9. LITERATURE. Australian literature may be said to be a thing of the last half cen tury. Previous to that writers were busy in Australia, but most of them were either of foreign birth or produced work that can scarcely, by any stretch of courtesy, be called literature. Even when writers of Australian birth, education and sympathies began to write, they practically always kept their faces turned toward London; for few native publishers cared to encourage native writers who had not first secured the approbation of some English pub lisher. This condition of literary affairs was quite natural given the conditions existing in Australia practically up to the close of the 19th century. The island continent was divided into seven distinct parts, which, far from being united in national sentiment, were cut asunder from one another as completely as though they had been separate political entities, as, to all intents and purposes, they were. This provin cial spirit killed all national sentiment, without which a national literature is impossible. The educational system of the country was prac tically in the hands of foreign-born, and all the educational and literary influences at work in the various states of the island were European. So the writers of Australia but feebly echoed the voices of the master singers from the home land. Naturally such writers, foreign-born and educated, failed to feel, think and express themselves as Australians; nor could they have well been expected to when the natives failed to do so themselves.
But the growth of population, the increase of interstate communication, the drawing closer together of the separate state entities following the establishment of the Common wealth, and the gradual increase in the powers of the Federal legislature, coupled with the rapidly expanding interests of the country as a whole, all tended to create a sense of nation ality which is sensibly reflected in the younger Australian writers. Provincialism exists still; but it is a provincialism from which all the bitterness of past local rivalries has disappeared.
The localism has come already, in a few short years, to accentuate only the local color that marks each individualistic writer and to give a variety to Australian literature and journal istic work that has served to call the attention of the English-speaking world to the best of it for the past 20 years. Australian critics have strongly condemned this spirit of localism without apparently realizing that it is distinctly a different localism from that of the past, and that its leading note is more national than local. It is the same localism that animates Scott and Dickens and the brilliant younger literary lights of Scotland whose strongly reflected localism is their chief charm.
The early history of Australia was not favorable to literary development. The island was long used as a penal colony by Great Britain. Many of the convicts escaping, over ran the southern part. This population was increased by sheep farmers and a few settlers on the coast who grouped themselves in small towns and villages around the ports. These settlements being all separated from one an other they had no community of interests. The discovery of gold in 1851 attracted to the island a horde of adventurers who, while they added practically nothing to the national feeling, were the means of attracting attention to the country itself ; and the following 10 years saw a very large increase in population throughout the southern and southeastern coast country. Many of the adventurers brought to Australia by the gold rush were educated men; and to some of these we owe the first serious attempts at literature in Australia, if we except a few local writers whose work is generally of a very poor character. The best of these was Barron Field who published at Sydney, in 1819, 'First Fruits of Australian Poetry,' and Lionel Michael, whose without Music) was issued in 1857. Among other writers of this earlier literary period who sing in uncertain tones are J. D. Lang, Henry Parkes and W. C. Wentworth, the best of whom is Wentworth whose (Austral asia' is well known in Australia.