In my final year of English Literature at Melbourne University, my tutor was Mrs Cowling. Those were the days before students began addressing staff by their first names.
In Mrs Cowling's case, even if the prevailing custom had been more relaxed, neither I nor any of the class would have dared to use her first name — which, as it happened, was Muriel, though I didn't know that at the time. Mrs Cowling was formidable. Her significant physical presence was accentuated by a commanding mien, impeccable English enunciation with that faint suggestion of superiority that so often accompanied anglo-verbal elegance in pre-multicultural days, and an impressive depth and breadth of literary reference supporting rock-firm opinions.
All of which in 2015 sounds, no doubt, unpromising. But as I and the rest of the class discovered slowly but with increasing admiration, Mrs Cowling was a wonderful teacher and not quite the immovably stern, stereotypical Pom of our early and shallow assumptions. All these years later, I wonder just how burdened she was in teaching literature to Australian students, which she continued to do into her 80th year, by her husband's notoriety. What! I hear you say, Notoriety?
Muriel Margaret Cowling came to Australia from Leeds in 1928 with her husband, George Herbert Cowling, who had been appointed Professor of English at Melbourne University and who would hold that position until 1943. At about the half way mark of his incumbency, Cowling published an article in the Melbourne Age in which he proposed that Australia lacked the history, traditions and accumulated lore and legend which supplied the writers of fiction and poetry with their material.
'There are no ancient churches, castles, ruins — the memorials of generations departed,' he wrote. 'You need no Baedeker [the guide to world travel first published in 1827] in Australia. From the point of view of literature this means that we can never hope to have a Scott, a Balzac, a Dumas ... nor a poetry that reflects past glories.'
The lengthiest and strongest of a wave of responses came from the Australian critic, P. R. 'Inky' Stephensen, who, by baldly listing the complaints of 'the learned professor', as he called him, exaggerated what many saw as their outrageous Anglocentric and Eurocentric bias.
Cowling wrote that 'Australia is not yet in the centre of the globe, and it has no London'; 'The rewards of literature in Australia are not good enough to make it attract the best minds'; 'In spite of what the native-born say about gum trees ... our countryside is "thin" and lacking in tradition'; 'Australian life is too lacking in tradition, and too confused, to make many first-class novels'; 'Literary culture is not indigenous, like the gum tree, but is from a European source'.
Debate about what would and should supply the Australian creative imagination had been going on in Australia as early as the 1870s when Marcus Clarke defined the 'dominant note' of the Australian bush as 'weird melancholy'. At the turn of the century, Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Banjo Paterson were very much concerned with what Australians should write about and how their stories and poems might best express the Australian landscape and its people. They saw these as central questions to be answered with native wit and in a local, recognisable voice.
Pre-empting and contradicting the Cowling view, Furphy, in Such is Life, notes, but explicitly celebrates the absence of, 'ancient churches, castles' and so on and regards the tradition-choked past as enshrining 'usages of petrified injustice ... fealty to shadowy idols [and] memories of fanaticism and persecution'. In a debate around the campfire about the Burke and Wills expedition, Mosey, one of the bullockies, refers to Europe as those 'ole wore-out countries'.
Much has changed and yet little has changed since Cowling published his article in 1935 and Stephensen exploded in response. Neither of them considered the Aboriginal past, in the words of Amy McGuire in New Matilda, those 'hundreds of Aboriginal nations who made this land home for almost 60,000 years, who managed the vast swathes of country under an extraordinary and complex land management system that incorporated aspects of their spirituality'.
Neither did Philip Ruddock, then Immigration Minister, on 11 October 2000, when, as reported in the Age, he said, 'We're dealing with an Indigenous population that had little contact with the rest of the world. We're dealing with people who were essentially hunter-gatherers. They didn't have chariots. I don't think they invented the wheel.'
And the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, nailed it down for an international audience in Brisbane last year. 'Australia', he said, 'was nothing but bush' before the British invasion, and life, until the British convict system set an alternative example, was 'extraordinarily basic and raw'.
Over to you George and Muriel. Lead me to the nearest available, dramatic, legend-haunted ancient castle and pull the drawbridge up after me. Or, to quote Furphy again, and still honouring the past, 'Go to; I'll no more on't. It hath made me mad.’
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.