularly in the local township. But the story slowly integrates him into his surroundings, not least through his increasing attraction to ‘the pretty daughter of a leading merchant’. As in Sladen’s ‘At the Melbourne Cup’, erotic attraction helps this male new chum to assimilate. But for Becke—a widely travelled adventurer himself and a prolific writer, known as the ‘Rudyard Kipling of Australia’—adapting to the local community means embracing adventure rather than turning away from it. Jenkins’s beloved encourages him to risk himself to secure her affections: ‘I don’t want you to be careless or untidy in your dress, but would like you to be just a little more colonial in your ways. And I want you to go shooting and fishing and kangarooing as much as you can—like the other men here’. Becke’s story is a bit like Walker’s ‘Fighting the Flood’, intensifying the adventure through a natural disaster that almost literally immerses its protagonist in the surrounding landscape. Landscape is always a potent force in colonial Australian adventure fiction, often desolate but also animated and liable to change unexpectedly. Hurricanes and floods take on epic proportions and become apocalyptic, engulfing entire regions. The process of describing landscape is important here: characters don’t just pass through it; it interacts with them and actively shapes their fortunes, and misfortunes. Lurid scenic descriptions work to ventriloquise a character’s state of mind, as Francis Adams’s story evocatively remarks about its ill-fated bushranger protagonist: ‘he felt the attraction of the barbaric picturesque’.

We have been noting that masculinity is close to the heart of colonial adventure fiction, something it invests in and evaluates. But this anthology also includes a number of adventure stories written by women: Praed and Fisher, as well as Ellen Liston, Mollie Skinner and Laura Palmer-Archer. Liston’s ‘Cousin Lucy’s Story’ introduces a young woman who lives with her uncle on a large cattle station in New South Wales. She is romantically involved with a young trooper stationed nearby—once again playing out the structural connection between the squattocracy and the police in colonial life. But a convict is on the loose and gains Lucy’s sympathy. In secret, she invites him into her homestead; this is quite a different turn of events from the bushranger assault on the squatter’s station that we see in Borlase, for example. Liston’s story gives us a strong, determined bush woman (and there are comparisons to Gertrude Martin in Borlase’s story here) who momentarily transgresses the strict enforcement of colonial law by turning the otherwise secure and prosperous homestead into a sanctuary for an escaped criminal. Mollie Skinner’s ‘The Hand’ is another story about something potentially threatening making its way into a place of refuge, in this case a remote hospital outpost. Here, the matron measures the resilience of her nurses by their capacity to deal calmly with unexpected events: ‘A nurse’, she advises, ‘shouldn’t scream’. But the woman’s colonial adventure story may not always invest in the figure of the strong, resilient colonial woman. Laura Palmer-Archer’s ‘My Visit to a Woolshed’ might not be considered an adventure story at all: it simply recounts a woman’s trip, on a remote Queensland station, to a shearing shed some distance away, where she is introduced to various colonial types and watches them as they work. But she is driven there by a strange young man, the station manager, a taciturn ‘charioteer’, and the station gates are opened by a ‘tiger’, ‘an imp in a striped brown cap’. This is a gently ironic and whimsical story, offering a genteel, feminine descent into a masculine world of work (made slightly dangerous through its use of non-union labour) that seems to fascinate the narrator. The scenery along the way is once again important, but now it shifts from the starkness of Adams’s ‘barbaric picturesque’ to a celebration of floral abundance. ‘Sometimes the branches almost whip my hat off’, she writes, as if this is the greatest danger the colonial landscape now offers her. ‘I learn to dodge them’. Palmer-Archer’s story takes us to the other side of colonial Australian adventure fiction: where the remote outstation is no longer a deranged and threatening place but, instead, an organised and productive part of the colonial economy.

Horace Earle

The Hurricane; or,

False Friends

1861

If any man wished to be a rogue or a villian on his own account, and to any extent, the diggings, at the time I write of, offered every advantage. In the towns, or in more civilised countries, he would have met with such obstacles to his progression as police, prisons, and magistrates. But on the diggings he had full and free play; there he was not watched; and if by any accident he was likely to meet with persecution at the hands of those who did not appreciate his talents, the forest offered a secure retreat. The following narrative will go far to prove the above; and I wish, for the credit of humanity, the tale were not true, or, being true, a solitary case.

Ben Evans was rough, home-spun, good-natured, and particularly simple; he had not been long in the colony—in fact, had only arrived a few days before my reader is introduced to him. He had been a farm labourer in England, and by dint of care and industry had managed to accumulate sufficient money to pay his passage out. His greatest desire had been, and was, to become a digger. He said he had a presentiment that a ‘nugget as big as his head,’ and consequently