"The New Republic in the South": Kipling's Australia.(Literature)(Critical Essay)

RUDYARD KIPLING visited Australia only once, for a total of thirteen days: he arrived on November 12, 1891, from Bluff in New Zealand, and left on November 25 for Colombo. Yet the country's impact on him was profound and long lasting, as his writing makes clear, and he went on revising his view of Australians, and recording them in prose and verse, for forty years after his visit. The response to Australia of one of the greatest and most controversial of Modernist artists is both revealing and surprising.

Charles Carrington, the biographer chosen by Kipling's daughter, devotes just one paragraph to Kipling in Australia:

 
   Rudyard's visit to Australia was briefer even than 
   his visit to New Zealand. He spent a few days at 
   the Melbourne Club, where the newspaper-men 
   took him up, chaffed him because Plain Tales had 
   just been banned by the public library for its 
   impropriety, and begged him to "report" the 
   Melbourne Cup, the greatest horse-race in the 
   world, for one of the papers. He would not; he 
   wrote no revelation of Australia except--ten years 
   later--the vivid poem called "Lichtenberg", and 
   that was based upon no more than a train journey 
   to Sydney and back. After three weeks in Australia 
   he left Adelaide in SS Valetta for Colombo, again 
   in the company of "General" Booth. 

Lord Birkenhead, whose biography was stopped for decades by the objections of Kipling's daughter, has even less to say about this visit:

 
   After New Zealand he made his way to Australia, 
   but his visit was brief, and his memories of 
   Australian travel "mixed up with trains transferring 
   me at unholy hours from one too-exclusive State 
   gauge to another, of enormous skies and primitive 
   refreshment rooms, where I drank hot tea and ate 
   mutton, while now and then a hot wind like the 100 
   of the Punjab boomed out of the emptiness". 

Almost all of this is simply quoting from Kipling's unreliable memories of the trip in Something of Myself.

The degree of untrustworthiness of his autobiography (left unfinished at his death and put into publishable form by his wife, who had no personal knowledge of this trip) is shown by the fact that it places the visit to Australia before the New Zealand trip. There are many other such slips of memory: Kipling says that on his trips round New Zealand he saw Pelorus Jack, "the big white-marked shark", at the entrance to Wellington Harbour, but Pelorus Jack was a greyish dolphin which frequented a stretch of water off Admiralty Bay and was never reported at Wellington. Kipling says he visited Sir Edward Grey in Hobart; though he did spend a few hours in that city, he in fact met Sir George (not Edward) Grey in Auckland.

It is worth getting the details of Kipling's Australian visit clear, and Australian and New Zealand newspapers paid enough attention to the young visiting celebrity (he was twenty-five at the time) for us to follow him day by day. Having (by his father's account) exhausted himself by his prodigious output in 1890 and 1891, he set off on a sea voyage round the world to recover his nerves. He left Southampton on August 22, 1891, for Cape Town, and spend a fortnight there (not "the greater part of September and October", as Charles Carrington's biography has it).

On September 25 he left Cape Town for Hobart and Wellington on the Shaw Savill liner SS Doric, reaching Hobart on October 13 and leaving without delay for Wellington. In later years Hobart would feature in his writing only in the poem he called "Song of the Cities", in which sixteen cities Of Empire are given a quatrain each. Hobart's is:

 
   Man's love first found me; man's hate made me Hell; 
      For my babes' sake I cleansed those infamies. 
   Earnest for leave to live and labour well, 
      God flung me peace and ease. 

Clearly Kipling saw Hobart as the backwater it was in 1891, but equally clearly he had taken the trouble to learn a good deal about its history.

Arriving in Wellington on October 18, he discovered on October 19 that his plans to visit Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa and then go back to Africa for a leisurely tour of the continent were impracticable because of the steamship timetables. He decided instead to visit Australia before going on to India. On November 6, after nineteen days of touring New Zealand, he left Bluff for Melbourne, travelling in company with General Booth of the Salvation Army and taking six days to cross the stormy Tasman Sea. On November 7, five days before he arrived in Melbourne, the Age heralded his approach by reprinting an interview with him from the Otago Daily Times.

KIPLING ARRIVED in Melbourne on Thursday November 12 in a gale, which he later memorialised in the lines he gave Melbourne in 'Song of the Cities":

 
   Greeting! Nor fear nor favour won us place, 
      Got between greed of gold and dread of drouth, 
   Loud-voiced and reckless as the wild tide-race 
      That whips our harbour-mouth! 

He stayed at the Oriental Hotel in Collins Street, and soon after his arrival gave interviews to journalists from the Melbourne Argus and the Age. Contrary to his remark in Something of Myself that he was …