AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE. Australia was not claimed for Great Britain until 1770, and the first settlements were penal. Then followed the sheep-farmers, and, on the dis covery of gold in MI, a horde of adventur ers. By 1859. Australasia (Australia, Tas mania, and New Zealand) consisted of seven independent colonies. The period of national unity did not begin till 1901, when these States, except New Zealand, were federated under the name of the Commonwealth of Australia. Young Australia has not had time to develop a literature of her own. She is where the United States was a century ago—in the imitative period. Her first writers, who came midway in the Nineteenth Century, were Englishmen or Scotchmen bred at the public schools and at the universities, some of whom returned to the land of their birth; while several contemporary writers, though in some instances born in Aus tralia, have settled in London. Hence by Aus tralian literature we can mean no more than English literature inspired by the life and scenes in this island of the South Seas.
The early settlers carried out with them little volumes of their favorite poets, and in the lone liness of bush-life began to write lyrics in imi tation. Indeed, there is hardly an English or American poet of the Nineteenth Century whose voice has not been echoed in Australia—Words worth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Poe, and many others. But as time has gone on, Aus tralian verse has more and more forgotten its models, and has assumed local color. Its themes are taken from incidents of the town and the hush. The poets sing of the "burning wastes of barren soil and sand." or. in another mood, of "the sunlit plains extended" and "the won drous glory of the everlasting stars." The Australian singers of the Nineteenth Century number more than one hundred. The earliest was Barron Field. Judge of the Supreme Court of New South \Vales, who published at Sydney, in 1819, The First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Among succeeding verse-makers were IV. C. Wentworth, author of Australasia; J. D. Lang. Sir Henry Parkes, Charles Harpur (1S12-68), known as the Australian Wordsworth, and Lionel Michael, author of Songs Without Music (1857). A new period for Australian poetry
began with Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Clarence Kendall. Gordon, born in the Azores, in 1833. educated at Oxford, emigrated to South Australia, in 1851, taking leave of England in lines imitated from Childe Harold. He became a horse - dealer, horse - trainer, and the best steeplechase rider in the Colonies. His life was particularly pathetic, and he died by his own hand, in 1870. Gordon published three volumes: Sea-Spray and Smoke-Drift (1S67), Ashtaroth (1867), and Bush Ballads (1870). In his sporting poems and narratives. based on his own wild experiences, we first get at the heart of Australia. The horse and the rider he glorified in ballads that have the ring of Scott and Macaulay. The Byronic influence never left him. His despair reaches intense expression in Whither Bound? Kendall was born at Ulla dulla. New South Wales, in 1842. There, in the lonely bush, he passed his boyhood. His life was saddened by an inherited love for drink, which be mastered only after years of struggle. He died near Sydney in 1882. His first volume, Songs and Poems (1862), was followed by Leares from an Australian Forest, containing his best work, and Songs from the Mountains. Of less force than Gordon, Kendall, `the national poet,' sang with great beauty of the Australian hills, streams, and forests, in poems like "September in Australia," "The Hut by the Black Swamp." and "A Death in the Bush." Among the many other poets belonging to the last part of the Nineteenth Century are A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, Edward Dyson, Alfred Dorsett, J. Brunton Stephens, Miss Jen nings Carmichael (afterwards Francis Ada Cambridge (afterwards Mrs. G. F. Cross), Charles Allan Sherrard, Alexander Sutherland, E. B. Loughran, J. B. O'Hara, Wil liam Gay, and George Gordon MeCrae. All this verse compares favorably with what is now being produced by writers distinctively English or American.