A Writer In Early Queensland

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32322, 13 June 1970, Page 4

A Writer In Early Queensland

James Brunton Stephens. By Cecil Hadgraft. University of Queensland Press. 126 pp. James Brunton Stephens was a scholarly Scotsman who in 1865. at the age of 31, settled in Queensland, Australia. and established a reputation for himself as a poet Poems like “To a Black Gin” and “An Australian Anthem” were widely praised by critics in the 70s and 80s of last century, and Kendall, for one, described Stephens as a writer of genius. Time has not borne out this judgment and today Stephens’s poems are very much period pieces, interesting chiefly for what they reveal of contemporary colonial attitudes. One can gather, for instance, just how universally despised the Aborigines were at this time when a man as gentle and kindly as Stephens could address an aboriginal woman as though she were an animal: Most unaestheticol of things terrestrial, Hadsl thou indeed an origin celestials — Thy lineaments are positively bestial.' Stephens’s first six years in Australia were spent tutoring on Queensland cattle stations. Outback life he found to be leisurely but dull. There was an almost total lack of congenial company, and Stephens spent most of his leisure reading the classics. “I am still fretting against the bush,” he wrote to a friend, in Brisbane. “I am in the land of monotony . . . deep in Euripides. W—was here on Saturday and Sunday, and all was horse, horse, horse. was here tonight and I literally fled from the drawing room to avoid the eternal horse, horse, horse.” It was in the bush that Stephens wrote his first book of poems, “Convict Once,” a romantic effusion in which the scent of gum-leaves is transformed into

“opiate breath." and the bush to “bosky entanglements.” He was fortunate in finding a reputable English publisher, and though the poem was slow to sell, it did much to establish his reputation in Australia. In 1870 Stephens left the bush and became a school-teacher in Brisbane at a salary of £lOO per annum. Apart from a break in 1872 when he once again went tutoring on an outback station, he remained teaching for a number of years. Finally, he became clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s Office, and held this position for nearly 20 years, until his death in 1902. His life as teacher and government clerk was as monotonous, in its own way, as tutoring in the outbacks, but he had friends and a measure of security, and seems to have been contented with his lot, except that he quite frequently complained about lack of time for writing. He himself summed up the major part of his life when he wrote to a friend: “What shall I say of my myself? Jogtrot, jog-trot. Peaceful monotony, all the happier because it has no annals . . . wife well, child well, self well. Altogether not an object of pity . . .” Mr Hadgraft is scrupulously fair in his assessment of Stephens’s poetic worth. He sifts his more successful poems for what is of value, drawing attention to his gifts as a writer of comic verse. Stephens’s importance, however, is chiefly historical, and Mr Hadgraft places him firmly in his historical context. Without Stephens, writes Mr Hadgraft, Queensland would be able to boast no literary figure until Judith Wrijht Stephens, he argues, “gave Queensland a measure of selfrespect. Scholarly, witty, competent, it was good for everybody that Stephens came when he did.”