Australian Book Review

LIFE IN DINGO DELL (Lucy Sussex)

Until recently there was a prevailing attitude that to succeed as a professional author one had to go into exile. The small Australian market could not support a writing career; it was necessary to travel abroad and court a larger readership. Because Australia was a British colony, the obvious destination was London, heart of empire.

There were, of course, exceptions. Ada Cambridge, in the nineteenth century, managed a literary career from her various Victorian vicarages. In the twentieth, Arthur Upfield created an international reputation and a small fortune from writing crime fiction in Australia. Both were English emigrants; those born in Australia, a land more interested in sports than in the arts, tended to believe that the only real chance of pursuing their vocation was to emigrate. They could point to the examples of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcus Clarke, even Henry Kendall, whose sorry fates might have been avoided by relocation to London.

The most famous examples of Australian writers succeeding abroad are recent - Clive James, Germaine Greer, et al. - and they have been adequately covered by scholars. Morton chooses to focus on preceding years. He states in his Introduction that he is investigating a period 'over several decades on each side of Federation, 1901'. As the subtitle indicates, eighty years are actually covered. It was a busy period in terms of history, encompassing the colonial era, two world wars, and the gradual decline of British influence.

Additionally, during this time Australia produced a bumper crop of aspiring authors. Although Morton tries to limit his definition of the term 'expatriate' -- difficult, given the frequent movement of writers between the hemispheres, and the numerous 'blow-ins' and 'blow-backs' -- he still ends up with about one hundred and fifty names. It is an array perhaps more suited to an encyclopedia than to a scholarly book of less than three hundred pages. Journalists, popular writers, playwrights, even such entertaining eccentrics as sexologist Dr Norman Haire, appear here. In fact more names appear than can be adequately covered. Though Morton laments the lack of archives for many writers, such as Mary Gaunt, he indubitably has no shortage of material. And more is coming, with the various digitisation projects creating material to keep scholars interested in this area busy for years. Indeed, it is possible to start researching some apparently obscure figure and find new information coming online daily. Trove and its fellow resources are already providing materials to rewrite literary histories.

In the final pages of the book, Morton takes both the Austlit database and the Australian Dictionary of Biography to task for being overly inclusive. It might be argued that he falls into this trap himself. Should Fergus Hume have been included? Hume declared that he belonged to New Zealand, and he actually spent only 1885-88 in Australia. Hume (or rather his publishing company) succeeded spectacularly in selling The Mystery of a Hansom Cab's Melbourne content to the Motherland. This feat was a rarity. Lionel Lindsay recalled an editor telling him: 'Actually the British public is not a scrap interested in outside things.' Herein lay a paradox: what made Australian authors distinctive in the British market could also be a liability. The colonial cringe reigned, with Australia's best dismissed as second-rate Kiplings by the readers at the London publishing companies.

One survival strategy was to change the stripes, blend in -- which in practice meant losing anything Australian. Crime writer James Morgan Walsh rewrote, and sold, an Australian novel as English. Haddon Chambers featured a bushranger in his first play, which was such a raging success that he never wrote another Australian character, despite thirty years of dramatic productions. He did not discard Australians from his society, his most significant relationship being with Melba. Morton states that their affair was 'presumed' -- Ann Blainey, in her biography of the diva (2008), documents a discreet but enduring love. Could Chambers have created Australian expatriates such as himself and Melba in his 'well-made' plays? Possibly. Had he done so they might not have been so comprehensively forgotten, in his homeland and abroad.

To move to London meant competing with the Empire's finest, and it was achingly hard. Perhaps the best account of trying (and failing) to succeed as a journalist in London is Reginald Carrington's. After five years of penury and over a thousand job applications, he admitted defeat. He would compose a brutally honest and detailed memoir of these times, never published but fertile for future scholarship. Another writer, Louise Mack, arrived with high ideals concerning the life of art. She did sell her novel An Australian Girl in London (1902), written in a garret in conditions approaching starvation, but thereafter she found far more money as a popular novelist, and as a correspondent during World War I.

A case could be made for this pair's having lacked the gifts or dedication to become first-rate writers. But others who did, such as Barbara Baynton and Henry Lawson, failed to achieve artistic renown. Lawson, through a combination of misfortune and his own weakness of character, would return like Carrington and would never be the same again. Baynton, arguably the greater writer, certainly found a publisher, but as an independently wealthy widow did not need to compromise herself for any market. She enjoyed herself far more as a socialite who could hold her own in an English drawing room. Indeed, she dismissed her fellow expatriates as inhabitants of 'Dingo Dell'. Ironically, it was popular writers such as Nat Gould (racing) Guy Boothby (thrillers), and Alice Rosman (romances) who made the real inroads into the difficult British market.

Those cited above are but a small proportion of Morton's selection, an at times bewildering omnium gatherum of names and brief lives, forgotten and truly forgettable. So many are discussed here, from Grace Jennings Carmichael to Truth co-founder William Willis. One was a poet, the other dealt in the saucy. They would seem to have little in common beyond being Australian writers, though both would die in London in poverty, Carmichael notoriously in a workhouse.

Where this book shines in when it eschews the broad overview and focuses on particular experiences of expatriation, as depicted in the works of three indisputably great writers: Henry Handel Richardson, Martin Boyd, and Christina Stead. The close reading of texts such as Stead's For Love Alone (1945) is rewarding, particularly when Morton follows the author's tracks around Bloomsbury, linking the alienation of the exile to London topography. Here he manages to be both scholarly and poignant.

It is possible to quibble with Lusting for London. Given the large and often obscure cast, there are inevitable errors. But Morton's research is admirable, and he does justice to a complex phenomenon, experienced by so many over a long period of time. Thankfully, in these days of globalisation, the Internet makes literary exile far less necessary.

Australian Book Review, June 2012.