Literature and Politics

This paper will address the role of self-identifying ‘bohemians’ engaged in creative symbolic work as radical agents of cultural and political change in Australia. My PhD thesis explored the idea of an Australian bohemian tradition composed of a succession of youthful ‘pushes’ stretching back past the punk and hippy counter-cultures, the Sydney Libertarians and Melbourne Drift of the 1950s, the modernist avant-gardes of the 1930s and 40s, to the jazz age libertines of the 1920s and the writers and visual artists associated with the Bulletin and Heidelberg schools of the last decades of the nineteenth century. While making a show of their antipathy to bourgeois society, Australian bohemians have had to make a living in commercial art markets, and have tended to favour the symbolic subversion of the carnivalesque to overt political rebellion. However, at different times, notably the 1890s, the 1930s and late 1960s/70s a significant minority of bohemian writers, journalists, visual artist and performers in Australia have made a stand as political activists, contributing their talents to radical causes as varied as the labour movement, socialist and anarchist groups, the communist party and New Left leaning counter-cultures. Why did some bohemian artists turn to radical politics, what was their contribution and what problems did they confront crossing from the cultural to political sphere? How did bohemian ‘cultural activists’ reconcile the carnivalesque, individualist, pluralist and transgressive qualities of their identity and subcultures with political imperatives of top down control, collectivism, solidarity, discipline, respectability and homogeneous notions such as class, race and nation. To answer these questions I will draw on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin and focus on the contribution of bohemian writers and journalists such as Henry Lawson, Victor Daley and J. F. Archibald to the political ferment of the 1890s. While journalism, poetry, black and white graphic art and pamphleteering played an important role in mobilising rural and urban workers and winning legitimacy for the union movement and the new Labor Party, the marriage of bohemianism and politics could be vexed.

Dr Tony Moore lectures in Communications and Media Studies at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University. His doctorate in history examined Australia’s bohemian tradition. His first book was The Barry McKenzie Movies (Currency), and in 2007 Tony was awarded the NSW History Fellowship to write Death or Liberty, a history of political prisoners transported to the Australian colonies. He writes regularly on communications, history and politics in the press and scholarly publications and was a documentary maker at ABC Television. Tony is currently Series Editor for Cambridge’s new Australian Encounters series.