E-text prepared by David Wilson and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) AUSTRALIAN WRITERS by DESMOND BYRNE London Richard Bentley and Son Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen 1896 [All rights reserved] CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 MARCUS CLARKE 29 HENRY KINGSLEY 90 ADA CAMBRIDGE 131 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 159 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 189 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 229 TASMA 260 INTRODUCTION. Any survey of the work done by Australian authors suggests a question as to what length of time ought to be allowed for the development of distinctive national characteristics in the literature of a young country self-governing to the extent of being a republic in all but name, isolated in position, highly civilised, enjoying all the modern luxuries available to the English-speaking race in older lands, and with a population fully two-thirds native. The common saying that a country cannot be expected to produce literature during the earlier state of its growth is too vague a generalisation. There are circumstances by which its application may be modified. It certainly does not apply with equal force to a country whose early difficulties included race conflicts, war with an external power and political labours of great magnitude, and to another whose commercial and social development, carried on under more modern conditions by a people almost entirely homogeneous, has been facile, unbroken and extraordinarily rapid. Nor can paucity of literary product, where it exists, be satisfactorily explained by the unrest that continues in a new land long after it has attained material prosperity and the higher refinements of life. The Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration, Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the Western race.