The Bulletin school

Abstract

It will be evident that the Australian novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century had the options of publishing serially in any one of a number of newspapers and periodicals supported by the various colonies, book publication in London or book publication in Melbourne or Sydney. In 1880 the most famous of all Australian periodicals, the Sydney Bulletin. was founded. At first it seemed much like its predecessors and contemporaries, opening with a serial entitled ‘Adrienne, a Love Story of the Lancashire Cotton Distress’. But it was politically and economically chauvinistic and satirically opposed to colonial pretentiousness. It favoured the federation of the Australian colonies, republicanism, Home Rule for Ireland, a White Australia policy, and protectionism. It was bohemian, radical, socialist, anglophobe, pro-Irish, and opposed to both capital punishment and ‘flogging’. Its chief effects on literature were to popularize bush life as a subject, to encourage amateurs to write, and effectively to move the literary capital of Australia from Melbourne to Sydney. Its demonology included John Bull, the Chow (Chinese labourers who were prepared to work for low wages), the new Chum, and the Fatman capitalist.