Culture, the Arts & National Identity

ArtMcCubbin and bush identity

Streeton

Tom Roberts

Literature

Henry Lawson Much of Lawson's work was set in the Australian bush, or was about bush life.Although most Australians lived in cities and towns in the 19th century, it was the bush that somehow grabbed the imagination - perhaps because of the stark contrast between it and the more gentle and controlled environment of Europe, from where most non-indigenous Australians had come.This was also the time before Federation, and Australians' allegiance was not to Australia, because it did not exist as an united entity as yet. Australians felt they owed loyalty to a particular colony - New South Wales or Victoria and so on - and beyond that, loyalty was owed to England, the King or Queen of England, and the British Empire.By the 1890s Australia had been settled for a little more than 100 years and Lawson was arguably the first Australian-born writer who really looked at Australia with Australian eyes, not influenced by his knowledge of other landscapes. He was the first perhaps to give voice to interpretations of an 'Australian' character.He was also from the bush, had lived on a selection, had been brought up in bush poverty, had suffered hardship and unemployment, and knew of the characters and lifestyles he talked about. His work reflected Australian experience with an integrity readers recognised.

LawsonThe Song of Australia The centuries found me to nations unknown – My people have crowned me and made me a throne; My royal regalia is love, truth, and light – A girl called Australia – I've come to my right.

Though no fields of conquest grew red at my birth, My dead were the noblest and bravest on earth; Their strong sons are worthy to stand with the best – My brave Overlanders ride west of the west.

My cities are seeking the clean and the right; My Statesmen are speaking in London to-night; The voice of my Bushmen is heard oversea; My army and navy are coming to me.

By all my grim headlands my flag is unfurled, My artists and singers are charming the world; The White world shall know its young outpost with pride; The fame of my poets goes ever more wide.

By old tow'r and steeple of nation grown grey The name of my people is spreading to-day; Through all the old nations my learners go forth; My youthful inventors are startling the north.

In spite of all Asia, and safe from her yet, Through wide Australasia my standards I'll set; A grand world and bright world to rise in an hour – The Wings of the White world, the Balance of Power.

Through storm, or serenely – whate'er I go through – God grant I be queenly! God grant I be true! To suffer in silence, and strike at a sign, Till all the fair islands of these seas are mine.

The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees, no undergrowth. Nineteen miles to the nearest civilisation - a shanty on the main road ... There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees.(Source: The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson)

Banjo Patterson Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson (1864-1941), poet, solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and soldier

Barty, as he was known to his family and friends, enjoyed a bush boyhood. When he was 7 the family moved to Illalong in the Yass district. Here, near the main route between Sydney and Melbourne, the exciting traffic of bullock teams, Cobb & Co. coaches, drovers with their mobs of stock, and gold escorts became familiar sights. At picnic race meetings and polo matches, he saw in action accomplished horsemen from the Murrumbidgee and Snowy Mountains country which generated his lifelong enthusiasm for horses and horsemanship and eventually the writing of his famous equestrian ballads. By the verdict of the Australian people, and by his own conduct

and precept, Paterson was, in every sense, a great Australian. Ballad-writer, horseman, bushman, overlander, squatter—he helped to make the Australian legend. Yet, in his lifetime, he was a living part of that legend in that, with the rare touch of the genuine folk-poet, and in words that seemed as natural as breathing, he made a balladry of the scattered lives of back-country Australians and immortalized them. He left a legacy for future generations in his objective, if sometimes sardonic, appreciation of the outback: that great hinterland stretching down from the Queensland border through the western plains of New South Wales to the Snowy Mountains—so vast a country that the lonely rider was seen as 'a speck upon a waste of plain'. This was Paterson's land of contrasts: 'the plains are all awave with grass, the skies are deepest blue', but also the 'fiery dust-storm drifting and the mocking mirage shifting'; 'waving grass and forest trees on sunlit plains as wide as seas', but the 'drought fiend' too, and the cattle left lying 'with the crows to watch them dying'.

The Man From Snowy River

The Bulletin

“Australia for the White Man.” The Bulletin was an Australian magazine first published in Sydney on 31 January 1880. The publication's focus was politics and business, with some literary content, and editions were often accompanied by cartoons and other illustrations. The views promoted by the magazine varied across different editors and owners, with the publication consequently considered either on the left or right of the political spectrum at various stages in its history. The Bulletin was highly influential in Australian culture and politics until after the First World War, and was then noted for its nationalist, pro-labour, and pro-republican writing. It was revived as a modern news magazine in the 1960s, and was Australia's longest running magazine publication until the final issue was published in January 2008.

Lawson and The BulletinLawson was first published in The Bulletin in 1887 with the poem Song of Australia . The Bulletin was an influential publication which promoted a particular set of views - egalitarianism, unionism, and 'Australianism'. It was also white and male.Lawson was a regular contributor, as was Banjo Paterson. A series of verses were published where Lawson and Paterson debated their different perspectives on the Australian bush - Lawson claiming Paterson was a romantic, and Paterson claiming Lawson was full of doom and gloom.

Sport The Victorian Football League was established in 1896 when six of the strongest clubs in Victoria – Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne and South Melbourne – broke away from the established Victorian Football Association to establish the new league. The six clubs invited two more VFA clubs – Carlton and St Kilda – to join the league for its inaugural season in 1897. Among the notable initiatives established in the new league was an annual finals tournament, rather than awarding the premiership directly to the team with the best record through the season; and, the formal establishment of the modern scoring system, in which six points are scored for a goal, and one point is scored for a behind.Although the Victorian Football League and the Victorian Football Association continued to compete for spectator interest for many years, the VFL quickly established itself as the premier competition in Victoria. In the early years Fitzroy and Collingwood were the dominant teams. Following the arrival of Jack Worrall as coach in 1903, Carlton began a dominating period, during which they won three successive flags from 1906 to 1908; although Worrall was the club secretary, he took on a player management and direction role which is today recognised as the first official coaching job in the league. Essendon won flags in 1911 and 1912, also under Jack Worrall's coaching.In 1908, the league expanded to ten teams, with Richmond crossing from the VFA and University from the Metropolitan Football Association. University, after three promising seasons, finished last each year from 1911 until 1914, including losing 51 matches in a row; this was in part caused by its players focus on their studies rather than football, particularly during examinations, and it was partly because the club operated on an amateur basis at a time when player payments were becoming common – and as a result, the club withdrew from the VFL at the end of 1914. University teams now compete in the Victorian Amateur Football Association.[1][2]

From 1907 until 1914, the VFL premier and the premier of the Adelaide-based South Australian Football League met in a playoff match for the Championship of Australia.