Leichhardt in Australian literature

MATTHEW HIGGINS: I have read only one Patrick White novel, The Tree of Man, which I greatly enjoyed. Ever since we started working on Leichhardt, I have been thinking that I must read Voss. I am very pleased to introduce Dr Susan Martin who will talk about Voss and other representations and references to Leichhardt in Australian literature.

SUSAN MARTIN: I promise that I am not only going to talk about Voss, for those of you not fond of the novel - joining quite a large group, I should say - but I am going to start with a quotation from Voss:

This is a moment with the title character from the best-known literary representation of Ludwig Leichhardt, from Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss. Leichhardt fascinated Australian writers from a very early period. Although his most famous representation in Australian literature is Voss, Leichhardt’s first or brief disappearance inspired elegiac poems from 1845 onwards. Leichhardt is one of the two most important white male heroes who figure in Australian fiction. The other one is arguably Ned Kelly. I am just going to compare them for a moment.

Leichhardt particularly populates the fiction and imagination of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, while Kelly seems to appear more in the latter half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Much of the fiction and poetry about Leichhardt represents him as a national heroic figure, contrary perhaps to his representation in Voss although not entirely. A lost and controversial explorer might not initially seem particularly promising as a choice for such celebration. However, like Ned Kelly, he has frequently been identified strongly as ‘other’ to a mainstream English, middle class, Anglican society and culture. Leichhardt, as you know, was a German national with an accent, regarded as an arrogant foreigner by some of his contemporaries and represented as a psychotic megalomaniac in some histories - most notoriously Chisholm’s. His class status was somewhat insecure, and his sexuality is ambiguous.

Where the two characters do diverge in their fictionalisation and other memorialisation is in the ways that the culture has invested in their bodies. Leichhardt is a figure increasingly disembodied in the fiction in which he appears, a figure written into Lemurian novels as a trace, a cipher, an always just missed sight. Ned Kelly, by contrast, is very much an embodied figure, memorialised and represented through and in material objects like the armour. While today we are celebrating a Leichhardt material object, the fiction doesn’t tend to do that.

Leichhardt’s first major appearance in literature was in the premature elegy and song published by his friend Robert Lynd in 1845. The poem was entitled Leichhardt’s Grave: An Elegiac Ode, with the subtitle:

This somewhat snide poem against yet another expedition tended to be the exception rather than the rule. Increasing poetic speculation occurred on Leichhardt’s fate across the 1870s and 1880s. This was followed by a series of Lemurian novels which speculated more graphically and imaginatively on his possible end. The term ‘Lemurian’ is taken from George Firth Scott’s novel The Last Lemurian of 1898. It refers to a spate of imperial gothic adventure novels published from the 1880s onward and imitating successful fiction such as Rider Haggard’s immensely popular King Solomon’s Mines of 1885.

Traces of Leichhardt are found in JF Hogan’s The Lost Explorer from 1890, W Carlton Dawe’s novel The Golden Lake from 1894 and Ernest Favenc’s, The Secret of the Australian Desert from 1895. In Rosa Praed’s Queensland novels from the same period the Australian state of Queensland is renamed ‘Leichhardtsland’ so that Leichhardt is everywhere but arguably also nowhere. These early representations lead on to the figure of Voss in Patrick White’s novel of that name. The explorer is re-embodied only to be dismembered, sought in vain, and finally repeatedly described as everywhere but nowhere - as dust, as part of Australia but indiscernible. He is ‘everywhere, and in the rocks and in the empty waterholes’, as the character Frank le Mesurier in Voss says, prefiguring Voss’s apotheosis.

In that novel Leichhardt is a haunting absence. Their premonitions do come true, however. As it is a Lemurian novel they do discover evidence of a lost race, a lost white maiden with golden hair, treasure and a volcano, although not quite the magical white city that they had been looking for - that turns out to be a kind of rock formation of white quartz. No further sign of Leichhardt is encountered.

Ernest Favenc followed his romantic historical work on explorers, including Leichhardt, with an exotic fictionalisation of him in the Secret of the Australian Desert in 1895. In 1888 Favenc published The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888: complied from state documents, private papers and the most authentic sources of information; issued under the auspices of the governments of the Australian colonies. As Melissa Ballanta points out in a recent article, Favenc used his identity as an historian of exploration, and sometime explorer himself, to give an aura of creditability to his novel. Some editions include maps of the fictional terrain traversed, and Favenc includes a preface in which he argues for the likely route of the Leichhardt party. He comments:

And thus he is apart of the landscape in that novel. A fire passes through the area behind them shortly after they have left him and is assumed to have obliterated all trace of him as well as all trace of the expedition, materials, and horses and so on. The explorer protagonists of the novel continue and find traces from the remaining Leichhardt party member Stuart and the rest of his journal, as well as evidence - as in Fugitive Anne and The Golden Lake - of a ‘superior’ race of people once resident in the interior. As with The Golden Lake, although artefacts and even the account of Leichhardt’s death are found, Leichhardt is not.

In Favenc’s novel, as in Francis Webb’s poem Leichhardt in Theatre from 1947 and in Voss, Leichhardt’s absence is the thing that guarantees white presence and belonging in Australia. The Lemurian novels cement this by having Leichhardt somehow transcend and outlast more transient Aboriginal homes and occupation. His disembodiment - uncertain traces, bodies of his companions, accounts of him, scattered over the desert like Voss’s letters - make him ineffaceable.

Robert Dixon sees the Lemurian novels as rehearsing anxieties about ‘racial and cultural degeneration’ threatening ‘the unformed identity of white Australia’. Leichhardt’s status as permanent but elusive trace in these fictions transcends the dangers and degradations attributed to some members of his party, the ‘found’ explorers. He might be seen even in the Secret of the Australian Desert as a guarantee of ownership of the landscape.

Leichhardt’s disembodiment is also in perfect accord with the making of imperial space in Australia in which he was involved. The critic Simon Ryan argues that the cartographic eye of the explorer narratives produces an Australia in the nineteenth century which is empty, measurable and available. The explorer gives a point of view which is both monolithic and disembodied. His self is made up by his authoritative gaze over the objectified landscape - the viewer provides authority but is less important than the view. The imperial project is served, then, by the disembodiment of the explorer, of the narrator of that space, and continues to be served by it even in the instance of that disembodiment becoming literal. The explorer, in other words, was not necessary to the success of the exploration; the narrative was.

The disembodiment of Leichhardt in subsequent fiction might be seen as perpetuating this kind of imperial space, the continual rewriting of the Australian interior as empty and yet always and already haunted and therefore somehow occupied by the explorer figure. Like most explorers, Leichhardt is also a ubiquitous mark in the place from which he is absent - as a name of a Sydney suburb, a river, a mountain range, a Queensland town and various plants.

Praed misspells the name consistently, with one ‘H’. I like to read that as a suggestion of the kind of missing ‘H’ at the centre, but you might see that as literary over-reading. It is interesting to speculate on the effect in the 1880s and 1890s of Leichhardtsland. The replacement of the Queen in Queensland with Leichhardt was a nationalistic, even republican, gesture.

In Fugitive Anne the boat from which Anne disappears, apparently slipping out a porthole, is called the Leichardt [sic], and Anne’s travels, and the search for her, echo faintly the passage and searches for Leichhardt. That the boat Leichardt is a vessel carrying that desired but elusive thing - Anne - is interesting. In having her heroine carried by the Leichardt and believed dead, Praed may be constructing an elaborate play on the fact that Ludwig Leichhardt, on his spectacular return to Sydney in 1846 after having been missing, believed dead, on his first major expedition, arrived on the schooner Heroine. Anne is missing believed dead but is a more present absence on the boat, having become invisible by cross-dressing by race and gender as ‘a young Lascar’ boy, and she is still on the boat. The vessel Leichardt is container here both for the indeterminate figure of Anne and the masculinity-affirming male negotiation going on between her big white bully of a husband and her big white Danish future lover. Once Anne disembarks, they remain aboard the Leichardt and steam up the Endeavour River to Cooktown - a journey which has imperial masculine overtones, I hope you will agree.

Leichhardt gets a bit of a rest in Australian fiction, as opposed to poetry, between the 1900s and the 1950s, with the publication of Patrick White’s Voss in 1957. The novel was first published in Britain and the United States. It received good reviews in Britain and established White’s reputation there arguably, though he had already had some international success with the Tree of Man. Voss ‘received mostly lukewarm and qualified reviews in Australia’, according to the critic Smith, probably because of its higher modernist style, which has certainly proved unpopular with my students over the years.

Voss is ostensibly based in part on White’s reading, and interpretation, of explorer Edward Eyre’s journals while White was in London; White’s experiences of the Middle East during World War Two and his experiences as jackaroo when a young man. He also read Ludwig Leichhardt’s journals and letters, although after today I’m wondering exactly where and how he read those, and obviously contemporary accounts of Leichhardt. I believe the recently opened up White archive shows notes that White made on Leichhardt from as early as 1939. Manning Clarke credits him with redeeming and repopularising Leichhardt through Voss.

Patrick White was also influenced by histories of exploration, in particular by Alec Chisholm’s notorious Strange New World, which represents Leichhardt as psychotic. Gerry Wilkes claims that White combined these accounts with his own experience of ‘traipsing backwards and forwards across the Egyptian … deserts, influenced by the arch megalomaniac of the day … [Hitler]’. Unlike the other fictions I have been talking about, Voss does not purport to be exclusively about Leichhardt, although the fact that the explorer hero of Voss is German, a natural scientist, takes a route that can be related to Leichhardt’s and disappears in the interior, as well as parallels with some of the characters - the ornithologist being very much Gilbert from the earlier expedition - have all pointed towards a parallel between Voss and Leichhardt. Irmtraud Petersson suggests that Voss is based on ‘the image of Leichhardt which prevailed at the time the novel was conceived and written’, so not based on Leichhardt but based on an image, which is an important distinction.

These interpretations have been enhanced by the packaging of the novel. If you compare the Penguin edition from the 1980s with a drawing of Leichhardt done in around 1846, you can see how the novel has been marketed as being Leichhardt. There is even an academic article called ‘The Vossification of Ludwig Leichhardt’, which suggests it has become almost impossible to consider Leichhardt apart from the novel - but I think today has proved that wrong.

In Voss a German explorer gathers together a rather motley collection of individuals: a poet, a worshipful simple boy, a devout ornithologist, an ex-convict, and some other individuals governed by baser desires. Voss is driven to explore the interior and, sponsored by the bourgeois businessmen of Sydney, heads gradually away from the settled districts and further and further inland. The novel is highly modernist in form, and has frustrated and delighted readers with its echoing pronouncements.

I will finish by looking at a popular representation of Voss as much as Leichhardt. In a recent discussion of the canon of Australian literature, Ken Gelder sees ‘Australian literature’ as a category produced through identification with high-art ‘literature’ rather than popular fiction. One of the interesting things about the trajectory of Leichhardt as a literary subject is that he traverses those fields chronologically. He goes from popular fiction into the more high-art fiction in the twentieth century, such as Francis Webb’s poem and Patrick White’s Voss.

In this sense Leichhardt might be seen as having been elevated to the literary canon from the popular in terms of his literary and cultural representation. Both forms of literature though, I would argue, work to install Leichhardt as a mythical figure, important partly because of the stories told about him, whose place is there still in the country. However, such mythologising in Australia is almost always subject to larrikin response or tall poppy syndrome, so I want to give the last word to an even more removed version of Leichhardt - that in Randolph Stow’s 1967 novel Midnite. This novel makes fun of Voss, rather than Leichhardt, and of the mythologising of Leichhardt through Voss.

And there I want to leave Leichhardt again, at least fictionally: lost in the desert, but at least smiling. Thank you.

MATTHEW HIGGINS: Thank you very much, Susan. The subtitle to today’s symposium is ‘The man, the mystery, the science, the history’, and of course it is the mystery of Leichhardt which gives so much power to these representations in literature. If he had got through to Swan River, we would remember him like Sturt or Mitchell and he would hardly be worth putting into these works of fiction. But it is because he is still out there and he is still in our imagination somewhere that people continue to refer to him via the fictional mode.

QUESTION: I have an interest in Leichhardt. I was aware of Matthew Higgins’s procrastination on reading Voss so I brought along this quote today to give him to tell him that he need not bother. It is from David Marr’s biography of Patrick White in which White reportedly said concerning the character of Voss, ‘There are bits of Leichhardt, bits of Eyre, and I suppose some of the others, but there is more of my own character than anyone else’s.’ Would you like to comment?

DR SUSAN MARTIN: As I was saying, Leichhardt has become seen to be the only explorer figure being depicted in Voss but, as White says and as other critics have argued, White certainly drew on all sorts of explorer narratives and accounts for the novel. I agree that David Marr’s quotation proves that White was arguing against that simple parallel of the two.

MATTHEW HIGGINS: I really liked your word ‘Vossification’ too. I will remember that one. Thank you again, Susan, for your presentation.