What is the significance and origins of the bush legend and other images in early Australian literature?

During the course of Australias history, many historians, writers, poets and others have attempted to put their digit on and establish an authentic or real Australian individuation for the relatively young population. One of the important and prolific images or myths is the Bush legend. The furnish legend has been a theme of ample debate over the years and two historians who have participated in this debate are Russel hold in his Australian Legend compose in 1958 and re-printed in 1982, and Graeme Davisons Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend, written in 1978 and re-printed in 1982. This essay will outline Ward and Davisons arguments as to the origins of the crotch hair legend and also compare and blood line the two arguments.

In Wards analysis of the bush legend, he states that the bush invention grew out of the material experience of labour and leisure in the bush. Ward states that the set-back and most significant bush workers were the con games and ex-convicts as their lives and previous lives worn out(p) doing time harboured similar attitudes to those found amid bush workers. Partly due to this convict beginning of the bush workers, the social class was definitely cut back class.



The bush legend according to Ward describes an itinerant unpolished proletariat and a pastoral proletariat and therefore the ethnical influences were upwards from the lowest strata of society and outwards from the interior (p. 189). According to Wards argument, the features and characteristics of the bush legend were already present in 1851, unlike Davisons view of the bush legends origins of the 1880s. Wards bush legend was also predominantly masculine as women were scarce in the outback and invisible in the bush legend.

Wards main point was that the economic, geographical and climatic conditions of the outback brought...

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