ABSTRACT
The new bohemians of the 1890s were consciously hedonistic, and not so earnestly wicked. There was still something of the old style among the Melbourne group. The most ludicrous expedition was surely that undertaken by four self-styled bohemians associated with the Dawn and Dusk Club. One reason for the smothering sexism was that ‘feminine’ values were associated with the ‘respectability’ which the young bohemians condemned: they talked of Melbourne’s literary circles as being ‘obsessed with respectability, the respectability which they believed fervently to be of the ruling English type, for which Ada Cambridge wrote her polite and soothing novels’. In the late nineteenth century the Australian economy was diversifying. From the imperial point of view the wool industry remained of special significance, and its drovers and shearers continued to contribute to the romance of empire. By the 1890s, many critics were condemning one of the classic descriptions of the Australian landscape.
