ABSTRACT
A principal virtue of the literary approach to history is that the historian can permit himself the luxury of omitting from his story difficult if relevant topics. Edward Shann and Brian Fitzpatrick wrote their economic histories of Australia without making more than passing mention of the capital cities, and their example has been followed by later historians such as Professor Russel Ward whose book Australia (1965) indexes the ‘Melbourne Cup’ but not ‘Melbourne’. Sociologists tell us that the inhabitants of large cities become anonymous as individuals, but this cannot be held to be true of them as a group, for the six capital cities contained one-quarter of the Australian population in 1871 and one-third in 1901. They were the points of entry and of permanent residence for most immigrants; they were the centres of government and of colonial trade, finance and transport. Yet as the nineteenth century enters its final decade—one of depression in which, however, the capital cities increased slightly their percentage share of total population and further consolidated their control over the rural hinterlands—we find most Australian historians gazing fixedly at the countryside. The economic historians describe the pastoral collapse ‘back of Bourke’, the social historians the tribulations of the pastoral workers and miners, and the literary historians the writings of Henry Lawson and his friends most of whom could be removed only forcibly from the Sydney bars they loved so well to the great outback about which they wrote so well.
