In Australia, our understanding of masculinity at a popular level has been associated with the inherited mythology of the noble bushman, a mythology fondly believed to have had proletarian origins. Ned Kelly, Tom Roberts’s shearers and the Anzacs all claim a place in the tradition that Russel Ward did so much to legitimise in The Australian Legend (1958).

But in what sense was this brand of masculinity part of the dominant culture? In Making the Australian Male – a nicely ambiguous title, by the way – Martin Crotty looks at middle-class images of masculinity over precisely the same period as is usually identified with the distillation of the bush mythology and comes up with a rather different story. Starting, appropriately enough, with Australia’s fledgling public schools, Crotty extends his analysis into ‘juvenile literature’, the boy rescue movements that sprang up in the late nineteenth century, and Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts. Colonial public schools inherited a masculinity that emphasised godliness, morality, and scholastic achievement, but that was soon infiltrated by the values of athleticism and, in the twentieth century, by militarism. And, through the boy rescue movements and the Boy Scouts, this sort of hegemonic masculinity attempted to impose itself on the working class.

The articulation of this ideal of respectable manliness was informed by the persisting fear of racial degeneration, the convict stain maintaining a silent but disturbing presence in these debates. So, at a time when the bush mythology would have us believe the encounter with a harsh environment was breeding a new race, one headmaster, surveying his boys, could lament ‘the colonial habit of slouch and lounge so injurious to their physical development’. Larrikinism among the urban working-class was another symptom of ‘the boy problem’, and there was always the fear that middle-class youth was not immune to its influence.

Of particular interest is Crotty’s tracing of the rise of athleticism in public schools and the tendency for it to displace both religion and scholasticism as important in the formation of character. Walter, the colonial hero of Robert Richardson’s A Perilous Errand (1876), is described as ‘a boy with bright blue eyes, a smooth red and white complexion, that many a young lady would have envied’; he was ‘neither sturdy nor wiry, but soft and loosely knit’ with a face that ‘had a kind of sweetness in it that one sees more in girls’ faces than boys’.’ Perhaps Walter was an extreme case, but clearly he and his gentle and sensitive companions would not pass muster when the character-building qualities of sport and cadets began to dominate the public-school ethos. By contrast, Jim Linton, elder brother of Norah in Mary Grant Bruce’s twentieth-century Billabong books, is ‘a huge boy, well over six feet, broad-shouldered and powerful’, while his mate Wally (no Walter he!) is ‘tall … lean and quick and active’. Anzac was to represent an apotheosis as much for the officer class as for Ward’s ‘nomad tribe’.

While religion did appear to retreat as sport took hold of the public schools, I wonder if Crotty overemphasises the scale of this shift. Crotty himself concedes the importance of religion in Boy Scout ideology. Although he makes passing reference to muscular Christianity, he doesn’t assess the significance of the religious embrace of athleticism. But it is true enough that religion has a marginal presence in the books of Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner, though it is there at certain crucial moments, such as the death of Judy in Seven Little Australians (1894). By and large, however, one gets the impression that the characters of Bruce and Turner would find displays of godliness just a little embarrassing.

Crotty acknowledges certain points of contact between the middle-class pursuit of manliness and the popular promulgation of the bush mythology. The bush always had its conservative advocates: one has only to recall Rolf Boldrewood, Banjo Paterson and, of course, Mary Grant Bruce. The shearers didn’t have it all their own way. Billabong is a benevolently stratified society where all know their place. Another interesting example of the two traditions intersecting is provided by the popular Australian melodramas of the nineteenth century in which the gallant hero was often an English-born gentleman colonist turned squatter. Richardson’s milk-and-water Walter would not have been at home in these energetic entertainments in which middle-class morality colonised the bush.

All those years ago, Russel Ward acknowledged that mateship ‘in the personal sense’ sometimes had the character of ‘a sublimated homosexual relationship’. Crotty avoids any consideration of the homosexual underside of the English public-school tradition and the extent to which that too was transported to the colonies. The concern to stamp out effeminacy, which was part of the athleticist agenda, suggests a sensitivity to this inheritance, but there was also an alarmist campaign waged against ‘the solitary vice’ of masturbation. But the rhetoric of athleticism could itself suggest a homoerotic potential. Crotty quotes Mary Grant Bruce’s description of another of her heroes, Dick Lester, who is:

tall for his age, and straight and supple; his skin tanned a deep clear brown to the very edge of his sailor collar, and on the muscular hands and knees that had never been covered from the sun … No beauty was Dick: only an ordinary, healthy, tanned young Australian. But there was something about him to bring a leap of pride to the heart of any mother.

Dick may be ‘ordinary’ but that ‘something about him’ emanates from his body, and one might hazard that his mother was not the only one responding to the immediacy of his physical presence. That it was women writers who were often creating these middle-class models of manliness adds an interesting twist. Crotty suggests they were prisoners of a masculinist ‘Australian discursive tradition’: but perhaps one should also allow for an element of playful sexual fantasy.

One wonders if Australian masculinity will prove as elusive as the national identity with which it is so bound up. In any case, Martin Crotty’s unveiling of middle-class manliness is a pioneering work and an important contribution to the masculine quest.