Sense and Nonsense in Australian History by John Hirst

Author:John Hirst [John Hirst]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Pioneer Legend

Schools have been the most influential purveyors of the pioneer legend and in literature for children it occurs in its purest form. The first item in the Fifth Grade Victorian School Reader, in use for two generations or more earlier this century, was the poem ‘Pioneers’ by Frank Hudson:

We are the old world people,

Ours were the hearts to dare;

But our youth is spent, and our backs are bent,

And the snow is on our hair …

We wrought with a will unceasing.

We moulded, and fashioned, and planned,

And we fought with the black, and we blazed the track,

That ye might inherit the land …

Take now the fruit of our labour,

Nourish and guard it with care,

For our youth is spent, and our backs are bent,

And the snow is on our hair.

This legend is very different from the radical, collectivist legend of the bush worker discussed by Russel Ward in The Australian Legend. It celebrates courage, enterprise, hard work and perseverance; it usually applies to the people who first settled the land, whether as pastoralists or farmers, and not to those they employed, though these were never specifically excluded. It is a nationalist legend which deals in a heroic way with the central experience of European settlement in Australia: the taming of the new environment to man’s use. The qualities with which it invests the pioneers – courage, enterprise and so on – perhaps do not strain too much at the truth, though it assumes wrongly that owners always did their own pioneering. Its legendary aspect lies more clearly in the claim that these people were not working merely for themselves or their families, but for us – ‘That ye might inherit the land’. The pioneer story can also be described as legendary because of what it leaves out: there is usually no mention of the social, legal or economic determinants of land settlement. The pioneers are depicted in a world limited by the boundaries of their properties, subduing the land and battling the elements. Their enemies are drought, flood, fire, sometimes Aborigines; never low prices, middle men, lack of capital, or other pioneers.

The pioneer legend can scarcely help being conservative in its political implications. It encourages reverence for the past; it celebrates individual rather than collective or state enterprise; and it provides a classless view of society since all social and economic differences are obliterated by the generous application of the ‘pioneer’ label. In claiming that the pioneers were working for us, it puts on later generations a special obligation not to tamper with the world which the pioneers made. One of the first of the epic pioneer poems was written in 1898 by Robert Caldwell, a conservative politician in South Australia. It concluded with an attack on land reformers and socialists for wanting to deprive the pioneers of their rightful heritage. During the 1890 Maritime Strike the Argus declared ‘this country should remain what the pioneers intended it to be – a land free for every man who is willing to work, no matter whether he belongs to a union or not’.

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