A Common Ancestry: Literature in Australia and Canada

Abstract

Even the most diligent search will yield only a few documents that could be used to illustrate directly the cultural relations between Australia and Canada. Writers in the two countries have, for instance, lived and worked in almost complete ignorance of each other. Only two minor exceptions come to mind, and in each case it is a matter of a general interest in the other country rather than of any specific interest in its literature. Gilbert Parker, who was, for a short time during the nineties, a journalist in Australia, collected his articles under the title Round the Compass in Australia. It is a good travel book, based on solid information and firsthand knowledge, and written in a vigorous and incisive style. Parker's book is balanced on the Australian side by A. G. Stephens' A Queenslander's Travel Notes, a fugitive production much less significant than Round the Compass in Australia, although Stephens, the most influential of the Australian literary critics, is a more important literary figure than Parker. Stephens' book, with its brief and melancholy coda on Canada, follows the pattern of the nineteenth-century traveller's report on his American tour. The book, like Parker's, came out in the nineties, and its comments—sharply critical and often openly contemptuous—are to be read in the light of the depression both political and cultural which, at that time, afflicted Canada. Since there have been almost no direct literary contacts between the countries, it would be logical to expect no popular acceptance by the one country of the other's literature. That is in fact largely the case, although here Canada fares rather better: she has been more successful in producing the international best-seller; that strangely assorted trio, Leacock, Service, and de la Roche, are perhaps just as well known in Sydney and Adelaide as they are in Toronto or, enjoying the same kind of reputation in Canada.