Melissa Bellanta. Gender & History. Volume 28, Issue 2. August 2016.

The popularity of the British‐born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler‐colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon—to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler‐colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn‐of‐the‐century era.

In the decades after he shot himself behind Melbourne’s Brighton Beach in 1870, the poet and steeplechase champion, Adam Lindsay Gordon, became a household name in Australia. Among settlers to the Australian colonies, the popularity of this dashing émigré from the British aristocracy reached its apogee around the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands attended organised annual pilgrimages to his grave bearing sprigs of wattle, a native Australian flower, during the 1910s. Films of his life and work screened in cinemas in 1913 and 1916, and new collections of his poetry made their way into Australian households. Gordon also had a profile in the wider British Empire. In the 1930s, the Dean of Westminster unveiled a bust commemorating him as ‘Australia’s National Poet’ at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, following a campaign supported by Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy and John Masefield. A vestige of his early‐twentieth‐century fame was still evident decades later, when Queen Elizabeth II quoted from one his poems in her Christmas broadcast of 1992 (‘Kindness in another’s trouble, courage in one’s own’). So just what made Gordon so compelling at the time?

Though suicide was potentially a shameful subject in the years spanning 1870 and 1920—the period in which the cult of his memory emerged and was most intense—Gordon’s celebrity sprang in part from the pathos surrounding him after locals discovered him ‘dead in the bush by his own rash hand’. Far from shying away from Gordon because of this, friends and admirers raised money to erect an impressive monument at his grave in Brighton Cemetery shortly after his death. The monument was a Doric column broken at the top and encircled by a wreath of laurel leaves, signifying the life of a poet cut tragically short. It became a focus for reverence and mourning in later years. Poets wrote of how its pitiful spectacle moved them; the chill of its cold marble; its ‘wreath that comes too late!’ Fans began visiting it as early as the 1880s, long before pilgrimages to Brighton Cemetery became well‐publicised events in the 1910s. As Gordon’s first biographer John Howlett Ross put it in 1888: ‘It is in a wild and lonely spot, but frequently visited by pilgrim Australians, who stand and weep by the side of the grave of their “poor Gordon”’.

Another factor in Gordon’s celebrity was that enthusiasts widely portrayed him as the embodiment of frontier adventure in an era when key opinion‐makers portrayed rugged enterprise on the outskirts of empire as the most admirable form of masculine endeavour in the Western world. Within the British Empire more specifically, popular audiences devoured narratives about British men who travelled to the colonial frontier and engaged in virile feats there. As an emigrant who won renown as a daredevil horseman in the colonies, Gordon’s life read almost as if designed by an author of one of these narratives—although only, of course, if one disregarded his suicide at the end.

For Australian audiences, Gordon’s life and verse was further suited to the bush nationalism emerging across the great southern continent after 1870. Increasingly over the ensuing decades, settlers to this continent laid claim to an Australian identity, not just a colonial one, whose salient qualities derived from the bush. Gordon appeared as an attractive figure against this backdrop. He had been an emigrant to the South Australian bush in the early days of settlement there, and had engaged in hardy endeavours as a policeman and horsebreaker. He also set some of his poems in the bush. Perhaps more importantly, he assisted colonial settlers in the difficult balancing act required by their desire to exalt frontier adventure on the one hand, but exculpate the mass of the populace of blame for violence towards Aborigines on the other. Gordon did this by offering benign examples of bush escapades in his work. His bush verse presented readers with pioneering settlers hunting for bushrangers, or gallantly racing on horseback to save immigrants drowning in a shipwreck, rather than driving Aboriginal people from their land. These twin agendas—the push for pride in a bush‐based national identity and to divert attention from wrongs committed during colonisation—induced settler Australians to praise Gordon as a noble pioneer of the national character.

In summarising the various components of Gordon’s legend, Australian historians Richard White and Hsu‐Ming Teo put it this way: ‘Gordon’s horsemanship was the subject of masculine myth’, they tell us, ‘his suicide of feminine sentiment’. Presumably, White and Teo characterised his appeal in these terms because at first glance it seemed to awkwardly combine the fin de siècle cults of the frontiersman and the bush with sighs and tears over his death. In this article, however, I argue that this perceived awkwardness has more to do with our assumption that ‘masculine myth’ and sentiment were separate phenomena—for actually, the two were intertwined. One sees this in the fact that even Gordonites who admired him as the embodiment of derring‐do expressed their attraction to him in sentimental terms. By this, I mean that they appealed to what the philosopher Robert Solomon calls ‘tender feelings’ when describing their attraction to Gordon—and at the same time tried to induce others to share those feelings in conventionally emotive ways.

Developed after close reading of work by literary scholars and theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, June Howard, Laura Wexler and Carolyn Burdett, I approach sentimentality in this article as a phenomenon with four core elements. In the first place, sentimentality involves an emphasis on tender feelings such as pathos and reverence. In the second place, it involves an effort to entice others to respond emotionally to a particular subject or scenario; and in the third, a reliance on conventional language or other familiar techniques to this end. Lastly, sentimentality is motivated by a belief in the value of ‘human connectedness’, and in the customs, traditions and shared feelings that produce this sense of connection.

Though sentimentality relies so much on conventional ways of talking about and evoking emotion, it has not remained static over time. Nor does it reside in a single political or cultural tradition. One cannot simply treat it as synonymous with the intellectual tradition associated with the eighteenth‐century Scottish School of Common Sense philosophy or ‘culture of sensibility’, say—topics that have been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarship in recent years. Nor is it possible to limit it to literary tradition represented by nineteenth‐century novelists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, or the closely related cults of Victorian domesticity and mourning. It is best viewed as a more open‐ended structure of feeling connected to a flexible set of values about community and tradition. Sentimentality changes over time and place because its proponents constantly repurpose existing ideas about tender feeling, and the aesthetic and cultural conventions used to evoke sentiment.

It is worth adding here that we speak of being sentimental if we find ourselves actually responding in an emotional fashion to a sentimental work of art or utterance. Many of us do this disparagingly, frustrated that our emotions can be conjured so directly by a cadence and lyrical sequence in a song, for example, or a politician’s use of a touching scenario in an election speech. This is why June Howard speaks of sentimentality as a phenomenon that reveals the culturally conditioned nature of all emotion with exaggerated distinctness, accentuating it and so laying it bare. One senses something of the controversial nature of sentimentality here. Even when it first emerged as a set of cultural practices and ways to approach emotion in the mid‐eighteenth century, there were individuals who were hostile or ambivalent towards sentimentality as well as those who embraced it wholeheartedly. Howard’s comments also provide us with an inkling of the composite quality of sentimentality. It incorporates efforts to conjure tender feeling in conventional ways and appropriately emotional responses to those efforts in individuals—both the call and the response, as it were.

The following speech given by a local dignitary at a ceremony held by Gordon’s grave in 1913 offers us a good example of masculine sentimentality as just defined. It combined regard for the bushman‐poet’s ‘virile verse’ with emotive talk of his ‘tender memory’. The orator also made use of rustic imagery to suggest that feelings for Gordon were as natural to the settler‐Australian populace as the bush surrounding the cemetery. One might argue that he repurposed conventions for representing the natural world when he did this. He either drew from the agrarian tradition, which celebrated the folk who cultivated the land and the aesthetic and moral value of their simple customs, or from pastoral romanticism, which connected ‘human warmth and community’ to an idealised vision of untouched nature. Both traditions had echoes in his rhetoric, serving to underline its sentimentality:

All that was best in him tended to ripen in the hearts of Australians. Here, in this corner of God’s acre, having for its setting the gnarled knotted trunks of the gum trees—this bit of Australian bushland—they today placed upon the grave of him whose memory was so dear to the hearts of all Australians tributes of homage and adoration. Written 45 and 50 years ago the virile verses of Gordon today strongly appealed to Australians the world over, and the pathos of his lyrics strangely stirred the chords of tender memory.

Participants in the Gordon movement were not unique in seeking to direct sentiments such as homage and adoration towards a masculine figure, and in drawing on an aesthetic of rustic simplicity while doing so. I argue here, in fact, that the cult of Gordon was an expression of a broader form of masculine sentimentality that circulated throughout Western culture over the decades roughly spanning 1870 and 1920. Its key distinction from the dominant forms of sentimentality in the nineteenth century was that it encouraged the members of imperial and settler‐colonial publics to identify emotionally with vigorous outdoorsy types rather than with feminine or otherwise domesticated ones—to collectively experience these masculine characters’ sorrows, griefs and joys.

The advocates of this sentimentality hailed their audiences not so much as the members of families as the members of a nation, empire and the British/white race, but were no less committed to the ideal of human warmth and connectedness for that. They also strove to license certain expressions of tender feeling in others. Even the most rugged of fellows could express intimate sentiments without compromising his masculinity so long as those feelings concerned an appropriately hardy subject. This was all the more the case if he expressed himself in an unpretentious, plainspoken way, since those aesthetic qualities were increasingly becoming associated with masculinity in the day.

The precise style in which individuals gave expression to masculine sentiment differed according to their social, cultural and geographic location. Elsewhere, for example, I have discussed the short stories by Henry Lawson, a Sydney‐based author who moved in bohemian, literary circles, published in the 1890s and early 1900s. In his prose, Lawson experimented with a spare, understated realist aesthetic. He was keen to capture a sense of the Australian vernacular and the laconic demeanour of the male settlers he encountered in the bush—yet he did this with the intent of emphasising their inner decency and tenderness of heart. Participants in the Gordon movement were less self‐consciously economical in language and conversational in tone. They were more likely to talk in the simple yet lilting cadences of the bush preacher or small‐town orator. Some spoke with the earnest folksiness of the amateur poet, scorning the notion of being learned or refined. According to Fred Morris, for example, a poet publishing in a provincial Victorian newspaper in 1918, Gordon had written his verse for ordinary Australian people: ‘Shrined in a people’s heart is he/Who no blazed a track for you and me’.

Why Focus on Masculine Sentimentality between 1870 and 1920?

In describing the Gordon movement as an expression of masculine sentimentality, I am conscious of certain differences between my approach and those of historians interested in masculine emotion/ality in the decades roughly spanning 1870 and 1920. Such historians include Joanna Bourke, Michael Roper, Julie‐Marie Strange and Thomas Dixon, who also call for more nuanced perspectives on the relationship between masculinity and tender feeling in this period. Each of these historians tells us that the relationship between masculinity and tenderness was widely considered problematic in the turn‐of‐the‐century era. Large numbers of people recommended emotional restraint in men and ridiculed sentimentality in feminised terms. Each of these historians also shows us, however, that men’s actual emotional experience and behaviour departed from these cultural prescriptions. They offer us examples of fathers who conveyed earnest affection to their children, soldiers who cherished postcards from their mothers and rugged imperialists who shed tears at the theatre.

A significant point of difference between these historians’ work and mine is that they focus either on intimacy or emotion, the latter understood much as Barbara Rosenwein has defined it, as a catchall term for ‘affective reactions of all sorts, intensities and durations’, rather than the narrower concept of sentiment. A sentiment is an emotion subjected to a certain intensity of social endorsement and reflection. It has a self‐consciously collective quality, usually on the basis that it is widely considered morally or socially desirable. A still more significant point of divergence is that the weight of these historians’ argument lies on the complexity of men’s emotional experience and personal behaviour. The key reason they call for more nuanced understandings of the relationship between masculinity and emotion is that a gap existed between what the dominant culture represented as appropriately masculine behaviour and how men actually felt and behaved.

By contrast, I argue that we can point to influential cultural forms and social practices that sought to elicit tender sentiments from masculine subjects in the turn‐of‐the‐century years. Plenty of people did scoff at ‘feminine’ forms of sentimentality at the time. Some also criticised elaborate expressions of sentiment using feminised insults such as ‘mawkish’ or ‘over‐civilised’. Yet even these figures still tended to engage in sentimental rhetoric of their own. Some strove to promote sentiment through a rustic discourse about the down‐to‐earth values and experience of the bush/frontiersman. They did not simply participate in furtive displays of emotion in theatres or with their families at home.

The key reason that the phenomenon of sentimentality is interesting is that it was (and remains) a crucial medium through which individuals’ feelings were directed and shaped in the service of social power. The masculine sentimentality discussed here was a vital means through which masculine subjects were privileged over feminine ones in the years between 1870 and 1920. In Australia, its proponents also helped to legitimate the power of the settler nation, and the history of settler colonialism upon which it relied. This was because the reverence they directed toward hardy pioneers glossed over the fact that many of the men in question had been personally involved in violence towards Aboriginal peoples, and that all benefited from the forcible appropriation of Aboriginal territory.

This is not to say, of course, that sentimental discourse produces a uniform response in its readers or listeners. Sentimental texts are in themselves diverse and internally complex. So are reactions to them. Not all individuals who listened to a speech urging reverence for a frontier adventurer actually felt that reverence themselves. There would indeed have been many cases of a gap between the outcome it sought to produce and the way that individuals responded to it subjectively. Yet one cannot simply dismiss the influence of sentimentality on this basis. Anyone who has felt uncomfortable about responding tearfully to an emotional narrative almost as if against their will can attest to the power of some sentimental forms to structure their feelings in particular ways.

This interest in power is the key reason this article draws on literary scholars and theorists of sentimentality more than the work of historians of turn‐of‐the‐century emotions. Literary critics and theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Laura Wexler have long been concerned with the fact that patriarchy and colonial governance are reproduced in personal relations. By contrast, historians aiming to highlight the richness of men’s emotional experiences tend to elide structural questions about power. It is in order to provide some more perspective on intimate power in turn‐of‐the‐century Australia that I focus on masculine sentimentality in the following—or more to the point, on the specific expression of that sentimentality one finds in responses to Gordon’s life and work.

Gordon’s Life in Brief

Born in 1833, Adam Lindsay Gordon belonged to an upper‐class British family hailing from Esslemont, Scotland. He spent most of his schooldays in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, but was much more interested in horse‐racing and pugilism than his education. By the time he reached the end of his teens, he had developed such a penchant for ‘low companions’ that his parents dispatched him to the colony of South Australia. Arriving in 1853, Gordon spent the next two years as a member of the Mounted Police in South Australia’s sparsely‐settled Mount Gambier district. This region was part of the country traditionally owned by the Buandig people, and the Buandig were still a visible presence there at the time. Gordon’s parents’ hopes that he would become a model of Antipodean respectability were soon dashed, however, for in 1855 he abruptly resigned this position to pursue ‘a nomadic, irregular and obscure life as a professional horsebreaker’ and steeplechase competitor. Over the next few years, he acquired a reputation as a superb, if reckless, horseman, winning a host of steeplechase races held in Melbourne and provincial towns.

In the early 1860s, Gordon inherited money, married and began publishing poetry in the colonial press. Three of his four books of verse appeared in this decade: The Feud (1864), Ashtaroth (1867) and Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1867). He also became as a Member of the South Australian Parliament. Yet just as he seemed poised to assume a more stable life, he relinquished this position in favour of a risky attempt at sheep farming. When this ended in disaster, he bought a livery stables in the Victorian goldfields town of Ballarat and tried unsuccessfully to make a living there. Further disaster struck in 1868 when his baby daughter Annie died. By 1870, he and his wife were living a straitened life in Brighton on the outskirts of Melbourne, facing worsening financial woes and dealing with his deepening melancholia. Gordon had written a new book of verse, but was pessimistic about its reception. None of his other works had been at all widely read. The nadir came on 24 June 1870 when he took himself into the scrub bordering Brighton Beach and ended his life with his local Volunteer Corps rifle.

The Cult of Gordon Emerges

A number of factors were crucial to the growth of interest in Gordon after he died. The most significant sprang from the contradictory impulses caused by colonial Australia’s character as a British settler society. As literary critic Vivian Smith puts it, Gordon’s verse carried a good deal of ‘high Victorian cultural luggage’. Only three of the sixteen poems in his last and best‐known work, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, were actually set in the bush. The remaining thirteen were set in Europe. They included an Arthurian fantasy, scenes from a poetic drama and melancholic reflections on brevity of life with titles such as ‘Song of Autumn’ and ‘A Basket of Flowers’. Laced with quotations from Latin and deeply engaged with British literary and cultural history, these poems recommended themselves to readers who regarded Swinburne and Tennyson the poetic icons of the age. Yet Gordon also wrote exultantly demotic verse that took its style and content from the culture of ‘common folk’.

A good example of Gordon’s poems written with a popular readership in mind was ‘How We Beat the Favourite’. It told the story of an English horse race in a rousing metre that warranted the description ‘galloping rhyme’. The three bush poems in Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes exhibited a similar style. Fans adored the fact that they lent themselves to recitation. Their rhymes tripped off the tongue and their swinging rhythms were exciting to speak aloud. The fact that they concerned exciting events added to their appeal. ‘From the Wreck’ included an attempt to save drowning immigrants, for example, while ‘Wolf and Hound’ concerned a high‐speed shoot‐out between bushrangers and mounted police. In this passage from ‘The Sick Stockrider’, the protagonist, a bushman, reminisced about another high‐speed gunfight, in this one that he and his friends had waged against the (fictitious) bushranger, Starlight:

Aye! we had a glorious gallop after ‘Starlight’ and his gang,
When they bolted from Sylvester’s on the flat;
How the sun‐dried reed‐beds crackled, how the flint‐strewn ranges rang
To the strokes of ‘Mountaineer’ and ‘Acrobat’.
Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
Close beside them through the tea‐tree scrub we dash’d;
And the golden‐tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath!
And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash’d!

Critics have since pointed out that not even Gordon’s bush poems exhibited a detailed engagement with the colonial environment. They rendered the bush little more than a blur of fern and timber as their hard‐riding heroes galloped past at breakneck speed. They were conspicuous, too, in their silence about Indigenous Australians, notwithstanding the fact that Gordon would have encountered many during his time in the bush. For late‐nineteenth‐century enthusiasts, however, it seemed enough that poems such as ‘The Sick Stockrider’ caught the flavour of the colonies’ oral bush tradition and tailored it for a mass literate audience. Another vital component of Gordon’s popularity was the fact that people widely considered him to have expressed ‘great commonplaces of human thought and feeling’ in his work. The quote that appealed so much later to Queen Elizabeth II was an obvious example: ‘Kindness in another’s trouble / Courage in one’s own’. Such pearls of ‘practical wisdom’ enhanced Gordon’s reputation as a poet who embodied the authentic spirit of bush folk and ‘the Australian people’ more generally.

The mix of parts in Gordon’s work—the high and the popular, and the European and colonial—makes his oeuvre seem disjointed today. Back in the 1800s, however, it was crucial to the breadth of interest he attracted in the colonial public. Those of his poems set in Europe allowed him to appeal as a serious poet to colonial readers not yet convinced of the value of bush verse and themes. At the same time, however, the fact that he wrote poems set in the bush allowed admirers to cast him as a prophet of Australian national identity, right at the moment in which that identity was forming as an ideal. The nationalists committed to this ideal frequently claimed that intimacy with bush pursuits lent settler‐Australian men more earthy pragmatism and adventurousness than their Old World counterparts. Even an emigrant from the Old World such as Gordon might come to embody these qualities after spending sufficient time in his adopted home.

One of the earliest critics to describe Gordon as a national icon was Marcus Clarke, himself a famous figure in colonial Australian letters. In a preface to an 1879 edition of Gordon’s verse, Clarke hailed the poet’s work as ‘the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry’. This description recommended Gordon to members of the Australian Natives’ Association, a male‐only organisation formed in the early 1870s. The ANA’s leaders were ‘middle‐class Australian‐born patriots who bridled at the dominance of British immigrants in public life’. Its wider constituency was more diverse, however, comprising respectable white‐collar workers and tradesmen as well as businessmen and professionals. ANA members did not view all immigrants as objectionable: only those who sneered at colonial culture and considered themselves superior to the native‐born. As a British aristocrat who constructed positive notions of colonial life and identity in his work, Gordon may even have been more attractive to these patriots than he would have been if born locally. At any rate, the ANA’s constituents numbered among some of his most ardent followers by the turn of the century. They appreciated the flattering vision of early colonial life that Gordon offered in his work, and so hosted earnest lectures on his legacy.

In 1888, an ANA member, the Melbourne journalist and elocutionist, John Howlett Ross, published the first of many Gordon biographies. He described Gordon as one of the finest ‘writers of imaginative literature that Australia has ever produced’. He also assisted the British writer Douglas Sladen to compile an anthology of Australian verse in 1888 in which Gordon’s verse featured prominently. Perhaps influenced by Ross’s zeal, Sladen himself became a renowned Gordonite. He was responsible for the Gordon memorial in Westminster Abbey in 1933, using his connections to British literary celebrities to garner support for the campaign. Sladen began publishing on Gordon in the 1910s, however, the decade in which popular feeling for the poet was most ardent and widespread. At least fifteen new collections of his verse were published that decade: nine in London, three in Melbourne and one each in Sydney and New York. Commercially successful films based on ‘The Sick Stockrider’ and ‘From the Wreck’ screened in Australian cinemas in 1913, and a biopic called ‘The Life’s Romance of Adam Lindsay Gordon’ three years later.

The fact of Gordon’s suicide had an obvious role to play in his celebrity. He shot himself just days after Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes was published, and there is no doubt that the mix of sympathy, morbid curiosity and shock this incited won the work a much larger readership than it would otherwise have received. Even more important was the fact that ‘The Sick Stockrider’ seemed to foretell Gordon’s demise. Its protagonist was a stockrider (the Australian equivalent of a cowboy) on the brink of death. The stockrider had become fatally ill on a horseback journey with his friend, Ned, and now lay reminiscing about the wild colonial youth they had shared.

Fans invested the wistful retrospect that the dying stockrider cast over his life with a haunting prescience, seemingly convinced that Gordon had written it in the knowledge that he would soon take his life. Since it concerned the protagonist’s dying wish, the last stanza seemed especially prescient. The stockrider told Ned he wanted to be buried in a wattle grove, with only bush flowers to mark where he lay:

Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.

This stanza proved vital to the cult of Gordon. Its insistence on the value of rustic expressions of feeling, conveyed via earthy symbols rather than elaborate ritual, summed up the spirit of the movement devoted to him. The stockrider’s wish also provided the impetus for fans to conduct pilgrimages to Brighton Cemetery and lay wattle upon Gordon’s monument, so that wattle became the unofficial symbol of Gordonian sentiment.

The Breadth of Gordon’s Appeal

Footage of a pilgrimage to Gordon’s grave screened in Australian cinemas in the mid‐1920s show numerous women in attendance among a crowd dominated by dark‐coated men and boys. This effectively sums up the gender composition of the cult of Gordon. While it attracted female members, the bulk of its participants were male and middle‐class. Its leaders were men such as Frank Maldon Robb, a Melbourne barrister who edited an Oxford University Press edition of Gordon’s collected verse in 1912. They were middle class, educated men, in other words, proud of their masculine literary tastes. (When he was not waxing eloquent about Gordon, Robb gave after‐dinner lectures about Rudyard Kipling, laureate of imperial masculinity). Other leading Gordonites included the actor‐manager Edmund Duggan, known for his leading roles in popular melodramas (he specialised in both swaggering villain and oppressed hero characters); Julius Grant, business manager at Melbourne’s King’s Theatre; and John Kinmot Moir, a Melbourne credit manager and book‐collector active in the bohemian Bread and Cheese club in the 1930s.

Though the leaders of the Gordon movement were middle‐class Melbourne men, the movement was similar to that of the ANA in that its rank and file was more socially and geographically diverse. Bush labourers were said to love Gordon’s most popular offerings, reciting ‘The Sick Stockrider’ or ‘From the Wreck’ in shearing sheds and by campfires across the continent. Newspapers provide us with an example of ‘The Sick Stockrider’ being recited at a farewell for a miner in the Western Australian gold‐town of Kalgoorlie in 1895, and otherwise at Mechanics Institutes, school concerts, in community halls and ANA meeting rooms in places as far‐flung as northwest Queensland and Tasmania. The appeal of Gordon’s work to audiences at provincial venues underlines the fact that poetry had become genuinely popular in this period. Members of the populace read it in newspapers, borrowed it from libraries and bought it in cheap pocket editions. They recited it in kitchens, literary‐society meetings, at community fundraisers and other amateur performances. The popularity of his work among rural audiences further gestures at Gordonites’ belief in the aesthetic value of rustic simplicity, and shared wellsprings of feeling among the common folk.

The Interrelationship of ‘Masculine Myth’ and Sentiment in the Gordon Movement

There is no doubt that Gordon’s most fervent admirers prized him for his masculinity as well as his vernacular appeal. In 1921, for example, the literary editor Mary Wilkinson included Gordon’s poem ‘The Swimmer’ in an anthology called Gleanings from Australasian Verse: Poems of Manhood. In her preface, she explained that the volume contained ‘poems dealing with subjects of interest to men, especially War Poems, Poems of Country and Poems of Sport’. Readers might be surprised by her omission of Gordon’s ‘How We Beat The Favourite’, she added, but she had done this only because it was already ‘universally known’. Back in 1912, Douglas Sladen had similarly associated Gordon with masculinity when he claimed that Australians admired him before all else as ‘a magnificent type of manhood, as the Bard of the Bush and the Race‐course’. Other contemporaries referred to his work as ‘virile’ and ‘vigorous’; to the fact that his protagonists were ‘men as opposed to dreamers and students’; to his ‘true soldier spirit’ and connection to ‘manly sports’.

The attention Gordon received as a model of vigorous manhood is of a piece with what countless scholars of masculinity have told us about the fin de siècle. Before the recent spate of revisionist histories such as Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia (2015) and Michael Roper’s The Secret Battle (2008), it was common to hear simply that Western masculinity was associated with ‘do‐ers’ rather than dreamers in this period. Sarah Watts, Gail Bederman and others have told us that men were expected to become more assertive and vigorous, and to refrain from expressing tender feelings such as ‘mercy, empathy, love and forgiveness’. In Britain, for example, John Tosh discerned a broad shift from the earnest expressiveness considered desirable in white middle‐class men during the 1830s to the stiff‐upper‐lip heartiness idealised in the new century. In Australia, cultural and gender historians suggested that colonial settlers faced even more pressure to avoid affect than their counterparts overseas. The array of scholarship on settlers involved in brutal violence towards Aboriginal people in the northern and central parts of the continent reinforced this notion that masculine sentiment was especially repressed in Australia well before the Victorian era was at an end.

Gordon fans’ emphasis on his virility might be in tune with this scholarship, but they said other things that scarcely resonate so easily. In the same year that Sladen praised Gordon as a ‘magnificent type of manhood’, for example, Frank Maldon Robb spoke tenderly of the love readers bore for him. ‘We in Australia … do not pedestal him … into the highest, or even a very high place’, he wrote of in a preface to a collected edition of Gordon’s verse. Rather:

… we love him and his verse; and love is given to a man and a poet and a book, not for the things that the world knows and names, but … for ‘that which the world’s coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb’. You cannot explain or analyse or weigh or ticket such love.

An anonymous contributor to the provincial Victorian newspaper Mildura Cultivator used a similarly affective tone to describe Gordon in 1916. The key to the devotion that Gordon attracted from the Australian populace, he wrote, was his ability to make ‘folk … feel’. His poetry inspired his readers to respond ‘not merely as an intellect saying things, but as a heart feeling things’. It was for this reason that ‘when the greater poets are smothered under laurel wreaths and the lesser poets are forgotten, Australian children will twine wattle bloom to lay on Gordon’s grave’.

The most significant thing to note about this sentimental response to Gordon was that it depended on his status as a model masculine type. The reason his enthusiasts felt licensed to talk of their deep affection for him was because his reputation for muscular bush experience prevented their rhetoric from being criticised as mawkish. As one anonymous writer for the South Australian press put it in 1900, Gordon ‘belied the popular perception of a poet as a meagre being, living in a garret, from which he occasionally emerged in long hair and a shabby suit of clothes’. He appealed to Australians, who were a ‘practical people’, because he was ‘a man of action’; because he spoke of ‘real, live men’ in his verse, ‘and of the things that men love and understand’.

Full‐bodied masculine characters were thus free to wax lyrical about the things they loved without being ridiculed. Any individual, I suggest, was free to express his or her affection for ‘real, live men’ and the things they held dear without attracting mockery in the late 1800s and decades following. Yet the same did not apply to the supposedly effete concerns of ‘meagre beings’. These feminised subjects were the selective focus of the anti‐sentimental rhetoric apparent in the day, which left masculine sentimentality more or less unscathed. Historians such as Bederman and Watts do not consider this licensing of masculine sentiment in their work. Neither do historians such as Roper or Dixon, who otherwise challenge the extent to which the stiff‐upper‐lip ideal governed men’s behaviour in their everyday lives. Having said this, the literary scholar and theorist Eve Sedgwick wrestled with precisely this facilitation of rugged sentiment in The Epistemology of the Closet (1990)—and it is accordingly to her insights that I now turn.

Sentimentality and Masculine Power

Sedgwick tells us that a marked shift in the dominant forms of sentimentality occurred between the mid‐nineteenth and turn‐of‐the‐century years. Back in the 1850s, feminine figures had been the focus of the prevailing manifestations of sentimentality in Western culture. Pious female children such as the golden‐haired Eva in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop had been foci for sentiment across national borders, social classes and genders. So had maternal figures: whether the angel of the middle‐class home or the silver‐haired mother in her rustic log cabin. Fast‐forward fifty or so years, however, and robust masculine types were receiving far more attention in the popular culture and public life of the day. The prime focus for sentiment was now a man who dramatised ‘a struggle of masculine identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine’. This man was a sturdily practical or rational fellow who had been overcome by strong feeling in spite of his hardy nature, in some cases being so moved that he gave way to tears. Masculine sentimentalists treated this rugged fellow’s tears or other signs of tenderness as precious—vastly more precious than the cheap tears of women and effeminate characters—and thus as worthy of sympathetic responses from the populace at large.

Sedgwick’s reflections on the sentiment associated with the hardy man moved to tenderness have been influential on numerous literary scholars since the publication of The Epistemology of the Closet. Few, however, have appreciated the historical specificity of her argument. Instead of thinking specifically about the significance of the turn of the twentieth century, they have simply applied her observations to other eras. For the gender historian concerned with the fin de siècle, however, the relevance of her insights is striking. They provide a more nuanced way to think about the idealisation of frontier/bush masculinity so much to the fore in the day. Instead of equating the development of these ideals with the decline of sentiment, they allow us appreciate that stoic bushmen and vigorous adventurers became a focus for appeals to tender feeling in and of themselves.

Sedgwick’s observations about turn‐of‐the‐century masculine sentiment make sense in the context of the era’s vexed gender politics. Whether as a consequence of first‐wave feminism, homosexual panic or other concerns about the feminising influences of urbanisation, many masculinist characters considered manhood to be under threat. Their desire to redress a perceived imbalance in power was crucial to the sentimentalisation of ‘hard’ masculine subjects emerging in the late 1800s. They attacked expressions of sentiment associated with femininity: the appeals to happy homes by temperance reformers, for example, or the ‘mawkish sentiment’ involved in compassion for Aboriginal people. At the very same time, however, they sought to enshrine virile characters in the sympathies of the national‐cum‐imperial community using affective terms. Arguably, too, this desire to redress a perceived imbalance in power helps to explain why the bush became a setting for sentimental scenarios rather than the parlour or log cabin so dear to participants in the Victorian cult of domesticity. The proponents of this structure of feeling treated rugged al fresco settings associated with masculinity as more appropriate backdrops for sentiment than those associated with the ‘feminine’ domestic domain.

Other Examples: The Pioneer Legend and Nostalgia for the High Colonial Age

The Gordon movement was by no means the only example of turn‐of‐the‐century sentimentality. Another was the cluster of beliefs, narratives and commemorative practices called the ‘pioneer legend’ by Australian historian John Hirst. It emerged in the late 1800s amid the Australian colonies’ burgeoning nationalism, although there were other versions in comparable settler colonies such as British Columbia. Its advocates called for recognition of the unsung heroes of Australian colonisation: common folk who had renounced the temptations of urban life for hard work and struggle in the Australian bush. They included women in their definition of ‘pioneer’. At the heart of their rhetoric, however, were robust men who had ‘braved the great lonely bush years ago, and hewed out of it comfortable homes for themselves and their families’.

The proponents of the pioneer legend made ample use of the language of nation and turn‐of‐the‐century ‘masculine myth’. They praised their subjects as ‘nation‐builders’ and as ‘virile men’ of a ‘fine and hardy… race’. Yet they also used the language of tender feeling. Advocates of the myth claimed that the pioneers had not just had their own interests at heart when they laboured in the wilderness. They had also tried to blaze a track for the whole settler community, ‘lay[ing] the foundations of our goodly inheritance’. One hears echoes of the agrarian and pastoral traditions in this emotive rhetoric. The pioneers deserved gratitude because they had lived simple lives of labour in their corner of God’s acre, caring not for their own greatness but that of their nation and race. The pioneer legend thus provides us with a good example of individuals repurposing longstanding sentimental conventions to suit new agendas and times. Its advocates adapted language and imagery from longstanding cultural traditions to help forge a distinctively fin de siècle sentimentality, catering to the priorities of their more nationalist and imperialist age.

Lingering over the suffering of pioneers was another way to portray them as worthy of gratitude and love. In an article published in the interwar period in the Mount Gambier press, a journalist urged readers to ‘visualise the sometimes terrible hardships and privations the pioneers of this district endured before they won out’. Artists, poets, novelists and cinematographers offered vivid illustrations of these hardships. Touching portrayals of hardy bushmen dying in the wilderness indeed developed as a common trope in Australian popular culture and literature across the years between 1870 and 1920. Some featured well‐known explorers such as Robert O’Hara Burke; others, bushrangers‐turned‐folk heroes such as Ben Hall; and others again, anonymous pioneers.

The 1913 film of ‘The Sick Stockrider’ provided a compelling example of this trope when it treated audiences to melodramatic close‐ups of the ailing stockman in the arms of Ned, the two almost like lovers as he imparted his final wish. The artist Charles Hammond focused on the pathos of this same scene in an illustration of ‘The Sick Stockrider’ for a postcard in the early 1900s. He depicted the stockrider lying helplessly on the ground in the bush, his faithful mate Ned and loyal dogs by his side:

Perhaps the keenest way in which proponents of the pioneer legend appealed to popular sympathies was by encouraging nostalgia for the early colonial age. They incited wistfulness for an era in which men were more magnificent than they were in the current day. This sentiment, which infused so much fin de siècle rhetoric about frontier masculinity, was potently evoked by the poem ‘The Pioneers’ by the hugely popular Australian writer, Banjo Paterson. It was published in 1896:

They came of bold and roving stock that would not fixed abide;
They were the sons of field and flock since e’er they learnt to ride,
We may not hope to see such men in these degenerate years
As those explorers of the bush—the brave old pioneers.

More than two decades earlier, Gordon had expressed a similar wistfulness to this in his poems ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’ and ‘The Sick Stockrider’. In the latter, his alter ego reminisced about the men of the ‘old colonial school’ with whom he had spent his youth:

In these hours when life is ebbing, how those days when life was young
Come back to us; how clearly I recall
Even the yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung;
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?
Aye! nearly all our comrades of the old colonial school,
Our ancient boon companions, Ned, are gone;
Hard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule,
It seems that you and I are left alone.

Sentimentality and Settler-Colonialism: Another Manifestation of Its Relationship to Power

As the decades passed after his death, Gordon himself was increasingly the beneficiary of nostalgia for the days of the ‘old colonial school’. Old settlers from the Mount Gambier district included him in reminiscences about the early days of colonisation there. Local South Australian journalists published a spate of these reminiscences in the local press in the interwar years. Their articles had titles such as ‘Mount Gambier Pioneer Looks Back’ or ‘Old‐Time Incidents’. In each case, they referred to Gordon as one of the district’s first colonists, so that the cult of Gordon became closely intertwined with the pioneer myth. This had in fact been the case ever since the early 1900s, when Gordonites had praised him as a ‘pioneer singer’ of Australian poetry, or a poet ‘of the virgin bush, [and] of the early pioneers’. It was also apparent in the 1910s when an organisation called the Early Pioneers’ Association sent representatives on annual pilgrimages to his grave. This association had similar aims to the ANA in that its members sought to instil respect for specifically Australian topics and people in the populace—in this case, by whetting interest in the colonies’ first settlers and their history.

Pioneer mythmakers obviously served settler‐colonial interests when they encouraged the settler populace to revere Australia’s early colonists. Some made veiled references to violence against Aborigines when they talked about the pioneers ‘winning out’ against adversity. They either left these references conveniently vague, however, or presented Aboriginal people as aggressors: treacherous natives who beset the pioneers from every side. By this means, they helped the populace forget the brutality of colonisation, enveloping the settlers who perpetrated it in a haze of nostalgic sympathy. This was a pressing political and cultural desire; a precondition of the pride in Australian topics and characters sought by the ANA and other nationalists in in the turn‐of‐the‐century years.

Not surprisingly, given its close connections to the pioneer legend, the cult of Gordon also worked to reinforce settler‐colonial power. There is no record of Gordon himself having been involved in violence towards Aboriginal peoples. Nor does his poetry make reference to it—although possibly the hunts for bushrangers in two of his poems were a euphemism for hunts for Aborigines. It is certainly overwhelmingly likely that Gordon would have at least heard of violent incidents involving Indigenous Australians. Even discounting the time he later spent in other districts, he worked for the Mounted Police at Mount Gambier in a period when settlers were actively challenging the Buandig people’s sovereignty. One of the early settlers of Buandig country would later recall ‘nasty clashes with the blacks’ alongside memories of Gordon riding in local races, mentioning them almost in the same breath. Gordon’s silence on such clashes helped to submerge them in popular memory. More importantly, the way he was memorialised helped the settler community to gloss over this aspect of their history. It allowed them to sentimentalise the high colonial era as a more reckless and yet warmly sympathetic age.

Historians of Masculine Emotions and Power

Postcolonial scholars such as Laura Wexler and Ann Laura Stoler have long observed that colonial power relied on structures of feeling as well as bureaucratic governance and force. Many literary and gender scholars have also shown that sentimentality has been used to further the interests of the powerful. Before slavery was outlawed in the British Empire and United States, for example, sentimental techniques were used to garner support for slave‐owners as well as by abolitionists trying to challenge the status quo. One finds little interest in the intimate operations of power, however, in work by historians of masculine emotions between c.1870 and the end of the First World War. Indeed, in the work of Dixon, Strange, Roper and others, one finds a tendency to celebrate past evidence of tenderness in men almost as a good in and of itself. They present us with happy examples of men who managed to escape the strictures imposed by the stiff‐upper‐lip ideal, and instead expressed pathos, romantic love, fatherly affection or tender care for loved ones. Roper’s work is even couched quite explicitly in the language of celebration. He describes it as a ‘tribute to the ability of men like my grandfather [a First World War veteran] and their families to love and look after others despite the injuries inflicted on them’.

There is a sense in these works of the need to right wrongs about men and masculinity in history. The Western public at large has assumed that past masculine characters were hard‐hearted and tough, or were at least expected to be so. To redress this misperception, these historians have set out to show us that they could in fact be tender and ‘soft’. The work of queer scholars of masculine intimacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Chris Brickell, John Ibson, Chris Packard and Brian Joseph Martin, arguably contributes to this air of reclamation and tribute. They show us touching examples of men expressing affection for each other in the period in which Western culture began to place greater limitations on masculine intimacy, fuelled by concerns about homosexuality. Brickell and Ibson both reproduce moving photographs of men in each other’s arms, conveying affection for each other in a manner not dissimilar from Gordon’s stockrider and his comrade Ned.

Arguably, this combined scholarship engages in its own sentimentalisation of masculine characters. Arguably, that is, its contributors treat masculine tenderness as a precious commodity, deserving our special attention because it won out against the odds. I say ‘arguably’, because on a personal level I am unsure of how hard to press this line of critique. Works such as Roper’s and Brickell’s do offer us heartening examples of human warmth and community. It is impossible to read them without feeling that they enrich our understanding of past emotions and lives. Yet having said this, if there is one thing that the cult of Gordon tells us, it is that Western culture has long encouraged the celebration of masculine tenderness. Certainly since the turn of the twentieth century, one might point to any number of efforts to cultivate sympathy for the suffering of hardy white men, some of whom were at the forefront of violent frontier expansion in settler colonies such as Australia. It is worth keeping this history of masculine sentimentality in mind when approaching recent works on the history of masculine emotions. Arguably, too, it should prompt us to produce more histories of feminine emotions at the fin de siècle. Perhaps it is time to revisit the feminine forms of sentimentality circulating in the era, looking for evidence of responses to the masculinist structure of feeling developing in the decades after Adam Lindsay Gordon died.