Culture, the arts, and national identity in 19th century Australia were strongly influenced by bush imagery in art and literature. Henry Lawson was one of the first Australian-born writers to look at Australia with "Australian eyes" and give voice to interpretations of an "Australian" character through his depictions of bush life and hardship in stories and poems. Other influential artists and writers who contributed to developing a sense of national identity included the painters Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, and the poet Banjo Paterson, known for his ballads celebrating the Australian bush tradition and bushmen. The Bulletin magazine also played a role in promoting Australian nationalism through its writing. Sport, particularly the Victorian Football League established in 1897, became an important part

1. Culture, the Arts &
National Identity

2. ArtMcCubbin and bush identity

4. Streeton

5. Tom Roberts

9. Literature
Henry Lawson
Much of Lawson's work was set in the Australian bush, or was about bush life.
Although most Australians lived in cities and towns in the 19th century, it was the bush that somehow
grabbed the imagination - perhaps because of the stark contrast between it and the more gentle and
controlled environment of Europe, from where most non-indigenous Australians had come.
This was also the time before Federation, and Australians' allegiance was not to Australia, because it did not
exist as an united entity as yet. Australians felt they owed loyalty to a particular colony - New South Wales
or Victoria and so on - and beyond that, loyalty was owed to England, the King or Queen of England, and the
British Empire.
By the 1890s Australia had been settled for a little more than 100 years and Lawson was arguably the first
Australian-born writer who really looked at Australia with Australian eyes, not influenced by his knowledge
of other landscapes. He was the first perhaps to give voice to interpretations of an 'Australian' character.
He was also from the bush, had lived on a selection, had been brought up in bush poverty, had suffered
hardship and unemployment, and knew of the characters and lifestyles he talked about. His work reflected
Australian experience with an integrity readers recognised.

10. LawsonThe Song of Australia
The centuries found me to nations unknown –
My people have crowned me and made me a throne;
My royal regalia is love, truth, and light –
A girl called Australia – I've come to my right.
Though no fields of conquest grew red at my birth,
My dead were the noblest and bravest on earth;
Their strong sons are worthy to stand with the best –
My brave Overlanders ride west of the west.
My cities are seeking the clean and the right;
My Statesmen are speaking in London to-night;
The voice of my Bushmen is heard oversea;
My army and navy are coming to me.
By all my grim headlands my flag is unfurled,
My artists and singers are charming the world;
The White world shall know its young outpost with pride;
The fame of my poets goes ever more wide.
By old tow'r and steeple of nation grown grey
The name of my people is spreading to-day;
Through all the old nations my learners go forth;
My youthful inventors are startling the north.
In spite of all Asia, and safe from her yet,
Through wide Australasia my standards I'll set;
A grand world and bright world to rise in an hour –
The Wings of the White world, the Balance of Power.
Through storm, or serenely – whate'er I go through –
God grant I be queenly! God grant I be true!
To suffer in silence, and strike at a sign,
Till all the fair islands of these seas are mine.
The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees, no
undergrowth. Nineteen miles to the nearest civilisation - a shanty
on the main road ... There is nothing to see, however, and not a
soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track
without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a
bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness
of the stunted trees.
(Source: The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson)

11. Banjo PattersonAndrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson (1864-1941), poet, solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and soldier
Barty, as he was known to his family and friends, enjoyed a
bush boyhood. When he was 7 the family moved to Illalong in
the Yass district. Here, near the main route between Sydney
and Melbourne, the exciting traffic of bullock teams, Cobb &
Co. coaches, drovers with their mobs of stock, and gold
escorts became familiar sights. At picnic race meetings and
polo matches, he saw in action accomplished horsemen from
the Murrumbidgee and Snowy Mountains country which
generated his lifelong enthusiasm for horses and
horsemanship and eventually the writing of his famous
equestrian ballads. By the verdict of the Australian people, and by his own conduct
and precept, Paterson was, in every sense, a great Australian.
Ballad-writer, horseman, bushman, overlander, squatter—he
helped to make the Australian legend. Yet, in his lifetime, he was
a living part of that legend in that, with the rare touch of the
genuine folk-poet, and in words that seemed as natural as
breathing, he made a balladry of the scattered lives of back-
country Australians and immortalized them. He left a legacy for
future generations in his objective, if sometimes sardonic,
appreciation of the outback: that great hinterland stretching
down from the Queensland border through the western plains of
New South Wales to the Snowy Mountains—so vast a country
that the lonely rider was seen as 'a speck upon a waste of plain'.
This was Paterson's land of contrasts: 'the plains are all awave
with grass, the skies are deepest blue', but also the 'fiery dust-
storm drifting and the mocking mirage shifting'; 'waving grass
and forest trees on sunlit plains as wide as seas', but the 'drought
fiend' too, and the cattle left lying 'with the crows to watch them
dying'.

12. The Man From Snowy River

13. The Bulletin
“Australia for the White Man.”
The Bulletin was an Australian magazine first published in
Sydney on 31 January 1880. The publication's focus was politics
and business, with some literary content, and editions were often
accompanied by cartoons and other illustrations. The views
promoted by the magazine varied across different editors and
owners, with the publication consequently considered either on the
left or right of the political spectrum at various stages in its history.
The Bulletin was highly influential in Australian culture and politics
until after the First World War, and was then noted for its
nationalist, pro-labour, and pro-republican writing. It was revived
as a modern news magazine in the 1960s, and was Australia's
longest running magazine publication until the final issue was
published in January 2008.

14. Lawson and The Bulletin
Lawson was first published in The Bulletin in 1887 with the poem Song of Australia .
The Bulletin was an influential publication which promoted a particular set of views -
egalitarianism, unionism, and 'Australianism'. It was also white and male.
Lawson was a regular contributor, as was Banjo Paterson. A series of verses were
published where Lawson and Paterson debated their different perspectives on the
Australian bush - Lawson claiming Paterson was a romantic, and Paterson claiming
Lawson was full of doom and gloom.

15. Sport
The Victorian Football League was established in 1896 when six of the strongest clubs in Victoria –
Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne and South Melbourne – broke away from the
established Victorian Football Association to establish the new league. The six clubs invited two more VFA
clubs – Carlton and St Kilda – to join the league for its inaugural season in 1897. Among the notable
initiatives established in the new league was an annual finals tournament, rather than awarding the
premiership directly to the team with the best record through the season; and, the formal establishment of
the modern scoring system, in which six points are scored for a goal, and one point is scored for a behind.
Although the Victorian Football League and the Victorian Football Association continued to compete for
spectator interest for many years, the VFL quickly established itself as the premier competition in Victoria. In
the early years Fitzroy and Collingwood were the dominant teams. Following the arrival of Jack Worrall as
coach in 1903, Carlton began a dominating period, during which they won three successive flags from 1906
to 1908; although Worrall was the club secretary, he took on a player management and direction role which
is today recognised as the first official coaching job in the league. Essendon won flags in 1911 and 1912,
also under Jack Worrall's coaching.
In 1908, the league expanded to ten teams, with Richmond crossing from the VFA and University from the
Metropolitan Football Association. University, after three promising seasons, finished last each year from
1911 until 1914, including losing 51 matches in a row; this was in part caused by its players focus on their
studies rather than football, particularly during examinations, and it was partly because the club operated on
an amateur basis at a time when player payments were becoming common – and as a result, the club
withdrew from the VFL at the end of 1914. University teams now compete in the Victorian Amateur Football
Association.[1][2]
From 1907 until 1914, the VFL premier and the premier of the Adelaide-based South Australian Football
League met in a playoff match for the Championship of Australia.