The Outback and the West: Australian and American Frontier Fiction

R O Y W. M E Y E R Mankato State College The Outback and the West: Australian and American Frontier Fiction When Melville referred to Australia as “that great America on the other side of the sphere,” he was expressing a notion wide­ spread in his day and ours, that Australia and the United States were pretty much alike, give or take a kangaroo there, a buffalo here. Though the notion has only limited validity, the two countries did— and do— have much in common. The resemblance is apparent, for example, in the pattern followed by white occupation. Begin­ ning in each case with a thin band of settlement along the east coast, the conquest progressed inland and westward, augmented later by penetrations from the southern and western coasts. On both continents the invasion proceeded without much regard for the rights of the native inhabitants. When the converging prongs of settlement reached the arid or semiarid lands of the interior, a pastoral economy developed, though in both countries mistaken beliefs about the climate led to sporadic attempts at agriculture in areas of deficient rainfall. A number of specific parallels have been pointed out by Harry Cranbrook Allen. In both countries the occupation of the land was accompanied by evasions of the laws, such as the use of dummies and fake dwellings and the seizure of water sites. The horse and the ox were used in both settings; the methods of farming and cattle-raising were similar; irrigation was tried in both, though under greater natural handicaps in Australia.1 Moreover, in other­ wise nearly valueless areas precious metals were discovered, and brief or lasting mining booms took place. But, as Allen also notes, such striking parallels are balanced by notable differences. In Australia the norm was not the small Wush and Backwoods: A Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States (East Lansing, 1959), pp. 60, 75, 78, 80-81. 4 Western American Literature farmer but the large pastoralist, partly because of geography and climate but partly also because the land policy was Hamiltonian, determined by those who wished to make money and subsidize immigration rather than by the members of a yeoman class. The difference is epitomized by the contrasting meanings of the word “squatter.” In the United States the squatter was the “bulwark of democracy,” in Australia, the “oligarch and local tyrant”—the man who laid the basis for a fortune by running cattle or sheep on land he did not own.2 For a long time the squatters dominated political life in the Australian colonies and threatened to develop into a permanent ruling class. When Miles Franklin subtitled a novel “A Tale of the Early Australian Squattocracy,” she was not just indulging her penchant for coining words. There were other differences, too. Whatever may have been its effect in the United States, the frontier in Australia never served, even in theory, as a safety-value. The development there of an egalitarian democracy owed more to the wage-earner, urban and rural, than to the frontier farmer. As a matter of fact, it has often been denied that Australia had a frontier at all, in the American sense of a steadily advancing line of settlement.3 Once the moun­ tain barrier had been crossed, about a generation after the first landings at Botany Bay, the readily usable land was quickly oc­ cupied. As might be expected, Australian fiction, a great deal of which is set in the outback, depicts life among the settlers with sufficient accuracy to provide instructive parallels with American writing about the frontier. The similarities and differences between the Australian and American experiences are reflected not only in the physical details of pioneering but also in the emotional and intel­ lectual responses to the process. The distrust and animosity felt toward the native population, the fear of a natural environment that seemed at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile toward man, the longing for “home,” which to the Australian usually meant England or Ireland, the suspicion of the city and of govern­ aIbid., pp. 61-62.®Allen, for example, says categorically, “Australia never had a frontier. The most that can be...