Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 (review)

University of Melbourne historian Joy Damousi's Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 is an examination of the imperial spread of English from the Australian perspective, taking as its focus the key role voice culture, elocution and eloquence played in the civilising mission of the British Empire and how this impacted Australian culture over the century covered by the book. Rather than looking at the English language in Australia from a linguistic point of view of lexis and pronunciation, as is the wont of many commentaries on Australian English, for example Baker 1945/1966, Ramson 1966 and Moore 2008, Damousi uniquely concentrates on the oral and auditory aspects of language, language as speech and listening, language as it is spoken and heard in everyday life.

The chapters of Colonial Voices are presented largely in chronological order.

Chapter 1 covers the fifty years from 1840s to the 1890s, looking at the ways in which English was brought to Indigenous Australians by missionaries and educators as a means to 'civilise' the 'savage' which they viewed as an "illiterate and primitive other" (7). Damousi, with a nod to postcolonial theory, sees this as an imposition of a "Western paradigm onto an oral culture" and discusses how "values of eloquence and elocution" were used by the European interlopers to define "otherness and savagery" (7). Sadly, it is with this short chapter that the impact of English upon Indigenous Australia ends, and the later manifestations of this positioned perspective and the power imbalances inherent within it are not further dealt with.

From this point the book moves wholly to an exploration of eloquence and voice culture in White Australia. Thus Chapter 2 resets to the 1840s, this time detailing the emergence of public speech and oratory in the emerging public sphere of colonial Australia, important in "defining self-government and shaping national independence" (50). Damousi further shows how this was "a sphere dominated by white male, middle-class ministers, lawyers and politicians" (50) and how newspapers played their part by meticulously reporting "male public speeches" (49). Chapter 3 deals with elocution theory and practice, revealing how for Victorian society elocution had implications far beyond mere training for public speaking but was rather a more wide-reaching "theory about the mind, body and self in society" (86). The ways in which speech was connected to conceptualisations of gender and class, especially speech as a defining feature of femininity, form the burden of Chapter 4, in which Damousi explains that the "art of correct speech...was central to definitions of culture and gender" (101). The chapter further discusses the importance and prevalence of the notion of etiquette in colonial society and how "accomplishment in recitation, drama, and recital was expected of middle-class women" (110). Chapter 5 deals with the former prominent place of elocution in the Australian education system and how correct speech was used to promote values of class distinction and formed "a central part of bourgeois moral training" (146).

Chapters 6 turns its gaze to the once ubiquitous elocution contests and the now largely forgotten Grand National Eisteddfod, while Chapter 7 concentrates on two famous political orators of their day, Alfred Deakin and Vida Goldstein, showing not only the importance of the platform and the soap-box as vehicles of social and political change, but also the difficulties politicians, particularly female politicians, faced from unruly crowds intent on disruption, and how this led to widespread debate in the media about freedom of speech.

Chapter 8 examines public speech during World War I, including the passionately heated conscription and anti-conscription rallies, which again raised questions of freedom of speech. It also notes the move to a less formalised style of public speech, reflected in the slangy, informal and ultra-Australian language celebrated by C.J. Dennis in his immensely popular poetry. Damousi argues that the war was responsible for "the beginning of the breakdown in ties to...