The brash colonial: Class and comportment in nineteenth-century Australia

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 12, Issue , 2002, Pages 431-453

  Russell, Penny ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949207125     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S008044010200018X     Document Type: Review

References (82)

1. Letter, Jane Franklin to Sir John Franklin, 20 Apr. 1839, in Sir John Franklin, diaries and letters, National Library of Australia MS 114. The various accounts of this scene, and a more detailed discussion of Lady Franklin's colonial travels, may be found in This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin's Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839, ed. P. Russell (Canberra, 2002)
2. Edmund Charles Hobson, diary of a journey, with Lady Franklin's party, overland from Melbourne to the Hume River, 20 Apr. 1839, La Trobe Library MS (State Library of Victoria) Box 25/1, M 383/09
3. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (1994), 3
4. As Ann Laura Stoler suggests in her 'Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves', in Cultures of Empire, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester, 2000), esp. 89-95
5. Examples of valuable approaches, which transcend national frameworks, can be found in Thomas, Colonialism, and in the overview offered by John Darwin, 'Civility and Empire', in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. P. Burke et al. (Oxford, 2000), 321-36
6. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994), 7
7. It was an argument that found its echoes in England, where colonisation was beginning to be celebrated as 'the mark of a special British genius for building new societies'. Darwin, 'Civility and Empire', 328
8. See, among others, Alan Atkinson, Camden (Melbourne, 1988)
9. A. Atkinson, 'Towards Independence: Recipes for Self-Government in Colonial New South Wales', in Pastiche I: Reflections on 19th Century Australia, ed. P. Russell and R. White (Sydney, 1994)
10. C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, III (Melbourne, 1973), chs. 7 and 8
11. Jan Kociumbas, The Oxford History of Australia, II: 1770-1860 (Melbourne, 1992)
12. J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney, 1983)
13. J. B. Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New SouthWales 1848-1884 (Sydney, 1988)
14. Ged Martin, Bunyip Aristocracy: The New South Wales Constitution Debate of 1853 and Hereditary Institutions in the British Colonies (Sydney, 1986)
15. The impact of free immigration on nineteenth-century society has been widely discussed by Australian historians. For examples of various approaches, see David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney, 1994)
16. Kociumbas, Oxford History, 294-319
17. John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (2nd edn, London and New York, 1996), esp. 28-35, 100-4
18. Geoffrey Sherington, Australia's Immigrants (Sydney, 1980)
19. E. G. Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney, cited in Darwin, 'Civility and Empire', 332
20. The phrase is from Archibald Forbes, 'Some social characteristics of Australia', Contemporary Review, 44 (Oct. 1883), 604. Forbes observed that each newcomer to colonial society 'must make himself individually pleasant and meritorious, in a social sense, or rather, to speak more categorically, in some one or more details of the abstract social eligibility'
21. Stoler, 'Bourgeois Bodies', 98
22. On manners, gentility, pedigree and distinction in Australian society see P. de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes (Melbourne, 1980)
23. and idem, Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850-1880 (Melbourne, 1991)
24. John Hirst, 'Egalitarianism', in Australian Cultural History, ed. F. B. Smith and S. L. Goldberg (Cambridge, 1988)
25. P. Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Melbourne, 1994)
26. Elizabeth Windschuttle, 'The New Science of Etiquette', Push from the Bush, 7 (Sept. 1980), 58-80
27. Cf. Anna Bryson, who describes her study of the emergence of 'civility' in early modern England as 'more an exploration of ideals and norms than a history of practice, but there can be no coherent approach to practice without an understanding of ideals and norms'. A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), 6
28. Australian Etiquette: Rules and Usages of the Best Society in the Australasian Colonies (Melbourne, 1886; facsimile edn, Melbourne, 1980), Preface and 71. On the ubiquity of conduct manuals in early modern English culture and the 'suspiciously long periods of time' over which they remained unchanged, see Bryson, Courtesy, 5. The same holds true of nineteenth-century etiquette books
29. R. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure (Melbourne, 1995), 106-7
30. See, for example, R. L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), xv. I have borrowed Bushman's terminology here
31. Bushman, Refinement, 222
32. The colonial context draws attention to the limitations of any model that assumes a 'discourse' of politeness developing according to its own autonomous logic. In the colonial setting, new and contested patterns of authority and hierarchy fundamentally reconstrue the logic of politeness, manners and presentability. The language of politeness in Australia is a language of distinction, which is employed strategically to establish not only position but framework. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the strategic use of 'cultural capital' in the transformations of social space and his discussion of the relationship between classes and classifications provide useful introductory points for understanding the importance of both 'Englishness' and 'politeness' in this context. See P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA, 1984). I am indebted here to Anna Bryson's illuminating discussion of the implications of the theoretical work of Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and others for the study of politeness, Courtesy, 15-18
33. 'So we will never arrive at the "real" Australia. From the attempts of others to get there, we can learn much about the travellers and the journey itself, but nothing about the destination. There is none.' Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney, 1981), x
34. The term 'imagined community' was coined by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
35. Those who did return Home, whether on a visit or for life, confronted the relationship between the England of their imagination and the society they encountered. A rich field for the investigation of 'colonial manners' lies in accounts of such journeys home. On cultural imaginings and personal experiences of England, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees, 222-45
36. Andrew Hassam, Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Impressions of Imperial Britain (Melbourne, 2000)
37. T. F. Pagliaro, 'An Australian Family Abroad, the Rowe Letters, 1873-4' (MA thesis, Monash University, 1981)
38. Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne, 1996), 158-77
39. Sherington, Australia's Immigrants, 59-87
40. Angela Woollacot, '"All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself": Australian Women's Voyages "Home" and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness', American Historical Review, 102(4) (1997), 1003-29
41. See also the Langton novels of Martin Boyd: The Cardboard Crown (1952)
42. A Difficult Young Man (1955)
43. Outbreak of Love (1957)
44. and When Blackbirds Sing (1962)
45. This brief account draws principally on A. W. Martin 'Parkes, Sir Henry', Australian Dictionary of Biography, V (Melbourne, 1974), 399-406
46. and Clark, History of Australia, 167-8
47. Quotation from Clarinda Parkes's letter is cited in A. W. Martin, Henry Parkes (Melbourne, 1980), 23
48. As Geoffrey Bolton observes in his entry on Parkes in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (Melbourne, 1998), 494
49. On the value colonists placed on such honours, see Hirst, 'Egalitarianism'
50. Martin, 'Parkes', 403
51. Samuel Curtis Candler, diary, 6 Oct. 1867, La Trobe Library MS 9502
52. Martin, Henry Parkes, 379
53. Cited in M. D. McLaurin, Sir Henry (Melbourne, n.d.), 101
54. Bulletin, 21 Feb. 1891, 14
55. Margaret Jersey, Fifty One Years of Victorian Life (1922), 249
56. Letters, Lady Jersey to Sir Henry Parkes, Parkes correspondence, Mitchell Library MS (State Library of New South Wales), 18 Feb. 1891 (A923); 10 Apr. 1891 (A923); 10 Apr. 1891 (A889)
57. The poem appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 11 Mar. 1891. Ten days later the Bulletin commented: 'The chief moral attaching to the publication of Lady Jersey's verse is this: as with pills so with poetry - advertising is the chief element of success. If the noble authoress wishes to find out the market (Heaven forbid that we should say the true) value of her poetical works, let her write on odd scraps of paper, append the name of some unadvertised governess, drop the poem into the Herald editor's box and await the results ere she feeds her hungry Pegasus', Bulletin, 21 Mar. 1891, 14
58. Letter, Henry Gullet to Lord Carrington, 10 Apr. 18, Carrington papers - correspondence, Australian Joint Copying Project M928 [hereinafter Carrington papers]
59. Henry Gullet to Lord Carrington, 20 July 1891, Carrington papers. In other contexts, Parkes expressed a sentimental sorrow rather than wit. A sonnet 'To Eleanor' began: 'And thou hast suffer'd bravely, tender heart! / But well thou know'st the world is not for them - / The social non-conformists who contemn / Or disobey the whitened laws, that part / The saints from sinners, in this painted mart.' Cited in McLaurin, Sir Henry, 100
60. B. Kingston, 'The Lady and the Australian Girl: Some Thoughts on Nationalism and Class', in Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. ed. N. Grieve and A. Burns (Melbourne, 1986), 31
61. Kingston, 'The Lady', 28-9
62. C. Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne (1862), 228-9
63. [J. H. Kerr] Glimpses of Life in Victoria, by a Resident (Edinburgh, 1872), 406. It has been suggested that Kerr's wife was a joint or perhaps the principal author of this work
64. R. McNicoll, Number 36 Collins Street: Melbourne Club 1838-1988 (Sydney, 1988), 144
65. Letter, S. C. Candler to Lord Newry, 9 Feb. 1868, copy in Candler, diary
66. Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox (2nd edn, Ringwood, 1987), 203-4
67. Lawson, Archibald Paradox, 203
68. Bulletin, 20 June 1891, 20; 7 Mar. 1891, 8; 4 Apr. 1891, 8; 18 Apr. 1891, 17
69. Bulletin, 5 Mar. 1892, 14
70. Russell, Wish of Distinction, 58-91
71. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982)
72. Thomas Anne Ward Cole, diary, 5 Nov. 1872, La Trobe Library MS, Boxes 1472-87. Brighton is a prestigious bayside suburb of Melbourne
73. See, for example, Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986)
74. Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 1989)
75. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989)
76. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentence: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge, 1990)
77. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police (Ringwood, 1975)
78. Kaplan, Sea Changes, 166-8
79. Candler, diary, 23 and 24 Sept. 1867
80. Australian Etiquette, 102
81. Cole, diary, 13 Apr. 1867; Annie Maria Baxter Dawbin, diary, 28 Feb. 1864, La Trobe Library MS 7648, MF 35-38
82. Annie and Bessie Carre Riddell, diary, 13 May 1872, Carre Riddell family papers, University of Melbourne Archives