Hopeless Romantics: Australian Studies in Romanticism

ABSTRACT

For most of the twentieth century, Romantic writers were largely ignored by serious Australian scholars even as they were celebrated and imitated outside the academy. This article tracks the belated emergence of Romanticism as a specialist field of study in Australia while providing what is often a counter-narrative about the broader reception of Romantic literature and ideology by the Australian public. In tracing these contrary yet entwined histories, the article shows how Romantic literature has been and remains implicated in the ongoing project of Australian colonization from 1788 to the present. It has been conscripted into the work of establishing a series of penal colonies on stolen Aboriginal land; of valorizing an English-speaking territorialization of that land; of shaping settler subjectivity; and of defining a national identity often vexed in its relationship to anglophone cultural centers. Exploring the ways in which the reception of Romantic culture is diffracted across various Australian sub-cultures, the essay arrives at the field as it exists today: at a critical Australian Romanticism that is, and needs to be, increasingly attentive to the history of the field and its investments in the settler-colonial state.

When Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was proposed for the syllabus at La Trobe University in 1986, the members of the English department voted it down. Shelley’s novel, in their collective judgment, was insufficiently literary, and would only distract students from their proper training in the task of critical discrimination. La Trobe had been established in 1964 to expand access to higher education in Melbourne’s largely working-class northern suburbs. The English department translated that pedagogical mission into a committed Leavisite program, broadly anti-Romantic in tenor. But although keyed to La Trobe’s specific institutional circumstances, the decision to blackball Frankenstein was in no sense out of step with wider disciplinary norms in literary studies in Australia at the time. With some important exceptions, Romanticism in the mid-1980s was a period and field still viewed in Australia as insubstantial. A young scholar would be professionally unwise to work even on Percy Shelley, let alone Mary.

In 2021, La Trobe’s English program hosted the fifth biennial conference of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA) with the theme “Romantic Generations.” No fewer than six of the conference’s sixty-five speakers gave papers on Mary Shelley—more than on any other writer from the period; Tobias Menely’s keynote on Frankenstein and reproductive crisis appears in this issue. This represents a dramatic reversal of critical fortune for both Mary Shelley and Romantic studies—a reversal that, while reflective of larger shifts in literary studies globally, has perhaps been nowhere quite so sudden and comprehensive as in Australia. In the span of a scholarly generation, Romanticism has been transformed from a disregarded backwater within Australian literary studies into a central historical field. And the study of Romanticism has been equally transformed, with the rise of women writers from the period to prominence being only one of a wide-ranging set of changes to its internal dynamics and priorities. The changing place of English within Australian higher education, meanwhile, is suggested by the shrinking of an English department at La Trobe that had twenty-six members of faculty in 1986 into an interdisciplinary program that now supports only six positions in literary studies.

In what follows, we offer an account of the Australian state of the Romantic field by positioning this recent generational shift within a longer history of Romanticism in this country.¹ We trace Romanticism’s transformation from a contested literary ethos at the start of the nineteenth century into a specialist field of study in the academic humanities today. Much of that story will, we suspect, seem familiar to Romanticists based elsewhere—although perhaps uncannily so. They will likely recognize many of the intellectual principles, currents of thought and institutional pressures that have at various moments shaped the field. But those methods and forces have played out in singular circumstances in Australia. By contrast with centers of Romantic scholarship in Europe and North America, the story of Romanticism is peculiarly episodic and intermittent in Australia, characterized by abrupt breaks, over-corrections and generational about-turns. It is also a story that intersects at pivotal moments with the larger political and cultural history of Australia’s colonial settlement by the British, and with the enduring conjunction that established between national development on the one hand and the violent dispossession of the continent’s First Nations peoples on the other. As we argue, the scholarly devaluation of Romanticism in this country through the twentieth century was as much an effect of active repression as it was of contingent neglect or mere lack of interest. Not talking about Romanticism was a way of not talking about the enduring Romanticism of literary studies in Australia—and so of not talking about colonial dynamics that continued to shape culture and society in this country.

The decades at the center of British Romanticism were in Australia the decades of penal colonialism. From the arrival of the First Fleet of convict transportees in 1788 through to the 1830s, European Australia was a thin sprinkling of littoral prison camps, a scattered gulag archipelago at the far side of the world. Formal structures of governance were those of a military autocracy; the main social roles available those of convict and jailer. The placement of the camps—thrust far into the Indo-Pacific—was influenced by Britain’s increasingly global commercial and military ambitions. Their carceral design, meanwhile, was shaped both by humanitarian principles of prison reform and by punitive strategies for disciplining the underclass generated by Britain’s industrialization. For radical English poets of the 1790s, Botany Bay offered a site of potential moral regeneration and spiritual renewal: notable examples include Erasmus Darwin’s “Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, Near Botany Bay,” Robert Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues and William Wordsworth’s “The Convict.” But in the colony itself, poetry offered far fewer opportunities for cultural or individual reinvention, at least at first. Australian publication of original poetry commenced in 1803 with “A Rum Effect,” a comic quatrain about alcoholic prostitutes. The poem was printed, as all published poetry would be for the next fifteen years, in the Sydney Gazette, the colony’s first newspaper—an official organ put out by the Government Printer, which was the only printing press in the colony.

At first variously comic or sentimental, this officially-sanctioned verse grew almost exclusively bombastic from 1810 under Governor Macquarie. Ceremonial odes by Michael Massey Robinson, poet laureate of New South Wales (transported in 1796 for attempting to blackmail a London alderman with a poem that accused him of murder) were recited at formal levees held to mark the King’s and Queen’s Birthdays, and then published in the Sydney Gazette. Written in heroic couplets, Robinson’s poems typically presented allegorical narratives in which capitalized personifications oversaw the colonizing of New South Wales and its rise towards civilization and prosperity. It was a neo-classical poetics essentially untouched by the poetic revolution occurring in Europe at the time (see Dixon). Similarly pre-Romantic were the underground political poems that were known as “pipes” in the colony. These were scurrilous satirical verses that circulated in manuscript; they were an important means of political dissent in the fractious early years of the colony, and much resented by authority. Governor King, for example, complained in 1803 to London of “Seditious Anonymous Papers” that celebrated his anticipated death:

For infamous acts from my birth I’d an itch,

My fate I foretold but too sure;

Tho’ a rope I deserved, which is justly my due,

I shall actually die in a ditch—

          And be damned!— (Historical Records of Australia

                   [hereafter HRA] 168)

Five years later, the military insurrection that deposed Governor Bligh was accompanied—and impelled onwards—by another paper war of pipes.

For later scholars, the striking absence of recognizably Romantic writing in early colonial Australia would have lasting effects on Australian poetry. For Andrew Taylor, Romanticism’s failure to take hold produced a colonial poetics of belatedness and negativity that would delay even the advent of modernism. Paul Kane gave this argument a dialectical twist by linking Romanticism’s Australian failures to a deconstructive model of Romanticism that located its achievements precisely in its failures to achieve the transcendent identities it claimed. Australian poetry thereby presented an object-lesson in a negative Romanticism hinged on its own absence; Australian poetry was all the more Romantic thanks precisely to its missed connection with Romanticism.

Such readings, influential within the study of Australian literature if not for the study of Romanticism at large, are best suited to the early colonial period, in which Australian culture and society were almost wholly determined by the colony’s carceral purposes. Even there, they overlook the important functions of Romantic tropes and categories that circulated in colonial accounts of Aboriginal people. In 1793, for instance, the convict artist Thomas Watling wrote to his aunt in Dumfries, Scotland, of “an itinerant sable Ossian,” who “held forth to some hundreds of his countrymen, who afterwards kindly entreating, escorted him home to some other bourne” (11). Barron Field, a colonial judge and minor literary figure (and friend of William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, amongst others), wrote in comparably Romantic terms three decades later of Aboriginal cultural performance practices. He appraised “the corrobory,” for example, for its “picturesque effect” and “sublime enthusiasm,” while transcribing an “Australian national melody” into Western musical notation and roman characters: “gumbery jah, jingun velah … ” (433–34). Part of the aesthetic appeal these encounters with Aboriginal poetic practices held for Watling, Field and others like them was the opportunity they offered for melancholy reflections on a culture understood to be passing inevitably out of existence—soon to be as vanished as the mournful world of Ossian himself. “In a few years, perhaps, even the corrobory will be no more,” Field inaccurately prophesied (434). Romanticized extinction discourse was a central way in which Australian colonial territories were constructed as terra nullius—as unoccupied, vacant, there for the taking, as if Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples did not really exist (see Brantlinger). Already by the 1830s, the Aboriginal lament (in which a white settler poet ventriloquized the song of the last of a dying tribe) was well-established in the colony as a prominent local poetic subgenre, a form that was at once transnationally Romantic and distinctively Australian.

From the mid-1820s, the nature of Australian colonization was transformed by dramatic increases in the inflow of free settlers, and by similarly dramatic increases in the scales of pastoral expansion and the dispossession of First Nations peoples. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the non-Aboriginal population was around half a million, for the first time likely outnumbering an Aboriginal population that had been decimated by colonial violence and disease. Underpinning that demographic takeover, which would be further accelerated by the gold rushes of the 1850s and 60s, was the reform of administrative and governmental structures, with the introduction of limited modes of representation and self-government. The normalization of Australian colonialism (its re-alignment with settler colonial practices elsewhere) significantly included the liberalization of the press. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the lively scene of colonial newspapers and magazines indicates widespread appetite for, and appreciation of, what we now term Romantic poetry. That poetry, however, was neither handled nor presented as the literature of a particular period or specific aesthetic program. Instead, it was seen as part of a general inheritance of English letters that extended into the colonial present.

Continuities with English literary culture were important for the rising colony. Take, for example, the series of lectures given by a “Mr. Ewing” on the “Modern Poets” at the School of Arts in Sydney in 1846. Ewing’s lectures were extensively covered in the press, and embraced with “enthusiasm” by “crowded spectators”; the lectures focused on “Wordsworth, Byron, Southey, Moore, Shelley, Coleridge, Scott, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Campbell, Pollok, and T. Haynes Bayley” (270). But the Spectator—a short-lived Sydney newspaper—chided Ewing for his “hasty allusions to, or entire omission” of “Wilson, Joanna Baillie, Crabbe, Hood, Alfred Tennyson, E. L. Landon [Letitia Landon], B. Simmons, Landor, Milnes, or our great favorite, Louisa [Elizabeth] Barrett” (270). Ewing, in other words, had failed to link his canon of recently dead poets to the poetry of the present. And such links were particularly important for the Spectator because they could be continued into the colonial scene:

During the whole of the period of our connexion with the press of this colony we have never ceased to assert that, the current of Poetry, although, in Australia, hiding in the earth and gliding invisibly through the heart of events and things, is still flowing and fructifying, even when its course is hidden and unheard, and that he who has the true divining rod can trace it always, and everywhere. (270)

Ewing’s lectures, for all their shortcomings, were for the Spectator an indication of subterranean poetic flows that coursed through colonial events and things even when unnoticed or disregarded.

Colonial newspapers like the Spectator and institutions like the Sydney School of Arts were key channels through which this current of poetry could shape Australian social life. At a time when a university education was possible only for a privileged few (see Anderson), Mechanics’ Institutes, Working Men’s Associations and Schools of Arts performed vital social and educative functions, offering public spaces in which residents of even quite small towns could gather to read, relax, socialize and discuss current events (see Comyn). Public lectures on Romantic writers and poets were particularly popular at such venues. The Argus for 30 August 1884, for example, reported on a lecture on “Burns and Byron” by the Rev. George Walters in the Athenaeum in Melbourne. For the Argus, Walters’s compare-and-contrast exercise produced little to connect the two poets stylistically or thematically. But poetic correspondence was largely beside the point. All that really mattered was that Burns and Byron were both Scottish, a potential lineage that could be activated for purposes of colonial remembrance in the present: “the day would come when every Scotchman in Melbourne, as every Scotchman in every other large town, would blush with shame until there had been placed in his city a worthy monument to him who sang so sweetly the songs of love and beauty, and who might justly be called the poet of humanity” (10).

Walters’s colonial Scotchman would not have long to blush: at least eight statues of Burns were erected as public monuments in Australia between 1883 and 1935. The particular shape of the colonial diaspora in Australia significantly influenced which Romantic writers were celebrated in monumental form. Walter Scott was another popular sculptural subject—as were Irish poets. In 1887, statues of both Burns and Thomas Moore were erected in Ballarat, the Melbourne Advocate wryly noting that “the movement, having as its object the erection of a statue of the celebrated Irish poet, was started … shortly after the Burns statue had been raised” (“Unveiling” 9). Poetic monuments acted as sites for the validation of communal identities in the colony and were more valuable for those from the Celtic margins than for settlers of English descent. There are no statues of Coleridge or Wordsworth that we can find. Not even Shakespeare was mobilized to embody English literature. A committee was indeed formed in Ballarat in 1889 with the purpose of erecting a statue to Shakespeare. But tellingly, the monument was not completed until 1960. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, suburbs named after Scott are commonplace, from inner-urban Abbotsford through leafy Ivanhoe to suburban Glen Waverley, which sports such streets as Midlothian Place and Mannering Drive.

By the 1850s, Romantic literary figures had become for the colonists of Australia a shorthand for Old World affiliation. The first universities in the colony (Sydney, 1850; Melbourne, 1854; Adelaide, 1873; Tasmania, 1890) were steeped in Romantic culture from their inception. The University of Sydney’s inaugural principal and professor of classics, John Woolley, lectured in the 1850s on “the unity of humanity in all its diverse forms” and on poets as mediators between God and humanity, “who trace the likeness of Heaven upon Earth” (qtd. in Little 57). Woolley’s words, as Geoffrey Little has shown, echo claims William Wordsworth had made in the “Prospectus” to The Recluse and included in his “Preface” to The Excursion (58). The architects of the oldest of Australia’s universities, Sydney University and Melbourne University, replicated in these new spaces for learning the colonnades, carillons and gargoyles of the Gothic revival, a style still being deployed on Australian campuses well into the twentieth century. In design and build, colonial higher education tied British Romanticism to the cultural reproduction of an anglicized Australia.

Disciplinary histories of English literary studies have shown that key elements of what would become the English department were established first in the colonial margins, rather than in England itself (see Crawford, Miller, and Viswanathan). But Australia’s universities were relatively slow to take up the formal study and teaching of either English or more specifically Romantic literatures. There were, as Leigh Dale has noted, initially no independent courses in English among the Australian universities founded in the nineteenth century; where modern languages were taught the early emphasis was overwhelmingly on grammar, style, and philology, rather than culture or literature (64). But in this, Australia’s universities were no more conservative than England’s, and in some cases considerably less so. Peter D. McDonald notes that Matthew Arnold was the first professor of poetry at Oxford to deliver his lectures in a language other than Latin (37). In Australia, meanwhile, a number of nineteenth-century academic figures (most of them trained in classics) made at least occasional sallies into English literature in their own scholarship, and of these, perhaps three—Mungo William McCallum at Sydney, Edward Ellis Morris in Melbourne and later Adelaide, and William Henry Williams in Tasmania—“could claim to be specialists in English” (Dale 65). But even here, Romanticism remained off limits, a subterranean current rather than an acknowledged influence: McCallum and Williams specialized in Shakespeare, and Morris spent much of his career researching the literature of the eighteenth century.

While the first specialists in English at the colonial university wrote little on Romantic literature, Romantic poetry and its values were nonetheless central to the university’s cultural life. Ian Reid has found in Melbourne University’s late nineteenth-century examination questions “an absorption of certain Romantic assumptions” to do with the purposes and methods of literary studies (Reid 128). These included the view that in tracing literary history, “significance should be specified in terms of individual greatness and key periods of achievement,” and the propagation of “a Romantic hierarchy of achievement within particular canonical genres” (128). From the late 1860s, specifically literary texts began to appear on the list of required reading for the matriculation examination in English at the University of Melbourne—previously confined to primers on etymology, syntax, grammar and the analysis of sentences. Knowledge of early modern literature was required for matriculation through the 1870s, in a broadly Romantic construction of literary history that did not, however, extend to consideration of the Romantic period itself.

That Romantic exclusion was overturned in the mid-1880s with the sudden and prominent embrace of nineteenth-century literature. Alongside Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard Morris’s Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar, the 1884 matriculation examination required prospective students to have read Byron’s Childe Harold and a selection of works by Walter Savage Landor. In 1887, a pair of essays by Charles Lamb were added to the list. In 1889 matriculants were to have Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark” “learnt by heart,” and have studied Shelley’s “The Cloud,” Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” and a selection of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Macaulay, Oliver Goldsmith and William Thackeray. Only Milton now remained from the early modern reading lists of the 1870s. This abrupt shift to a relatively contemporary literary field was almost certainly owed to the influence of E. E. Morris, appointed to the Chair of Modern Languages in Melbourne in 1884.

Thomas Harlin’s 1885 study-guide—Selections from Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Macaulay: As Prescribed for the Matriculation Examinations of the Melbourne University, with Notes and Other Help for Students—indicates how this gravitation towards eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature was intended to give shape to white colonial subjects’ cultural affinity with England. The selection of Goldsmith’s letters, penned as if by “the philosophic Chinaman, resident in London after long wonderings from home” and containing “his observations of men and things of the Western World” (qtd. in Harlin 108), affirm London as global center even while worrying at its centrality. The selection of poems by William Wordsworth and Thomas Babington Macaulay works more unambiguously to establish a relationship between these poets and their readers as common subjects of empire.

The Macaulay selection is dominated by the narrative poems of his Lays of Ancient Rome, most of which were written in the 1830s during his term as the legal member of the Governor-General of India’s Supreme Council. In this same period, at the request of Governor Bentinck, Macaulay published his now notorious “Minute on English Education in India,” a document central to the introduction of English as the medium of instruction in all institutions of learning under colonial authority in India, and to a heightened emphasis on the teaching of modern English literature. Macaulay asserted the massive superiority of Western knowledge to that written in the “Sanscrit language” (58). The modernization of India, he claimed, would therefore require the teaching of a European language. English, “pre-eminent even among languages of the West” (58), struck him as the obvious choice. Macaulay went on to offer a comparison between the situation of India in the 1830s and that of England on the eve of the Renaissance, when “everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans” (59). Failing to impose English literature on India would be akin to “our ancestors” neglecting “the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus,” printing nothing and teaching nothing at the universities “but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French” (59). “What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India,” Macaulay concluded, before calibrating his analogy once more in favor of modern English: “The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments—in history for example—I am certain that it is much less so” (59).

Macaulay’s advocacy in the 1830s for English literature as a tool of cultural Anglicization found broad social approval among British subjects, but it ran ahead of the practices of the first Australian universities, which had eschewed modern literatures and would have had limited sympathy with Macaulay’s claim that English literature “is now more valuable” than Latin and Greek. The appointment of E. E. Morris in the mid-1880s was a moment of cultural catch-up. As Dale reports, Morris quoted at length from Macaulay’s “Minute” in his inaugural lecture at Melbourne University (99). A colonial policy designed for India in the 1830s was now being repurposed for Australia a half-century later. But for Morris, there was a key difference in the Australian situation. Whereas in India, English instruction was to be imposed on the population, in Australia institutional practice actually lagged behind popular taste. Introducing nineteenth-century British literature onto the university syllabus marked the institutional acceptance of an idea the colonial public had already intuited. The inclusion of Macaulay’s own nineteenth-century poems in the matriculation syllabus then carried out, in altered circumstances and with other means, the Macaulayist project of mobilizing modern English literature to cultivate imperial identification with Englishness.

While Wordsworth was less explicitly entangled in the production of empire than Macaulay, Harlin’s (and probably Morris’s) selection from his work seems similarly calculated to give shape to powerful sympathetic identifications between England and the subjects of its imperial outposts. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” exalt English landscapes. “Westminster Bridge” gestures in its opening line to London’s global supremacy and, in the litany of “Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples,” to the city’s centrality to global economy, governance and culture (635). “Character of the Happy Warrior” is introduced by Harlin as an unproblematic and sincere hagiography of Lord Nelson (149), whose name, along with that of Trafalgar, was already widely celebrated in colonial toponyms. “Elegiac Stanzas, suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont” imagines what it would be to “plant” the art, landscape and history of England

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. (710)

“Peele Castle” is not quite a reverie about transplanting Englishness to Bondi Beach, but its imaginative mechanics afforded cultural translocation to colonial contexts, allowing these lines to be overlaid with newly imperial meanings.

“It is not to be thought of that the Flood / Of British freedom,” another sonnet in Melbourne University’s Wordsworth selection, unambiguously addresses the relationship between England and the “foreign lands” to which England ships “freights of worth” (647). Ian Reid has argued that these “freights of worth” are “[n]ot so much the material blessings of Victorian commerce and industry as the capacities of the English language, the literature to which it gave rise, the knowledge to which it gave access, and the institutions (educational, religious and so forth) through which that whole cargo of cultural values was transmitted” (120). The further inclusion in the matriculation selection of “London 1802” helps to confirm Reid’s reading here. Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Milton in this poem calls on the latter poet to confer “manners, virtue, freedom, power” on his reader and thereby restore the “ancient English dower / Of inward happiness” (Wordsworth 646). In this, Wordsworth reiterates the view that modern English literature inculcates improving English values in its reader, and none-too-subtly implies that his is the Miltonic sensibility the nascent nineteenth century desperately needs.

If, as seems very likely, the Macaulayist (and Indian-born) E. E. Morris was indeed instrumental to the formation of this reading list, it offers an important footnote to Gauri Viswanathan’s argument that the colonies (India, in particular) provided key sites for the construction of English literary studies. English as “the study of culture and not just the study of language” existed in India as early as the 1820s, she writes, when English universities still adhered to what she calls “the classical curriculum” (4). If it is, as Viswanathan suggests, ironic that English literature “appeared as a subject in the colonies long before it was institutionalized in the home country” (3), it is a lesser but still significant irony that the institutionalization of English literature in India would come to impact on its institutionalization in the colonies of Australia, particularly given Macaulay had himself cited in his 1835 “Minute” the purportedly English-speaking Australia, one of “two great European communities which are rising … communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire,” as a secondary argument for the instruction of modern English literature in India (58). Another irony: in Australia in 1835, speakers of Aboriginal languages still outnumbered speakers of English, and it was not until late August that year that English-speakers first arrived by boat from Lutruwita (Van Diemen’s Land / Tasmania) to take possession of the territory, Naarm, that colonists would come to call Melbourne.

The Romantic connections made explicit in Morris’s imperialist pedagogy soon sunk from view; after the six British colonies were federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, settler Australia’s current of Romanticism again passed along culturally subterranean channels. For all the nation’s newfound political independence, its academic institutions remained powerfully oriented towards British models. British universities supplied Australia with many of its academic staff; promising young Australian graduates traveled in the other direction for further training and accreditation. These career paths linking the discipline of English in Australia to prestigious institutions in the mother country were so well-worn that, as Dale has shown, much of the twentieth-century history of university English in Australia can be told as a story of Oxford versus Cambridge. By the 1940s, every university extant in Australia boasted an English department. But works of Romantic literature made their way onto reading lists only in desultory, more-or-less accidental ways, and typically were understood as eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literature rather than as “Romantic.” This was in part due to the dominance of Oxford-trained faculty members. The academic study of English was legitimized in Australia by its philological scholarship on historic modes of the English language, for which Oxford provided the model. In the 1940s, according to the recollections of G. A. Wilkes, anyone entering the University of Sydney aspiring to take honors in English would gravitate to a course in Anglo-Saxon in first and second years. A first-year survey course delivered by Ian Maxwell would take in such arguably Romantic fare as “traditional ballads” and Burns, alongside Malory and T. S. Eliot. Wilkes’s study of “the literature of the nineteenth century” involved “reading Landor and Swinburne, Carlyle and Ruskin, Gaskell and Trollope” (Wilkes 10).

The philological scholarship that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century in Australia was overturned, beginning in the 1950s, with the arrival of Leavisism and a broader realignment from Oxford to Cambridge. The Oxford model, focused on specialist historical topics, had served a university system open only to a vanishingly small elite fraction. Like Macaulay before him, Leavis presented Australian universities with a model of literary education as a mechanism for propagating cultural values and improving the world beyond the classroom. As Australia’s higher education system, now centrally administered and funded by the Federal Government, expanded significantly in the decades following the Second World War, Leavis provided scripts for its broadened social mission. But the well-documented ascent of Leavis in Australian universities, where his ideas became more dominant than in any other national system, still left little room for Romanticism. The relatively low value attached to the study of Romantic literature continued, even as literary studies in Australia expanded out from philology to take in the practical techniques and moral and social callings associated with Leavisite criticism.

On the one hand, Leavis refused to acknowledge anything so coherent as a Romantic literary cohort and tended to treat the authors he saw as belonging to that non-cohort separately, praising Wordsworth and Keats (on occasion), while deriding the “repetitive, vaporous, monotonously self-regarding and often emotionally cheap” Percy Shelley (“Literary Criticism and Philosophy” 69). On the other hand, he would allow that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, “in belonging to the same age … have something negative: the absence of anything to replace the very positive tradition (literary, and more than literary—hence its strength) that had prevailed till towards the end of the eighteenth century” (The Common Pursuit 185). In practice, Leavis gave the Romantics more of his attention than some of his most avowedly Romanticist North American contemporaries did—his commentary on them takes up much of his Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936), for instance­—but it was commentary that had a distinctly dampening effect on the study of Romanticism among his Australian acolytes, who instead overwhelmingly turned for thirty years either to the literature of Elizabethan England or to the Victorian novel.

1961 was a landmark year for studies in Romanticism in the Anglophone world, with the inaugural issue of Studies in Romanticism. The foundation of the field’s first dedicated journal at Boston University suggests some of the ways that North America’s scholarly climate differed from Britain’s. These differences would contribute to a reorientation for Australian students of English, who from this moment would increasingly come to see North American universities as rival destinations for graduate studies to Oxbridge. In 1960s North America, academic interest was drawn to the seemingly countercultural Romantics, and to a 1960s poetic counterculture that likewise positioned itself in a lineage stretching back to Blake and Shelley. In the Leavisite English departments of Australia’s eastern seaboard, no such congruence of scholarship, contemporary poetics and Romantic materials was possible. When John Tranter published The New Australian Poetry in 1975 to anthologize what he called Australian poetry’s “generation of '68,” he argued that the new poets saw their writing “as an integral part of a wider struggle for freedom … from the handcuffs of rhyme and the critical strictures of the university English departments” (xvii). Positioning this poetry as a vigorous alternative to an Australian literature consisting of “Henry Lawson and A. D. Hope” (xvii), Tranter opposed it to the contemporary views and practices of Hope, a self-styled neo-Augustan poet and professor of Australian literature at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Henry Lawson, meanwhile, stands in here for a rugged Australian nationalist poetics, discussed in Jeremy George’s essay in this issue. Hope, more academically, had begrudgingly welcomed 1960 by publishing “Free verse: a post-mortem” in Australia’s CIA-sponsored conservative cultural journal, Quadrant. For the poets of Tranter’s anthology, Australian poetry was “largely derived from enfeebled English models … too closely aligned with the reactionary establishment that had dragged us into the shame of the Vietnam War,” and “built upon a mid-Victorian understanding of poetry’s role that had been convincingly demolished in Europe and the Americas decades before” (xvii). Overwhelmingly writing the free verse that Hope (as the incarnation of the anti-Romantic university) had deplored, the Australian poetic generation of '68 borrowed from the moods and tropes of Romantic poetry, not excluding opiate addiction, and name-dropped Romantic poets (particularly Blake, Shelley, Keats and Goethe, but also Baudelaire and Mallarmé) by way of signaling both their poetic genealogy and their aesthetic radicalism.

Tranter’s perception of an academic hostility to Romantic modes was likely shaped with particular reference to Sydney University, Melbourne University and ANU. There were institutions of a notably different critical bent, including the University of Adelaide, which in the 1970s was in certain respects more politically and aesthetically progressive, if not in terms of any commitment to or even sympathy with feminist agendas of the period. The Adelaide Writers Festival, closely tied to the university, oversaw visits from radical male American poets dear to the Australian generation of '68: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garry Snyder, amongst others. Not coincidentally, Adelaide had two tenured staff members in the early 1970s who worked primarily on Romantic literature: John Colmer, editor of the Bollingen edition of On the Constitution of the Church and State (1977), and author of Coleridge, Critic of Society (1959), and Michael Tolley, a scholar of Blake, who co-edited a major edition of Night Thoughts with Jack Grant and Edward Rose for Oxford University Press.

The title of Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry was an homage to Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry of 1960. Radical breaks with the cultural orthodoxies prevailing in Australia under the long conservative government of Robert Menzies often involved appeals to American models. The broad cultural realignment that set in around 1968 was then fraught with paradox, given it essentially followed Australia’s geopolitical repositioning of late 1941, in which the country split with Britain as its imperial hegemon and committed instead to American military supremacy in the Pacific. The long delay in translating that switch of allegiance into cultural spheres goes some way to explaining why writing American-inflected verse against the English department could be seen as a way of countering Australian military involvement in Vietnam. In the intellectual conjuncture emerging from the late 1960s, a turn to British Romanticism could appear as progressive and exciting because it contested the out-dated Britishness of Australian cultural life. Only rarely, however, was this configuration mobilized to revisit and challenge received histories and understandings of British Romanticism itself. Tranter’s Australian beat Romanticism, after all, contained more than a few uncontested clichés.

Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, presents the most significant attempt from this period to rewrite Romantic narratives from a Southern perspective. Smith argued that Romanticism was shaped in important ways by the history of European encounters with the landscapes and Indigenous societies of southern Oceania. In the struggle to reconcile new empirical observations with existing aesthetic conventions, scientific and artistic ways of seeing were transformed in colonial encounters. Neo-classical concepts and values gave way to an emergent and proto-ecological ordering of the visual field. Where the current of British Romanticism had previously been imagined as flowing in only one direction, Smith then presented an alternative model of hybridizing cultural exchanges between metropolis and periphery. His work would go on to be widely influential across multiple disciplines, and has been seen to anticipate important themes and priorities subsequently developed in postcolonial theory. In Australia, though, his influence was restricted more narrowly to art history, where he mentored a generation of scholars working at intersections of colonial and contemporary art by settler and Indigenous artists. As was also the case with Tranter, Smith’s revisionary project was motivated by an impulse to break with inherited British cultural modes: the program elaborated in art-historical terms in European Vision and the South Pacific had been announced in more nationalist terms the previous year in his “The Antipodean Manifesto,” which had vindicated an Australian right to “see and experience nature differently in some degree from the artists of the northern hemisphere” (166).

From its inception in the late nineteenth century, a central part of the project of English in Australia had been to “become British” (see Green and Cormack). The realignments charted by Smith, Tranter and others were designed to expose and disrupt the colonial continuities still gliding through Australian events and things. In the cases of Smith and Tranter, that project of de-anglicization somewhat paradoxically involved a return to British Romanticism. The priority they thereby assigned to Romanticism tended to be overlooked, however, even as their revisionary projects were broadly taken up and further developed within Australian universities in the 1980s. In this period, English in Australia as elsewhere was convulsed by the theory wars and contested by the emergence of innovative transdisciplinary studies: cultural studies, media studies, gender studies and others. Somewhat differently to other nations, in Australia these intellectual debates were staged within a higher education system already being reorganized along broadly neoliberal principles. The case for that reform was made in terms of expanding access to new constituencies traditionally excluded by university elitism. The new “studies,” on occasion, would find common cause with administrative measures aimed at weakening the autonomy of traditional departments like English which (with one or two exceptions) have today been reorganized into programs that sit within larger interdisciplinary managerial units. But even as Australia’s scholarly generation of the 1980s would carve out prominent positions within cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonialism and critical theory, Romanticism played little explicit role in the defining debates of the era. Where Tranter had turned to Romanticism to break with the English department, scholars now turned to French theory and British cultural studies.

There had always been Australian academics working, singly and incidentally, on Romantic-period writers through these decades. Robert S. White, for instance, had worked at the University of Western Australia on Keats; John Wiltshire, at La Trobe, worked on Jane Austen. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that studies of Romanticism cohered as a substantial presence within Australian university English. 1990 or thereabouts was also a high watermark for English in Australia. An audit in 1993 found that the English Department at the University of Sydney (still the largest in Australia) was staffed by a now incredible sixty-three scholars, the vast majority of whom were tenured. This largesse in staffing allowed for a burgeoning of idiosyncratic undergraduate area studies, and a subject dedicated to what at Sydney had still seemed a fairly niche area, Romantic Literature, was suddenly possible.

In 1989, Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto coordinated the “Imagining Romanticism” conference at the University of Melbourne. Otto, whose Ph.D. on Blake was supervised by Tolley at the University of Adelaide, had been recently appointed to a lectureship at the University of Melbourne, whereas Coleman, recently returned from Oxford with a DPhil on Coleridge, had been appointed at the University of Adelaide after Colmer’s retirement. The conference attracted international participation: John Beer from Cambridge; Nelson Hilton from University of Georgia; Tilottama Rajan, a rising star, with her Dark Interpreter recently published; and Stephen Prickett (then at the University of Glasgow, but Australian in origin). But it also called forth an impressive assortment of scholars from around the continent who had been working discretely on projects of roughly Romantic stripe. These included Sydney University’s Judith Barbour, who had published on Mary Shelley and Henry Fuseli; Ian Reid, whose Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies would appear in 2004; J. M. Q. Davis at the then Northern Territory University in Darwin, who had published on Blake and Austen, and who had compiled an anthology of German Tales of Fantasy, Horror and the Grotesque; Dennis Haskell at the University of Western Australia, who had published major studies in 1991 of mid-twentieth-century Australian poet, Kenneth Slessor, and of John Keats; Francis King at Monash, who had published on Coleridge and Wordsworth; Jon Mee, then at ANU, his Dangerous Enthusiasm approaching release; and Gerhard Schulz, whose work on German Romanticism was widely influential. So successful was the conference that the idea of starting a Romantic Studies association was mooted, but did not gain traction at the time. For Australian English departments, preoccupied with the rise of new fields like cultural studies, the future appeared to lie with theory, not historicization.

The conference resulted in the publication of Imagining Romanticism: Essays in English and Australian Romanticisms (1992). Eight essays, which make up the first half of the book in a section titled “English Romanticism,” cohere around a canonical big six: Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron, Polidori and the Shelleys. The essays of the second part, “Australian Romanticisms,” grapple with just what an Australian Romanticism might be. They focus on settler-colonial literature from the mid-nineteenth through to the late twentieth century, arguing for its Romanticism on the grounds of the texts’ relationship variously to landscape, nature, place, feeling and literary aesthetics. Even as the book brought questions of Romanticism’s workings in Australia together in a single volume with revisitings of the European canon, these were nonetheless positioned as two largely independent lines of inquiry, suggesting the continuing difficulty of perceiving European and colonial Romanticisms as interbraided elements in a coherent larger story.

A number of key players in the Imagining Romanticism conference were to go on to contribute to a landmark book in Australian Romanticism, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, edited by Iain McCalman. This major work of collective scholarship emerged from the thriving environment of the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, and brought contributions from numerous Australia-based academics together with those drawn from an extensive network of international researchers. Attempting to bridge divisions between historical, literary and cultural studies, the Companion offered an overview of the preoccupations of the era while also trying to “retain that interest in marginality and idiosyncrasy which so illuminated the cultural miscellanies and histories of the Romantic age” (ix). In this spirit it offered essays on such topics as “Utopianism,” “Sensibility,” “Prints” and “Popular Culture” alongside encyclopedia-style entries introducing the Romantic characters and concepts appearing in the essays. In his “Preface,” McCalman argued that the Australian context within which the book was produced helped to shape its defiantly idiosyncratic take on the period, noting that readers would “detect an inevitable antipodean inflection in our Companion: while this may carry some disadvantages, it also squares with our belief that much of the stunning vitality of the Romantic age derived from exchanges between margins and metropole” (n. p.).

Central to the intellectual claims of McCalman’s Companion was then the unique vantage point occupied by Australian Romanticists—hemispherically separated from their American and European colleagues, and in consequence partly distanced from the ever-shifting currents of the conference circuits in those centers of scholarship. Even now, with virtual conferences changing the academic landscape in dramatic ways, 8pm in London is still 7am on Australia’s east coast. But while Australian Romanticists continue to suffer from what historian Geoffrey Blainey famously termed “The Tyranny of Distance,” as many of our convict forbears soon realized, physical distance from Imperial centers could be a blessing, if one that is also often mixed. A convict, having served his or her term, could become a respectable businessperson in a society in which the strict class divisions of Britain were necessarily more fluid and malleable due to the scarcity of labor. Given its relative destratification, Australia was for McCalman a peculiarly appropriate site for the study of what he called “gutter Romanticism”—a Romanticism of the margins and the marginalized.

The time now appeared ripe for revisiting the idea of a Romantic studies association. When Will Christie proposed the inaugural RSAA conference in 2011 at the University of Sydney, he adopted the theme “Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance,” and invited participants to consider what it might mean to practice Romanticism in Australia, New Zealand and the wider region in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In a nod to the Companion’s role in establishing Australian Romantic studies, McCalman and two of his key collaborators, Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, participated in a plenary roundtable on “Romanticism in Australia.” All three of us remember the roundtable and the conference fondly for their collegiality, impressive scholarship and good humor—qualities that RSAA conferences have managed to retain in the decade or so since this inaugural meeting at the University of Sydney.

Over the course of the early decades of the twenty-first century, Australian scholars began to undertake work that not only demonstrated their competence to read and commentate on Europe, but also investigated Australia as a site of Romantic cultural production, interpretation and revision. The study of Romanticism in Australia today then takes place alongside attempts to decolonize literary studies that have resulted in, or coincided with, new emphases in what literature gets studied, an attention to citation politics that is creating new and regionally-specific intellectual couplings for Romantic studies, and critical frameworks through which European literatures, in particular, are being reconsidered for their collusion with or conscription into projects of white nativization and settler colonialism. These new modes of focus have culminated in recent publications that re-orient Romanticism towards Australasia, such as Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis’s edited collection, Worlding the South (2021), and Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens’s Barron Field in New South Wales (2023). Deidre Coleman and Sara Fernandes’s essay in this issue reflects the strong current of postcolonial thought in Australasian Romanticism, while works like Chris Murray’s China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793–1938 (2020) reflect our region’s ongoing connection to Asia. Organizationally, the RSAA reinforces links between scholarship in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider region. Nikki Hessell’s work, including her essay in this issue, has been profoundly influential on these conversations as she continues to grapple with the impact of Romantic-era colonization on the Indigenous inhabitants of anglophone countries. Alex Watson’s essay in this issue points to further hemispheric repositionings of the literary Pacific.

In a region of the world that has felt the catastrophic effects of climate change in myriad and ongoing ways, ecocriticism remains an area of strength, as evidenced in Kate Rigby’s body of work, Dalia Nassar’s recent Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (2022), and in collections like Olivia Murphy and Anne Collett’s Romantic Climates: Literature and Science in an Age of Catastrophe (2019). As was the case with Smith some six decades ago and, more recently, with McCalman’s titles following the Companion, this work has also often sought to reconnect literary histories with contemporaneous histories of science—see, in this issue, Robert Boncardo, Justin Clemens and Meegan Hasted’s essay on poetry and astronomy. An acknowledgment of the significance of the long-neglected women writers of the period remains central to the work of Claire Knowles, Olivia Murphy and Thomas McLean (another New Zealand scholar), while scholars such as Gillian Russell (and Francesca Kavanagh in this issue) remain committed to McCalman’s vision of a Romanticism that embraces the popular and ephemeral just as much as the political and canonical. Even work on canonical Romantics produced in the Australian context often has a revisionary tenor; see, for example, Clara Tuite’s extensive writings on Austen and Byron, and Peter Otto’s recent edition of William Blake (2019). A converse political effort to recenter canonical understandings in Australian scholarly work, meanwhile, has received significant institutional backing in the form of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a name in which, as Ramsay board member and conservative former Prime Minister Tony Abbott noted, emphasis is intended to fall on the preposition. As a major philanthropic investment in higher education, the Ramsay Centre is highly anomalous in a cash-starved Australian public university system; it has been led, since its controversial founding in 2017, by Simon Haines, a Romanticist by training whose titles include Shelley’s Poetry: The Divided Self (1997) and Bloomsbury’s European Romanticism: A Reader (2010).

Even as at least some Australian Romanticists have been revisiting Romantic materials and traditions in locally situated and globally revisionary ways, the most pointed efforts to provincialize European Romanticism in this country have come from outside academic literary studies, and particularly from contemporary Aboriginal novelists, poets and artists. Take, for example, Tony Albert’s iconic artwork from 2008, hopeless ROMANTIC (Figure 1). Albert is a Sydney-based Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku-Yalanji conceptual artist whose work often employs language as one of its central media. Here he takes the common idiom of the “hopeless Romantic,” which describes someone who is incurably sentimental, incapable of disillusion and unable to learn from experience, as the textual support for a display of what Albert has called “Aboriginalia.” This is comprised of kitsch souvenir objects from the twentieth century—ashtrays, decorative boomerangs, garden ornaments and the like—that present commodified Aboriginal motifs and themes. These are the everyday racist trinkets and trophies of twentieth-century settler Australia, now mostly discarded thrift store bric-a-brac. “It’s not until you see Aboriginalia on this mass scale,” the artist stated in a 2018 interview, “that you start to understand how pollinated Australia was by these images, how they were used to sell a country” (84). For Albert, this degraded memorabilia and aesthetic flotsam is charged with latent powers to generate counter-narratives precisely because it was dissolved so entirely into the material culture of Australian society, forming something like a substrata—or subterranean current—of unacknowledged collective memory. Here, the keyword recovered to critical reflection is the one spelled out in word-carvings, bronze busts, plaques, decorative plates and coasters, a calendar tea towel from 1981, crude figurines, and caricatures and sentimental drawings: ROMANTIC.

Figure 1. Tony Albert, hopeless ROMANTIC, 2008. © Tony Albert Copyright Agency, 2023.

The practices of collection that underpin Albert’s use of Aboriginalia are one way his art reflects critically on the institutional frames within which it circulates. His source materials might appear to present a very different kind of Aboriginal art to that collected and exhibited by Australia’s leading cultural institutions. But in its parodic echoing of institutional art collecting, hopeless ROMANTIC underscores the commonalities they share. The histories of both institutionally-valorized Aboriginal art and of Albert’s “Aboriginalia” trace back to the early colonial period (that is, to the Romantic period), in which collecting the material artifacts produced by Aboriginal people (or indeed, transcribing Aboriginal poetry, as with Barron Field) was an aesthetic corollary of a settler program premised on the elimination of Aboriginal people and Aboriginality. The artist Richard Bell, an important generational influence on Albert, condensed these ramified connections, at once historical and contemporary, into a “Theorem” in 2002: “Aboriginal Art—It’s a white thing!” But for Bell as for Albert, Aboriginal art for all its whiteness remains available nevertheless for creative acts of re-Aboriginalization, which is one way to understand Albert’s strategies in hopeless ROMANTIC. The long history of settler Romanticization of Aboriginal people (the mass-produced iconographic treatment of Aboriginal people as noble savages, primitive throwbacks or sentimentalized curiosities) is reconfigured here in ways that render its hidden scriptings visible. Settler Australia is finally required, as it were, to spell out its melancholically genocidal Romanticism.

The essay in which Bell first formulated his theorem on the whiteness of Aboriginal art ends with the words: “There is no hope.” The phrase “hopeless Romantic” characterizes someone who is undisillusionable—a characteristic Albert here applies to Romantic settler subjectivity in Australia. But for all its critical agenda, hopeless ROMANTIC is itself also a strangely hopeful work, playfully committed to the possibility of an aesthetic unpicking of histories of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and marginalization. Note the way Albert mobilizes a little contradiction contained in the phrase he takes as his text. The hopeless Romantic is hopeless not in the sense of being without hope, but of being a hopeless case. For the problem with hopeless Romanticism is precisely its abundant optimism, its viewing of past, present and future through rose-tinted glasses. Hopeless Romantics are, so to speak, hopelessly hopeful. Albert’s Aboriginal conceptualism is always alert to verbal effects of ambiguity like this, and to the lability and even reversibility of the meanings borne by the terms he selects from Australian public discourse. If it is, paradoxically, an excess of hope that makes the Romantic hopeless, then equally a situation in which there is no hope might potentially offer ironic support for visions of a radically altered state of affairs. At one level, the hopeless Romantic here is settler society, still entangled violently in colonial imaginings and European visions. But at another, the phrase could also be referred to the artist himself, who reconfigures history’s worn-out lies in a quixotic effort to envision something new. Perhaps that ambiguous hope might even be extended to Australian studies in Romanticism, Albert’s work suggests—on the condition, that is, that it too prove capable of recognizing itself in this image, and so also of recognizing how its objects and methods have for too long coursed invisibly through events and things in this country.

Notes

1 RSAA is a society that includes scholars from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and across the broader Asia-Pacific region. We focus here only on the story of Australian engagements with Romanticism. Special thanks to our colleagues, Will Christie (at the Australian National University), and Peter Otto and Deirdre Coleman (both at the University of Melbourne), for sharing their recollections and analysis of the field. Thanks also to the peer reviewers of this essay for their very pertinent and helpful comments, and indeed to the many scholars from around the world who reviewed essays for this special issue. Finally, we owe a huge debt of thanks to Meegan Hasted and Francesca Kavanagh for their invaluable assistance in the running of the 2021 RSAA conference and in the editing of this special issue.