One project currently in hand, the determination of the pre-Macquarie ground plan of Hobart, is quite literally that; others more metaphorical., include the recounting of the odyssey of John Boultbee, the gentleman sealer who patrolled the Tasman Sea. To which must now be added Paul de Serville’s excellent book, ending as it does with the gold rushes, the point at which popular consciousness of Victoria may be said to begin.

It is this popular consciousness which the author sets out to assail. ‘The early gentlemen are the forgotten and neglected people of Port Phillip’, he writes. Eclipsed in both public and scholarly estimation by the men of the gold rush era, it is time that the balance was redressed: ‘So much has been made of the egalitarian tradition in Australian society’, he continues, ‘that it has overshadowed the existence of an older code, that of the gentleman’.

It is, of course, a case that can very easily be overstated. Some elements of the gentlemanly code, such as restraint and moderation, were not to be readily found in Port Phillip: the gentleman-squatters of a particular district happily dubbed themselves ‘mobs’, while the tone of society in the district, as de Serville is quick to point out, at times resembled that of a vast unreformed public school. But then the code of the gentleman was itself in a state of transition, moving away from notions of birth and breeding at the beginning of the century to the point where in the middle decades those of behavior became more important.

In Port Phillip, matters were further complicated by the fact that social definition was not forthcoming from its Superintendent, La Trobe, who was both by temperament and predicament precluded from taking the necessary lead: he had no specific place in the colonial order of precedence, while his salary and residence were so diminutive that he was unable to accommodate the Governor, Gipps, when the latter paid a visit to Melbourne in 1841. Further, many gentry seemed to harbor ideas of returning ‘home’; fully one quarter of de Serville’s gentlemen by birth actually did so once the going got rough in the depression of the 1840s. That option, whether exercised or not, carried a corollary, stated unequivocally by one of the leading gentlemen of the day, William Stawell: ‘The very fact of emigrating render[s] us all equal.’

Even so, a surprising number of the appurtenances of genteel life were reproduced here in the early days of the settlement including the more fractious manifestations of horsewhipping, courts of honor, and duels. The latter appear to have been largely ritualistic – perhaps not so very different in tone from the one which occurs in a Laurie Clancy short story, the protagonists being those ersatz gentry, academics. Whatever the case, Paul de Serville effortlessly unravels the disputes involved, and convincingly explains (in case you’re wondering) why so genteel a section of society should resort to so great an extremity so readily.

He is no less competent in narrating the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Melbourne Club in 1838 (a mere three years after the city’s foundation), those surrounding its less august rival the Port Phillip Club a few years later, or the ins and outs of rival assemblies and balls. Similarly, his deft juxtaposition of the notions of ‘genteel’ and ‘respectable’, with the gradual shift in coloration from the former to the latter to produce mid-Victorian gravitas, is admirably done: the implication carried is that this change suited the sobriety and industriousness of the Scots rather better than the endearing dilettantism of the English gentry, who, for all their flamboyance, were initially much more public-spirited.

Given the small numbers involved, readers could be forgiven for wondering whether the whole subject isn’t merely a matter of reading tea leaves in a moustache cup. It is not. Victoria’s abnormally high number of public schools, or the fact that, as de Serville shows, one quarter of the entries in Burke’s Colonial Gentry (1891) came from that state (for all their dubiousness), are indications that there is a conservative pedigree which needs to be both traced and explored. In literature, it is already apparent. As the author points out, when it comes to the gentle enclave: ‘No other colony has a body of writing, stretching over more than a century, which can rival the work of Henry Kingsley, Rolf Boldrewood, Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd.’ And, significantly enough, a sense of loss regarding the simpler, uncomplicated days of Port Phillip is apparent in at least two of them.

Looking back it is easy enough to perceive a tradition, in all probability the writers concerned had an unmediated response to their materials (they usually do). But scarcely less significant is that such a tradition can now be discerned and stated fifteen years ago no one would have bothered. Conservatism meant attachment to England, and in de Serville’s case, undergraduate involvement in the Monarchist Society at Melbourne University. What this book represents, and it may be the fullest measure of the ‘new nationalism’, is a dramatic relocation of Conservative sentiment. The elegiac Port Phillip Gentlemen is the natural heir to the frivolities of the Romanov Memorial Lecture.

Oxford University Press have risen to the subject with a production as sumptuous as could be desired: an elegant typeface sits on superb paper, while the ample illustrations are crowned by the striking jacket, a scarcely known view of Melbourne by Liardet. They have also been generous in allowing the author half a dozen appendices, thereby providing scholars and others with a veritable Victorian Almanach de Gotha. (Even the list of bankruptcies is Select). The only error could find was ‘Tichborne’ with a ‘u’; even that was stylish.