At a Sydney rally in support of the federation of its colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1897, one speaker proclaimed what was in effect an Australian version of manifest destiny. Edmund Barton (‘Toby Tosspot’ to his foes), who would become the first prime minister of that Commonwealth on 1 January 1901, grandly avowed that ‘For the first time in history, we have a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation.’ Local poets had been hailing such a prospect for decades, in windy, idealistic verse. The 1890s had seen – largely by means of the Sydney weekly magazine, the Bulletin – the rise to authority of some of the leading proto-nationalist, and still among the most enduring, figures in Australian literary history: Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Joseph Furphy principal among them.

Such an emphasis on nation-making, particularly in the conflation of political and literary chronologies, would colour the writing of Australia’s literary history for generations. Indeed there were earlier instances. G. B. Barton’s two volumes of literary history were among the New South Wales offerings at the international exhibition of 1867 in Paris. Barton intended that they should be an earnest indication of the ‘progress’ so far achieved by colonial writers and colonial culture.

In the 20th century, organic metaphors flourished in lieu of literary historical analysis: ‘The Novel Begins to Grow Up’ (Ewers, 1955); How Australian Literature Grew (Heddle and Millington, 1962); from ‘a period of infancy’ towards ‘national maturity’ (T. Inglis Moore, 1971). Coincidentally, there was an acrid critical division over the canon of Australian literature, and what kind of development it actually had to show, between radical nationalists and universalists, or cosmopolitans. Often these adversaries were poets and novelists, whose own work evaded such categories, even as they contributed to the melodramatic contest for the threatened corpus of the national literature.