AustLit

Ackland tests the literary criticism that suggests Wentworth and other colonial poets were inept in their descriptions of the Australian landscape (when compared to the Bulletin school) by arguing that the poet did not primarily attempt such poetic descriptions. Wentworth wrote to describe the European appropriation of Australia signalled by the mapping of the land, and introduced many of the themes taken up by later poets: landscape; exploration; colonisation; aborigines; the cultivation of the enlightenment; and the relationship between old and new worlds.

'When Hamilton Mackinnon collected Clarke's stories in The Austral  Edition of the Selected Works of Marcus Clarke (1890),1 he placed as the first item of the 'Australian Tales and Sketches' section two pages entitled 'Australian Scenery'. This justly famous passage, originally part of the text accompanying reproductions of two paintings, Louis Buvelot's 'Waterpool Near Coleraine' and Nicholas Chevalier's 'The Buffalo Ranges' in Photographs of the Pictures in the National Gallery, Melbourne (1874), had been incorporated into Clarke's preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon's poems in 1876 and frequently reprinted.2 It was certainly not a tale, even if arguably a sketch. But its inclusion set a tone for Clarke's stories that followed, even if it was not the tone that Clarke set. The expected feature of Australian stories by the 1890s was clearly up-country description. Yet when we turn to Clarke's stories, such landscape descriptions are generally marginal. Mackinnon's incorporation of the passage into 'Australian Tales and Sketches' suggests an attempt to supplement the comparative lack of scenic settings in the stories themselves.' (Introduction)