The "Rude, Naughty" Bulletin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 112, 15 August 1941, Page 5

The "Rude, Naughty" Bulletin

ND now this brings us to that astonishing phenomenon in the development of Australian literary nationalism, The Sydney Bulletin in the 80's and. 90’s, under J. F. Archibald. Colonialism now became truculent, aggressive and rebellious. Like the young man with the strong inferiority complex, it concealed its feeling of inferiority beneath a bold exterior; it asserted Australianism; it was anti-English and anti-Imperial. It opposed the Boer War; it was procolonial. P. R. Stephensoh describes it as "rude, naughty, vigorous, robust, and, in a larrikin or certain flair, Australian." Larrikin is the word. Larrikin is its terse, snappy irreverent style. It turned out pro-Australian short stories and pro-Australian cartoons. It ridiculed and satirised and gave cheek to anything un-Australian. It drew its occasional contributions from the shearing sheds, the waterside

wharves, the wheat fields, the camps in the outposts of the continent. And yet, I fancy, The Bulletin of the 80’s and: 90’s, though aggressively Australian, in its own way sentimentalised and romanticised Aus-tralia-yes, even falsified Australia-as much as the poets who wrote of the gum trees and the shingle splinters. It was grand, perhaps, but it wasn’t quite genuine. It shouted to keep its high spirits up. It wasn't quite as assured as it pretended. And of course the short stories published by The Bulletin, the whole tone of The Bulletin in fact, was still colonialism in literature. In a newer, more truculent, arid I must confess, more likeable fashion, Australia in The Bulletin is Dutch South Africa in Die Burger the Dutch journal; with this difference, that the Australian in The Bulletin was still in the family even if he was the black sheep.-("Colonialism in Literature,’ Professor W. A. Sewell, 1YA.)