There has been no leisured class of cultured people to provide the atmosphere
in which literature is best developed as an art; and, until recently,
we have been content to look to the mother country for our artistic standards
and supplies. The principal literary productions of our first century
came from writers who had been born elsewhere, and naturally brought with them
the traditions and sentiments of their home country.
We have not yet had time to settle down and form any decided
racial characteristics; nor has any great crisis occurred
to fuse our common sympathies and create a national sentiment.
Australia has produced no great poet, nor has any remarkable innovation
in verse forms been successfully attempted. But the old forms
have been so coloured by the strange conditions of a new country,
and so charged with the thoughts and feelings of a vigorous,
restless democracy now just out of its adolescence, that they have
an interest and a value beyond that of perhaps technically better minor poetry
produced under English skies.
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