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Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Colonial Australia produced a vast number of journals and magazines that helped to create an exuberant literary landscape. They were filled with lively contributions by many of the key writers and provocateurs of the day - and of the future. Important Australian writers such as Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, Ethel Turner and Katharine Susannah Prichard published for the first time in these journals. In The Colonial Journals, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver present a fascinating selection of material: a miscellany of content that enabled the 'free play of intellect' to thrive and, matched with wry visual design, made attractive artifacts that demonstrate the role this period played in the growth of an Australian literary culture.' (Publication blurb)

Contents

* Contents derived from the Crawley, Inner Perth, Perth, Western Australia,:UWA Publishing , 2014 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Beginnings and Endings : The Precarious Life of a Colonial Journal, Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , single work criticism

This work is an introduction to the book. It also provides detailed information on individual colonial journals.

(p. 9-66) Section: Introduction
The Making of Australian Literature, Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , single work criticism (p. 68-109)
Colonial Authors, Canons and Taste, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism
‘The colonial Australian journals provided venues for the establishment of often tightly-knit literary networks, featuring groups of writers who worked (and often socialised) together and who would write about each other, reviewing and promoting each other’s books. Some of the longer-lasting journals would also try to sustain the literary careers of writers in their ‘circle’, offering regular payment for contributions; the serialisation of a novel, for example, or a series of articles on a particular topic. The writers associated with a journal helped to make it both distinctive and recognisable in terms of style, content and values. And they also determined what counted (and what didn’t) in the ongoing project of establishing an appropriate literary canon. At one level, journals are all about literary ephemera, the kind of writing that lasts only a moment and then disappears. But at another level, they work hard to establish longer-term views of literary production, memorialising certain writers and speculating about their legacies. The colonial journals enabled writers to talk candidly about their influences, their aspirations, their fortunes and their misfortunes. As we look back on them now, we can say that the journal played a vital and constitutive role in structuring an Australian literary field: investing in it, evaluating it, gathering it together and then distributing it across the colonies and beyond.’ (Authors introduction : 111)
(p. 110-150)
Stories and Poetry from the Colonial Journals, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism

‘The colonial journals committed themselves to publishing Australian poetry and fiction right from the beginning. Even journals with only an incidental interest in literature would publish at least the occasional Australian verse – partly because poetry could be so overtly declarative, able to give strident expression to the ideological imperatives that a journal stood for. H.M. Green described the first colonial Australian journal - Ralph Mansfield’s Australian Magazine; or Compendium of Religious, Literary, and Miscellaneous Intelligence – as follows: ‘most of its subjects have no connection with the colony, but there is an article on the platypus, and Australian subjects are sprinkled through the Religious and Miscellaneous sections. There are the usual negligible local verses…’ This last remark is interesting, because it suggests that colonial poetry – ‘negligible’ as it may sometimes be – is about the only thing that properly connects this early journal to its colonial context. We want to go against the grain of Green’s off-hand account by beginning this section with Barron Field’s ‘On Seeing the Bible Society’s Map of the World’, published in the Australian Magazine in September 1821. Arriving n New South Wales in 1817, Field went on to become a colonial magistrate, a founder of the Society for Promoting Christian knowledge among Aborigines, a supporter of public schooling, and the first president of the New South Wales Savings Bank. His First Fruits of Australian Poetry was published in 1819 by George Howe and reprinted (in expanded form) in 1823 by Robert Howe – the two proprietors of the Australian Magazine. Neither ‘negligible’ nor ‘local’, Field’s poem is in fact foundational, which is why we reproduce it here. It pays tribute to the global responsibilities of the British empire as it spreads its influence across its ‘dominions’, including Australia. But the emphasis is no longer on military conquest; rather, it is on the roles played by education and the Christian missions –which literature (‘Bookmen and penmen’) is now called upon to serve.’ (Authors introduction : 152)

(p. 152-195)
Colonial Journals and Their Artists, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism
‘The very early colonial Australian journals were visually lain, with the covers showing little adornment beyond the typography of the journal’s title or perhaps a patterned border or a few generic flourishes in the corners. By the late 1830s, however, editors were drawing on the skills of local artists and designers. According to Frank S. Greenop, James Tegg’s Literary News (12 August 1837-3 February 1838) was the first colonial journal to include an illustration, an image from Australian natural history: ‘Apart from being a creditable weekly publication, the Literary News left behind it one innovation: it had broken the even type measure of its column to include in one issue an illustration which was engraved on wood, a picture of a platypus illustrating an article describing the creature. Only once before had a magazine included an illustration, and that was the lithographic frontispiece which appeared in some issues of the Hobart Town Monthly. Not long afterwards, however, colonial journals began to employ local illustrators to develop their visual content, livening up the printed page. The Short-lived Arden’s Sydney Magazine (September – October 1843) highlighted its association with the immigrant lithographer and painter J.S. Prout: ‘we’re inclined to hope’, George Arden wrote, ‘that Mr Prout’s connection with our literary labours will not be disadvantageous to his fame as an Artist’. Prout’s sketch for the first issue, ‘The Tank Stream, Sydney, 1843’, is generically typical of the kinds of illustrations found in the journals around this time. They give realistic black-and-white snapshots of aspects of colonial urban development (the Tank Stream had provided fresh water to Sydney in the early days of the colony), bush landscapes, local natural history and portraiture. In fact, they work precisely as precursors to documentary photography – which made its way into the colonial journals much later on, towards the end of the century.’ (Authors introduction : 197)
(p. 196-220)
Colonial Types : Emergent and Residual, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism
‘The primary task of the colonial journals was to reflect colonial society, to analyse and dissect it, to chronicle its fashions and foibles and to comment on its prospects for the future. The colonial scene was never homogeneous; in fact, it was remarkably diverse, composed of numerous different interest groups interacting with each other, competing with each other and so on. Given all these different constituencies, who then could be properly identified as a colonial? The journals all wanted to invest in the idea of a representative type who could carry the aspirations of a developing nation. At the same time, the colonies were busily distinguishing themselves from one another; and besides, there was little agreement among commentators as to the qualities that best typified colonial ideals. The journals soon turned their attention to the dynamics of colonial populations, chronicling an extraordinarily wide variety of practices, dispositions, social classes and occupations. The proliferation of character ‘sketches’ across journals during this time reveals an increasingly fractured social economy. It also brings a great deal of colonial literary writing – think of some of Henry Lawson’s short stories and poems, for example – into close proximity with the interests of social journalism. Alongside the guest or a representative national character we see the emergence of a multiplicity of minor colonial types, some inherited from Europe and America and some locally developed. Each type inhabits its own set of narratives and is given a life-cycle – a destination – that is always assessed in terms of its ability to contribute to the nation’s wellbeing.’ (Authors introduction)
(p. 268-311)
Colonial Types : The Australian Girl, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism

‘The Australian girl became visible as a type early on in colonial print culture, occasionally invoked in ladies’ columns and popular romances in the 1860s and 1870s. By the mid-1870s, the Australian Town and Country Journal began to invest in the type as a way of valorising the distinctive traits of colonial Australian women. In 1874 it serialised T.A. Brown’s novel Incidents and Adventures of My Run Home, in which a protagonist named ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ sings the praises of Australian girls to his English companions. Paul de Serville notes that through this character, Browne created ‘an energetic, patriotic squatter of educated literary tastes…[who] could carry the good name of Australia in the motherland with credit, Browne, of course, went on to adopt ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ as his pen name. Celebrating the virtues of the Australian girl abroad soon became part of the colonial project of nation building; and as Angela Woollacott suggests, the Australian girl was often promoted ‘at the expense of her discursive foil ‘the English girl. In September 1888, the Australian Town and Country Journal celebrated the centenary of the colonies by publishing Ethel Castilla’s now-famous short poem, ‘The Australian Girl’, an early attempt to define this type’s essential qualities and measure them against her English counterpart. This part begins with an extract from the Australian Woman’s Magazine and Domestic Journal (April 1882-September 1884), which had serialised Janet Carroll’s novel Magna : An Australian Girl in 1882 – the first novel, in fact, to bear the title of the character type. The Australian girl is a projection, an ideal. But the Australian Woman’s Magazine also reminds us that she emerges out of real conditions, which means thinking about the sorts of opportunities local colonial life can offer women in terms of education and employment. In ‘Woman’s Work’, ‘Vaga’ cautions colonial women against frivolity but keeps her counsel rather vague; here, ‘work’ has more to do with nurture and duty, especially towards the husband. As in so much commentary on the Australian girl, matrimony is her taken-for-granted destination.’ (Authors introduction)

(p. 312-347)
Race and the Frontier, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism
‘The Colonial journals often reflected carefully on questions of race; at the same time, they casually reproduced the virulent kinds of racism that were pervasive right across the settler colonies. A whole range of questions and dispositions come into play here; to do with the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal people, the role of government policy and the law, the ‘civilising’ agendas of Christian missions, the intellectualisation of racial categories (under the growing influence of evolutionary anthropology), he prevailing opinions about importing labour from elsewhere, and the way settler colonies might manage or respond to increasingly diverse immigrant population. Some colonial journals were more progressive and humanitarian then others as far as these questions are concerned, but there is never any consistency here. Coming in the wake of the global abolition of slavery, settlement in Australia nevertheless utterly relied on the legitimation of forced labour: convict gangs, indentured workers from the Pacific Islands, and so on. And the imperative to ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people only helped to consolidate the discourses that characterised them as ‘savage’ and destined for extinction. Indeed, as Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell note, ‘the nineteenth century heralded a new era for discourses of savagery as Aboriginal Australian superseded Native Americans as exemplars of primordial man’. Patrick Brantlinger has neatly expressed the way that even progressive views on race were always enmeshed in the assumptions and biases of their times: ‘humanitarians’, he writes, ‘could be both abolitionists and racist’. The full range of these contradictions is played out right across the colonial journals and across the various genres of writing they invest in, from chronicles of frontier violence and adventure to panoramic surveys of racial diversity in the colonial metropolis.’ (Author’s introduction)
(p. 348-379)
Colonial Modernity, Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , single work criticism
‘So much of the writing we see in colonial Australia registers the changing features of the physical landscape: the evolution of the colonial cities, the radical transformation of bush and country. The journals were especially committed to giving definition to the ways in which urban and regional spaces alike were utterly reshaped through the process of financial speculation and colonial expansion. New social and material structures superimpose themselves on existing ones, which they displace or marginalise – but those older forms also return over and over to give the new its self-definition. Richard Dennis makes this point in his book Cities of Modernity (2008): modernity ushers in ‘the realisation that now is not the same as then’, but it also throws these two radically different temporal moments together, recreating ‘the past as ‘other’’ as a continuing proof of the superiority of the new. The idea of a colonial modernity folds this point into further realisation that, as colonisation progresses, an otherwise remote place like Australia is at the same time embedded in global frameworks for the flow of capital and commodities. For Robert Dixon, ‘the term colonial modernity […] refers to a series of developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked apparently provincial cultures like those of the Australian colonies into a busy traffic in personnel, cultural practices, texts and intellectual property around the English-speaking world’. This section of our book shows the many ways in which the early Australian journals registered the ‘busy traffic’ of colonial modernity, as writers navigated their way through increasingly crowded urban streets and the demands of capital impacted on every aspect of daily life: from the rapid growth of business centres across the country to the systematic degradation of the forests and waterways.’ (Author’s introduction : 381)
(p. 380-433)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Crawley, Inner Perth, Perth, Western Australia,: UWA Publishing , 2014 .
      image of person or book cover 117896756409405646.jpg
      Image courtesy of ISBS website.
      Extent: 200p.
      Note/s:
      • Includes bibliographical references.
      • Published 12 May 2014
      ISBN: 9781742584973 (paperback)

Works about this Work

Review : The Colonial Journals and the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture. Susann Liebich , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 46 no. 2 2015; (p. 318-320)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Judith Johnston, of Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, The Colonial Journals and the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Judith Johnson , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 219-222)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Review : The Colonial Journals Elizabeth Morrison , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 29 no. 3 2014; (p. 132-136)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Raiding the Archives for Our Treasures Raiding the Archives for Colonial Treasures Owen Richardson , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 11-12 October 2014; (p. 36) The Canberra Times , 11 October 2014; (p. 22) The Age , 11 October 2014; (p. 32)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
History Elaine Fry , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The West Australian , 12 August 2014; (p. 7)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
[Untitled] Brad Jefferies , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Books + Publishing , February vol. 93 no. 3 2014; (p. 21)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
History Elaine Fry , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The West Australian , 12 August 2014; (p. 7)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Raiding the Archives for Our Treasures Raiding the Archives for Colonial Treasures Owen Richardson , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 11-12 October 2014; (p. 36) The Canberra Times , 11 October 2014; (p. 22) The Age , 11 October 2014; (p. 32)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Judith Johnston, of Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, The Colonial Journals and the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Judith Johnson , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 219-222)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Review : The Colonial Journals Elizabeth Morrison , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 29 no. 3 2014; (p. 132-136)

— Review of The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , 2014 multi chapter work criticism
Last amended 26 Jun 2014 12:19:29
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