Britain was never the ‘onlie begetter’ of Australia or its literature; but colonised Australia has always been, in some sense and degree, British. It is the nature of the relationship, not the fact of it, that appears complex, difficult to define, and dynamic. P. R Stephensen, in one of the less controversial contentions in The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936), insisted that Australian culture is both derivative and local; that distinctive non-Aboriginal Australianness is, whatever else, a variant and product of Britishness. Especially in relation to the period before popular and governmental endorsement of a multicultural Australian nation, that suggestion may not seem contentious; and yet the move from a colonial relationship with Britain towards nationhood has influenced many literary nationalists to deny or disown Britishness; or to define ‘Australianness’ by jettisoning certain unwanted aspects of ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’, while valorising as ‘Australian’ other preferred traits.

In The Australian Legend (1958), for example, Russel Ward uses the words English and British primarily to indicate middle- or upper-class Englishness, and thereby erases cockney and north country Englishness from his discourse. Paradoxically, he demonstrates thoroughly the cultural ‘transmission’ of a particular English literary heritage, a proletarian one, within colonial Australian literature and culture; but he is unwilling to label this process too obviously as English or British, since he perceives a discrete and distinctive Australianness as excluding Britishness.

For A. A. Phillips (in The Australian Tradition, 1958) a key ‘Australian’ quality is the ‘democratic’, whereas Englishness is defined in relation to class hierarchy. The Marston currency lads in Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888) are, ideologically and linguistically, on the way to gaining the Australian-ness that Henry Lawson’s typical characters later achieve, but squatter Falkland of the colonial gentry is more ‘English’. This class paradigm has exercised inescapable cultural power, understandably when it is remembered that Australia claims to be one of the world’s oldest current democracies. Despite the rejection by recent commentators of the methodologies and the particular brands of nationalism of Ward and of Phillips, a similar image of ‘British’ and ‘Australian’ necessarily persists.