Sensuality in sandshoes representations of the bush in the walking and writing of John le Gay Brereton and Percy Grainger

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 115, 2000, Pages 287-303

  Harper, Melissa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 19544379413     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610008596132     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. The promotion of the bush as a leisure and tourist destination, as evidenced by guidebooks and newspapers, began in earnest from the late 1860s. See, for example Guide for Excursionists from Melbourne (Melbourne: H. Thomas, 1868) and Guide to Excursionists from the Mainland to Tasmania (Melbourne: H. Thomas, 1869). Both were reissued in the 1870s and joined by many others in the 1880s. Illustrated newspapers such as the Australasian Sketcher and the Illustrated Australian News regularly published articles and sketches of 'beauty spots' frequented by summer excursionists and accounts of holiday outings. Mountainous areas were especially popular and each of the major cities established their own hill resorts. Much work remains to be done on bush tourism in Australia, and indeed on tourism more generally. Julia Home has made a valuable contribution with 'Favourite Resorts: Aspects of Tourist Travel in Nineteenth Century New South Wales' (PhD thesis. University of New South Wales, 1995). Also useful are Tom Griffiths, Secrets of the Forest-Discovering History in Melbourne's Ash Range (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992); Sally Symonds, Healesville: History in the Hills (Melbourne: Pioneer Design Studio, 1982); Peter Stanbury and L. Bushell, eds, The Blue Mountains: Grand Adventure for All (Sydney: Second Back Row Press and Macleay Museum, 1988). The chapter by Anne Burke, 'Awesome Cliffs, Fairy Dells and Lovers Silhouetted in the Sunset: A Recreational History of the Blue Mountains, 1870-1939', 99-117, traces the broadening class composition of visitors
2. Janice Newton, 'Domesticating the Bush', Journal of Australian Studies 49 (1996): 67-81, looks at bush tourism in Victoria in the interwar period, exploring the working-class origins of visitors to the Dandenongs
3. While the words 'bush walk' were sometimes used in guidebooks before this time, the two words did not join to become one and then enter popular discourse until the formation of the Sydney Bush Walkers in 1927. For a discussion of the development of bushwalking in New South Wales and the invention of the term, see Melissa Harper, The Bushwalking Movement in New South Wales, 1914-1941' (BA honours thesis, University of Sydney, 1992) and Melissa Harper, The Battle for the Bush: Bushwalking between the Wars', Journal of Australian Studies 45 (1995): 41-52
4. John Low, Pictorial Memories: Blue Mountains (Sydney: Atrand, 1994) 72-4
5. William Mogford Hamlet, the government analyst in NSW, co-founded one of the first walking clubs in Australia, the Warragamba Walking Club, in 1895. See Howard McKern, William Mogford Hamlet. 1850-1931: Gentleman and a Scholar (Sydney: Howard McKern, 1995) 42-7
6. George Emest Morrison walked from Melbourne to Adelaide in 1879 and then in 1882-83, roughly backtracking the route of Burke and Wills, he walked from Normanton to Melbourne. See Melissa Harper, 'A Boy's Own Adventure: George Morrison on Foot Across Australia', in Playing the Man: New Approaches to Masculinity, eds Katherine Biber, Tom Sear and Dave Trudinger (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1999), 110-22
7. Cyril Pearl, Morrison of Peking (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1983), 8-10, 26-34
8. Harper, 'Bushwalking Movement in NSW', 31-47
9. John Le Gay Brereton, Knocking Round (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930) 105-8
10. Christopher Thacker, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983)
11. H.P. Heseltine, John Le Gay Brereton (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965) 9
12. J. Le Gay Brereton, in Song of Brotherhood and Other Verses (London: George Allen, 1896) 72
13. 'Buffalo Creek' and The Faun' in Swags Up! (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1928) 12, 17-19. For a discussion of fauns, centaurs and classsical gods in Australian literature see Ivor Indyk, 'Some Uses of Myth in Australian Literature', Australian Cultural History, no. 5 (1986): 60-74
14. John Bird, Percy Grainger (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1982), 10
15. 'Percy Grainger Crosses South Australian Desert on Foot', Musical Courier: Weekly Review of the World's Music, 2 October 1924
16. Cited in Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688-1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 132
17. Donald MacDonald, The Bush Boy's Book (Sydney: J. Endacott, 1911)
18. Brereton, Landlopers: The Tale of a Drifting Travel and the Quest of Pardon and Peace (Sydney: William Brooks & Co, 1899), 21
19. Jim Smith, From Katoomba to the Jenolan Caves: The Six Foot Track, 1884-1984, (Katoomba: Second Back Row Press, 1984), 52-4
20. Bird, Percy Grainger, 70-1. See also David Pear, 'Percy Grainger and Manliness', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 56 (1998): 106-15
21. Percy Grainger to Karen Holten, 18 March 1906, in The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger, 1901-14, ed. Kay Dreyfus (Melbourne: Macmillan Press, 1985) 60 (emphasis in original)
22. Geoffrey Murray, The Gentle Art of Walking (London: Blackie & Son, 1939). The history of walking in English and American literature has been much explored
23. See, for example, Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)
24. Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (New York: St Martin's Press, 1997)
25. Jeffrey Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989)
26. Anne D. Wallace, Walking Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of the Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
27. Brereton, 'Our Country', in George Cowling, ed., Australian Essays (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1939), 85-9
28. Brereton, Landlopers, 99
29. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958)
30. Marilyn Lake, The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', in White and Russell, 263-80. More recently Linzi Murrie has added to the debate, further exploring the anxieties over masculinity in the 1890s
31. See The Australian Legend: Writing Australian Masculinity/Writing "Australian" Masculine', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 56 (1998): 68-77
32. Brereton, 'In the Gusty Old Weather', in Henry Lawson by His Mates, eds J. Le Gay Brereton and Bertha Lawson (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1973), 2-3
33. Brereton, Song of Brotherhood, 136
34. See 'Up the Country' and 'The City Bushman', in A Camp Fire Yam: Henry Lawson Complete Works, 1885-1900, ed. Leonard Cronin (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1984), 228, 234
35. Phyllis Grosskurt, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (London: Quartet Books, 1981). For Brereton on Besant's view on women's right to sexual pleasure, see Hermes 6, no. 8, 11 December 1891, 20. For Chidley
36. see Bill Homadge, Chidley's Answer to the Sex Problem (Dubbo: Review Publications, 1983)
37. Brereton, 'Hints on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass', Hermes 10, no. 3, 25 July 1894, 8
38. Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 7, 1891-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 405
39. Brereton, Knocking Round, 49
40. Kay Dreyfus and Janice Whiteside, 'Percy Grainger and Australia: Was There a Kookaburra in Those English "Country Gardens"?' Meanjin 41, no. 2 (June 1982): 155
41. For the reference to the sensual language of guide books I would like to thank Lara Bardsley-Smith for access to her research paper. The Tourist Guide, the Erotic Landscape and the Changing Experience of Tourism in the Blue Mountains, 1880-1930s' (University of Sydney, 1998). For an example of sensuous nature writing, see Amy Mack, A Bush Calendar (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1911)
42. Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
43. M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
44. Brereton, The Books I Remember', Lone Hand 12, no. 70, 1 February, 1913, 350
45. Landscapes featuring nudes formed a small but important part of the work of the Heidelberg artists. Tom Roberts The Sunny South, painted c. 1887, is one of the earliest Australian paintings to feature a nude in the bush. Others were Charles Condor's The Yarra, Heidelberg (1890) and Arthur Streeton's Spring (1890). Although not a Heidelberg artist Sydney Long's By Tranquil Waters (1894) also expresses a sensuous engagement wih the bush. Anna Coyne has examined how the male artists of the Heidelberg era sexualised nature as male, see 'Sexuality and the Body in the Art of the Heidelberg Era, 1885-1900' (B.A. hons thesis. University of Sydney, 1993), especially 32-8. See also Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, 1788-1970 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971), 99-100. As a young man Havelock Ellis spent four years in Australia (1875-79) as a teacher. In 1878 he was appointed as a schoolmaster for two small bush schools beyond Scone. This provided the setting for his fictional work Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll, written in 1884-85. It tells of an imaginary love affair with a female teacher, the bush providing an erotic setting for the encounter. Ellis claimed the year he spent in the bush had a profound influence on his life. See Geoffrey Dutton, Havelock Ellis in Australia (Sydney: Picador, 1983), 15-19. Elsewhere Ellis wrote on the history of the love of nature, see The Love of Wild Nature', The Contemporary Review 95. (1909): 180-99
46. Dot Butler, The Barefoot Bushwalker: A Story of Romance, Courage and Adventure (Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1992). Allison Cadzow's doctoral work on women explorers examines the language used by female bushwalkers, such as Byles, in constructing a sexualised landscape