Boredom

Abstract

Australia was never meant to be fun. It was designed to be a prison: a convict settlement where England’s victims were sent “to pine their young lives away in starvation and misery” (Kelly 67). Historian Russel Ward records the high level of drunkenness in mid-nineteenth-century Australia, but suggests that this was a result of the “loneliness of bush life, no less than the brutalities of the system,” rather than boredom (32–33). Andrew McCann, however, writing on the fiction of Marcus Clarke (1846–1881), claims that, “In the nineteenth century practices of spectatorship, and of culture-consumption more generally, were closely connected to a sense of ennui and boredom” (331).

“Note to the Song of ‘Good Night.’” Written 1850; in Mitchell 1973 “Bromide.” Written 1945, unpublished