A passage from Dick Marston’s account [p 226] of what he saw at Turon is worth reproducing here as characteristic of the author’s representation of a gold-fields community and as a sample of his humour. The ‘three honourables,’ of whom the disguised bushranger captain is one, are together in a hotel.
‘The last time I drank wine as good as this,’ says Starlight, ‘was at the Caffy Troy, something or other, in Paris. I wouldn’t mind being there again, with the Variety Opera to follow—would you, Clifford?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ says the other swell. ‘I find this amazing good fun for a bit. I never was in such grand condition since I left Oxford. This eight hours’ shift business is just the right thing for training. I feel fit to go for a man’s life. Just feel this, Despard,’ and he holds out his arm to the camp swell. ‘There’s muscle for you!’
‘Plenty of muscle,’ says Mr. Despard, looking round. He was a swell that didn’t work, and wouldn’t work, and thought it fine to treat the diggers like dogs…. ‘Plenty of muscle,’ says he, ‘but devilish little society.’
‘I don’t agree with you,’ says the other honourable. ‘It’s the most amusing, and, in a way, instructive place for a man who wants to know his fellow-creatures I was ever in. I never pass a day without meeting some fresh variety of the human race, man or woman; and their experiences are well worth knowing, I can tell you. Not that they’re in a hurry to impart them; for that there’s [p 227] more natural unaffected good manners on a digging than in any society I ever mingled in I shall never doubt. But when they see you don’t want to patronise, and are content to be as simple man among men, there’s nothing they won’t do for you or tell you.’
‘Oh, d——n one’s fellow-creatures! present company excepted,’ says Mr. Despard, filling his glass, ‘and the man that grew this “tipple.” They’re useful to me now and then, and one has to put up with this crowd; but I never could take much interest in them.’
‘All the worse for you, Despard,’ says Clifford: ‘you’re wasting your chances—golden opportunities in every sense of the word. You’ll never see such a spectacle as this, perhaps, again as long as you live. It’s a fancy-dress ball with real characters.’
‘Dashed bad characters, if we only knew,’ says Despard, yawning. ‘What do you say, Haughton?’ looking at Starlight, who was playing with his glass, and not listening much, by the look of him.
In his latest novels Boldrewood reverts to his familiar themes. The Sphinx of Eaglehawk, the shortest of all his works, might have been an excerpt from The Miner’s Right; and the scene of The Crooked Stick is an inland station in New South Wales in the days of bushranging and disastrous droughts.
The materials employed in the latter story reproduce the principal features of almost a [p 228] score of other Australian novels published within the last few years. The love-affairs of a beautiful, impulsive girl, sighing for knowledge of the great world beyond the limits of her narrow experience; the influence upon her of a fascinating and gentlemanly Englishman, with aristocratic connections and a dubious past; the manly young Australian, whose loyalty, undervalued for a time, is rewarded in the end—these are some of the items which go to the making of a class of story already somewhat too common. The fact that Boldrewood continues to make such subjects interesting is due largely to the pervading sense of scrupulous truth, the evident element of personal experience, and the general cheerfulness of tone, which are never absent from any product of his pen, and which constitute his highest claims to rank in Australian literature.
[p 229]
MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.
To Mrs. Campbell Praed belongs the credit of being the first to attempt to give an extended and impartial view of the social and political life of the upper classes in Australia. While she has not ignored whatever seemed picturesque in the external aspects of the country, her chief concern has been with the people themselves. Some of the best of her works—Policy and Passion and Miss Jacobsen’s Chance, for example—might fairly be named as an answer to the somewhat common complaint of a deficiency of dramatic suggestion in colonial life.
In a preface to the first-named novel, Mrs. Praed explains it to have been her wish to depict ‘certain phases of Australian life, in which the main interests and dominant [p 230] passions of the personages concerned are identical with those which might readily present themselves upon a European stage, but which directly and indirectly are influenced by striking natural surroundings and conditions of being inseparable from the youth of a vigorous and impulsive nation.’
The point of view here taken by the author at almost the beginning of her literary career has been maintained in most cases throughout her later work. The same preface might almost, in fact, serve for all her Australian stories. They describe broadly, in an attitude of good-natured criticism, the leading facts in the intellectual life of the people; their proud self-reliance, tempered by an acute sense of isolation and its disadvantages; their susceptibility to foreign criticism and example; their frank, natural manners in social customs of native origin, contrasted with their quaintly-rigid observance of conventionalities which have long since been relaxed in the mother country whence they were copied.
Mrs. Praed has turned to account more [p 231] fully than any other writer the little affectations of that small upper crust of Antipodean society which is sufficiently cultured to have developed a taste for aristocratic European habits, along with an uncomfortable suspicion of ‘bad form’ in anything of purely local growth. This is the class which maintains an air of portentous solemnity in public ceremonials, and is liable at any moment to be convulsed by a question of precedence at a Government House dinner.
From a lively appreciation of comedy to caricature is an easy descent which the author has not always resisted, but her exaggeration is so obviously resorted to in the interests of fun that it is unlikely to mislead. There is certainly no need to repudiate as untypical of Australian political society the Pickwickian spectacle of a drunken Postmaster-General fearfully trying to walk a plank after a Vice-regal dinner, in order to win three dozen of champagne wagered by the leader of the Opposition, while the Premier looks on and holds his sides with merriment; or the case of the Premier’s wife, who, on being told by [p 232] a newly-arrived Governor—a musical enthusiast—that he hoped to be able to ‘introduce Wagner’ at the local philharmonic concerts, said: ‘I’m sure we shall be very pleased to see the gentleman.’