Picnic with Nuns and Natives

In 1982, Michael Symons published One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition extended the subtitle with the addition of the "g" word as a sign of national progress and maturation, so that it read, A Gastronomic History of Australian Eating. The main title, while remaining the same, originally read ironically, like Donald Horne's title for The Lucky Country,¹ suggesting a settler culture lacking in discipline, ambition, or taste—whereas by the time of the anniversary edition, "the continuous picnic" had become a full-blown paradox, conjuring simultaneously both progress and decline. It speaks now of nostalgia for a more innocent time, the naiveté (some would say the perversity) of which lay in its self-satisfaction. So what exactly does the picnic signify in Australian culture? What was its original conception, and how has it evolved as a representative image of the Australian way of life?

This article presents a brief introduction to Australian picnic imagery and iconography, leading into consideration of the picnic trope as it functioned during and since the History Wars that ignited in the 1980s (and which, unfortunately, remain unresolved). The main "field of battle" (as Robert Manne puts it) at that time was the "the nature of the Indigenous dispossession and the place it should assume in Australian self-understanding" (Manne, "History") While the Australian History Wars in the 1980s and 1990s were less wide ranging than were the Culture Wars that followed in the United States, they had similar implications, relating to millennial debates about cultural degeneration and the end of history. But to understand the multifunctional operations of the picnic trope in Australian literature and culture requires some familiarity with both the material and representational history of al fresco dining and other outdoor settler entertainments.

There is no reliable etymology for the word "picnic" (Levy 70). The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word originally referred to a fashionable social entertainment in which each person contributed a share of the provisions, and it locates the first recorded English usage of "picnic" in a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son from Germany in 1748. For the Germans, however, it meant simply a meeting, or an assembly of people. The Swedish consider the word of possible French origin, and the French at first speculated that it might be Spanish, although no Spanish dictionary apparently agreed; so the French eventually decided that the word must indeed be French: a contraction of pique (to pick), piquante (sharp or pungent), and nique (of small value).

The earliest English account of outdoor dining occurs in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Oliver Cromwell had a dinner served on the grounds of Hyde Park in 1654; and Samuel Pepys ate many meals while boating on the Thames or reclining on its banks. But none of these were named picnics. Georgina Battiscombe, in her 1949 book English Picnics, credits Oliver Goldsmith with the first picnic in English literature, in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766): "Our family dined in the field, and we sat, or rather, reclined round a temperate repast, our cloth spread upon the hay" (21). But as Battiscombe points out, until the Romantics made nature fashionable, "no one connected the idea of pleasure with the notion of a meal eaten anywhere but under a roof" (4). Pleasure indicated indulgence. This is perhaps what Dickens had in mind when he compiled The Picnic Papers (1841), a "picnic" in this instance meaning that it was composed of specially selected items—in other words, it was an anthology—and with the suggestion also of something rather frivolous. A person accused of picnickery is a frivolous person. Hence, in the English poetry wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Imagists derided the Georgians as Sunday picnic poets.

In 1859, Henry Kingsley published in England the novel that many people wrongly regard as marking the beginning of an Australian outback literature, The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, a popular romance of bushranging. He was criticized for his depiction of the pastoral life on a cattle station as "too much like a prolonged picnic" (Hergenhan...