ABSTRACT
For a brief moment in the history of the modern West, between about 1880 and 1920, narrative fiction in books, newspapers, and magazines dominated the rapidly growing markets for transnational mass-produced popular entertainment in English, before being challenged successively by cinema, radio, and television.1 During that same period, bounded, let’s say, by the centenary of British colonization in 1888 and the Great War in 1914, Australia came of age as a nation. This was a time when Australians were proud to identify themselves as ‘independent Australian Britons’, in Alfred Deakin’s rousing phrase, bound to the old country by race, culture, and history. At the same time, in the 1880s and ’90s Australians began writing and reading stories about themselves which cast off the ignominy of their convict past and proclaimed a society of the future: a new-world social experiment – democratic, progressive, and fair (and racially exclusive). An upwelling of chauvinistic cultural nationalism, captured in the populist bushman aesthetics of the Sydney Bulletin, accompanied the long and sometimes precarious process of political nation-making that culminated in the self-governing colonies being formally constituted as a federation of states in 1901. Ironically, though, the Bulletin’s success depended on three factors that Ernest Gellner identified as being essential to modern nations: ‘homogeneity, literacy, and anonymity’. Although it exalted a folk culture of white male settlers and rural labourers battling heroically against a harsh interior, the Bulletin’s predominant readership was the ‘anonymous mass society’ of other modern nations, living in the world cities strung out along the temperate coastlines of southern Australia.2
