As I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to devote a chapter to Australians in literature whom I have known, counting both people from the Old Country who became Australians by residence, and those who were born or educated in Australia, though their writing career has been in England.
I never met either Gordon or Kendall—Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Clarence Kendall, the twin stars of Australian poetry, naturally come first to one’s mind in writing of Australian literature, because poetry in Australia, as usual, preceded prose as an art.
Gordon, whose nephew, Henry Ratti, living in London, had just placed himself in communication with me in a couple of long letters, and invited me to lunch when he died so prematurely, had been dead for nearly ten years before I landed in Australia. But Kendall did not die till I had been in Australia for nearly three years. I was in Victoria when he died; I think I had actually been appointed to the Chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney before it happened, so I missed him by a very narrow margin. So little stir did his death cause in Victoria that I never even heard of it, and imagined that he had been dead for years, though he wrote lyrics only excelled in music by Shelley’s, Swinburne’s and Poe’s in the whole of English literature. Yet he had visited Melbourne, and was, in fact, there and in the company of Gordon the very day before his rival died. Kendall, unlike Gordon, was Australian born.
Far the greatest author born on Australian soil is, of course, Mrs. Humphry Ward, a Tasmanian by birth, though Australia had long passed out of her life before she wrote. “Tasma” was also a Tasmanian by birth, and “George Egerton,” whose father, Captain Dunne, fought in the New Zealand war, was born in Melbourne.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, on the other hand, was not only born in Queensland, the daughter of a prominent Queensland politician, Thomas Lodge Murray Prior, but has gone to her native land for the scene of her brilliant novels. Ill-health kept her from coming often to Addison Mansions, where she had a double claim to literary homage, for, apart from her own eminence as a novelist, she has a matrimonial connection with William Mackworth Praed, the brilliant novelist and father of Society Poetry.
Rolf Boldrewood, though born in London, has been so long in Australia that he almost counts as a Colonial (Australian born) rather than a Colonist (settler). He went to the old Sydney College in New South Wales more than seventy years ago, and though he spent the greater part of his life as a Police Magistrate and Warden of the gold-fields in New South Wales, began life as one of the pioneer squatters of Victoria. His experiences gave him a rich equipment for writing tales of wild life in the old Colonial days, like Robbery Under Arms, with which he made such a huge reputation in 1888. I remember him as a writer ten years before that, when he used to send a weekly causerie to the Australasian, admirably written under his famous pseudonym. I believe that he used to call it “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He had already written and published the novel which he afterwards called The Squatter’s Dream. It was a thin paper volume, a sort of cross between our sixpennies and the French three francs fifty coverless novels, and it was called in those days Ups and Downs. It was a true story; it dealt with the ups and downs of the famous Mossgiel Station, which made John Simson’s great fortune, and the ruin by drought of the De Salis brothers who had the station before him. It was published anonymously. Rolf Boldrewood’s real name is Thomas Alexander Browne. His mother was a Miss Alexander. Both the Brownes and the Alexanders were huge men; Rolf’s brother, Sylvester Browne, was the tallest man in Australia, a couple of inches taller than my uncle, Sir Charles (who was just under six foot six, and I think may have owed some of his influence in the early days to his great stature). The Brownes were not only very tall, but very strongly-built men. Their adventurousness took them to West Australia, where they made large fortunes during the mining boom.
Guy Boothby and Louis Becke, on the other hand, both much younger men, were real Colonials, Becke having been born at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, and Boothby at Adelaide, where his father was a member of Parliament and his grandfather a Judge. That did not prevent him from leading the wildest life. At one time he was an explorer and crossed Australia from north to south. At another time he was stoker on a tramp steamer trading between Singapore and Borneo. He “struck oil” with the detective stories of Dr. Nikola, which the Windsor Magazine ran in opposition to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine, and at one time was making nine thousand a year out of his writing. I remember his chartering an eight hundred ton steam yacht, and he had some wonderful prize dogs at the Manor House, close to the Kempton Park racecourse, in which he lived.
Becke was never so fortunate in his earnings, though he was a far superior writer. He acquired his wonderful knowledge of the Australian coast and the South Sea Islands as supercargo of one of the schooners which trade between the islands and Sydney. He was one of Fisher Unwin’s discoveries, and came very near achieving a Kidnapped and Treasure Island success, for which, as far as first-hand knowledge was concerned, he was infinitely better equipped than Stevenson.
Frank Bullen, Becke’s rival in South Sea knowledge, was not an Australian, but born in Paddington. Like Becke, he was in the Merchant Service. I have more to say about him in another chapter.
Ada Cambridge, who was for a long time the best-known novel-writer in Australia, was born in Norfolk, and spent all her time in East Anglia till she married the Rev. J. F. Cross, and sailed with him to Australia in 1870, the year of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death. She published her first novel about seven years later. Cambridge was her maiden name.