National Landscapes: The Australian Literary Community and Environmental Thought in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

In 1944 Nettie Palmer, a leading figure in the Australian literary community, asked ‘what is the human value of this last Continent, which stepped straight into the age of industry, world-communications, world-wars, and accepted them all?’ Her question, posed at the height of World War Two, captures well the anxieties that drove Australian literary production across the 1930s and 1940s. During these decades the atmosphere of international catastrophe mingled with a variety of distinctly Australian colonial insecurities and incited a literary effort to enhance the country’s cultural ‘value’. Writers set themselves the task of ushering in an era of cultural ‘maturity’ in Australia as a bulwark against a variety of perceived external and internal threats. This thesis explores the ways that the Australian environment was co-opted into this mission. I argue that unlocking the supposedly untapped and elusive spiritual and material potential of the continent was considered a critical step toward both economic prosperity and national and cultural adulthood. Writers responded to environmental events and problems that were specific to the 1930s and 1940s: their writing registered changing approaches to closer settlement, the rise of institutionalised science, the environmental implications of new technologies and an emerging ecological consciousness. Their imaginative engagement with these processes – available to us in the books, poems, stories and letters they left behind – reveal the ways that contemporary environmental issues provoked and deepened literary concerns about white Australian belonging on the continent. This thesis is a fusion of historical, literary and environmental approaches. I highlight specific authors – Nettie Palmer, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Frank Dalby Davison and Brooke Nicholls, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Ian Mudie, William Hatfield and Flexmore Hudson – who wrote directly or indirectly about the Australian landscape in the 1930s and 1940s. Although they did not always share a unified environmental, political or even literary sensibility, this cohort was united by a sense of the social responsibility of writers and a desire to locate in Australia’s varied landscapes a national culture that they hoped would prove robust in the face of the catastrophes of the early to mid-twentieth century. Show more