ON 1 JANUARY 1901, at the beginning of a new century, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed a political entity by the federation of six separate British colonies. Queen Victoria's formal assent to the necessary legislation of the Westminster Parliament was one of her last official acts; she died on 22 January. For all the tyranny of 20,000 kilometres distance, the impress of the monarch on her far-flung colony was evident. Two of the states of the Commonwealth, Victoria and Queensland, had been named for her. When the Port Phillip settlement separated from New South Wales in 1851, it became Victoria; in 1859, when the Moreton Bay settlement also hived off, its first governor announced “a fact which I know you will all hear with delight–Queensland, the name selected for this new Colony, was entirely the happy thought and inspiration of Her Majesty herself!” (Cilento and Lack 161)

While monarchism in Australia has survived into the twenty-first century, such sycophantic devotion to the Crown and the Motherland as that expressed by Sir George Bowen is now relatively uncommon. Perhaps its last gasp was heard as recently as 1963 when conservative Prime Minister R. G. Menzies on the occasion of the second visit to Australia of a reigning sovereign, Queen Victoria's great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, intoned a couplet by the Elizabethan poet Barnabe Googe: “I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die.” Some claimed that even the Queen looked embarrassed. Thanks largely to successive migrations from Europe and Asia, especially since World War II, Australia's population is no longer overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic–one factor among many generating pressure for Australia to become a republic. Yet most Australians go about their daily lives untroubled by the consciousness that the Governor-General is still the Queen's representative in Australia, and her head is still on Australia's currency. A century on from the coincidence of Federation and the death of Queen Victoria, such vestiges of empire exemplify the paradoxes of Victorian afterlives in Australia. Influences work intricately and intriguingly, and some of the Victorian afterlives that are evident still in the twenty-first century are almost subliminal, others more tangible. The tensions in play are nicely captured in John Thieme's phrase, “colonial complicity and postcolonial contestation” (103).

Australia is a Victorian creation. Statistics of population growth alone make the point. When Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the population of Australia was estimated at 135,000; at her death, it was 3.373 million, concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. It is unsurprising that Victorian vestiges are most readily discernible in the built environment. For a start, there are relatively few pre-Victorian structures extant; white settlement of Australia dates from 1788 and the arrival of the First Fleet with its convict cargo. The Victorian foundations of a number of Australian cities are still evident–and bear in mind that “Melbourne: A Victorian Community Overseas,” was one of Asa Briggs's Victorian Cities. He described it as “one of the most interesting of the cities of the Empire” because of the rapidity of its growth and the simplicity of its ground plan, a set of grids laid out from its foundation in 1837 (285; see also 52). Briggs found notable Melbourne's low urban density and rapid suburbanization, and took pleasure in the preservation there of a range of buildings in a variety of styles: public buildings, domestic ones; grand and modest; classically influenced, Gothic Revival. Many were ornamented extravagantly, mansions and working-class terraces alike often using decorative cast iron panels to form balustrades on verandahs and terraces (originally ballast in ships coming from Europe); “iron lace” came to be distinctive of much Victorian building in Australia.

Many notable Victorian structures survive, like Melbourne's Exhibition Building of 1880 in a style referencing Paxton's Crystal Palace, but in plaster rather than glass; and the subdued Italianate central structure of the Queen Victoria Market, surrounded by extensive covered areas still used principally to sell foodstuffs. I teach at the University of Sydney, but protest that my reasons for singling out the Victorian Gothic main buildings–the east front was completed in 1857– are not simply partisan. The Great Hall is a copy of Westminster Hall, still described as “magnificent” and “the finest Gothic Revival building in Australia” (Freeland 123). Here is a characteristic transmission of English influences; the architect, Edmund Blacket, was a conduit for the vision of Augustus Pugin and the Gothic Revival style. Blacket was not the only Australian architect working in a Puginesque manner; where Blacket's connection was largely Anglican, that of William Wardell (who had in fact studied with Pugin) was largely Roman Catholic.

Moreover, Pugin himself had strong connections with Australia, particularly with Tasmania, where his friend Robert William Willson was Bishop of Hobart Town from 1842 to 1866, and as a consequence what is claimed to be “the sole coherent collection of Pugin's works outside Britain and Ireland” is in Tasmania (Andrews 38). Brian Andrews curated a major exhibition, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes, shown at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 14 September-10 November 2002, and subsequently in a number of mainland locations. The splendour of Blacket's Sydney University designs invokes without qualification a whole set of European traditions. In some cases, however, Australian churches were built adhering to Pugin's architectural plans, locally modified with his permission. In equipping Willson for his distant diocese Pugin personally customized his existing designs for ecclesiastical architecture, furniture, and ornament, cognizant of the likelihood that there would be limited funds and rudimentary workmanship available to realize his concepts. This pragmatism extended to designs for “four very plain and easily replicated headstones” along with such items as vestments and altar vessels (Andrews 55).

A secular analogy to this vignette of “Pugin at the Antipodes” is provided by another medieval revivalist. As I complete this essay, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is showing Morris & Co., an exhibition based on the major collection in the Art Gallery of South Australia of artifacts from the workshops of William Morris (18 August–6 November 2005). The bulk of the collection was donated by Morris & Co.'s biggest customer in Australia, Adelaide's Barr Smith family, who over the period 1884–1929 furnished seven huge homes for three generations almost entirely by purchase from the firm. Paradoxically, these objects have become museum pieces, while those made according to Pugin's design mostly continue in use. The Pugin and Morris examples also represent the revaluation of Victorian style in the last several decades. Briggs wrote as an apologist for Victorian extravagance and elaborateness as an alternative to classical elegance and restraint. Now, in Australia as elsewhere, fuller appreciation of sociological contexts and technological achievements has displaced aesthetically based prejudice against Victorian style (or styles). Renovation of buildings no longer suitable for their original purpose is a practical homage that is exemplified by the fact that the venue for the Morris exhibition is a converted late-nineteenth-century electricity-generating plant.

A different kind of vestige is evident in the persistence in vernacular Australian construction of a Victorian invention. Again, the medium is metal, this time galvanized iron. A process for applying a non-rusting zinc coating to thin sheets of corrugated puddled steel was patented in England in 1837: galvanized iron was imported in quantity from the 1850s when an influx of population with the gold rushes made it necessary to build cheaply and quickly, especially in remote locations. It was widely used, often but not only for roofs; many sheds, barns and other such buildings, and occasionally dwellings, mainly in the outback, were made from it. Partly because these were utilitarian structures, durability was not a prime concern; surviving examples are accorded significance as authentic vernacular. In a piquant revolution of fortune's wheel, in the late twentieth century galvanized iron was used as a material of choice by one of the country's most distinguished architects, Glenn Murcutt, whose practice is mainly in domestic building.

To turn to less tangible vestiges, there are active sites of interrogation of Victorianism in academic circles in Australia. For literary and art historians, “the Victorian period” is still a concept to be reckoned and wrestled with, the key question having to do with the relevance of the term “Victorian” (meaning English Victorian) in Australian contexts. The point at issue is well made via a consideration of Australia's part in the rehabilitation of Pre-Raphaelite painting that began around 1960. Daniel Thomas of the Art Gallery of New South Wales curated the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Art that toured Australia in 1962, which was followed by two further exhibitions at the same gallery, both curated by Renée Free: Victorian Olympians in 1975 and The Victorian Social Conscience in 1976. A more recent and much larger exhibition curated by Angus Trumble, Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, was shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 7 December 2001–3 February 2002, and then toured elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand. In a review of this exhibition, Joan Kerr comments with satisfaction on changes of taste in the past forty years and went on to challenge “the weird proviso that Australia applies to Victorian art exhibitions: that they may contain works by artists from any location except the region mounting the exhibition” (as she wryly observed, a condition that if applied in Birmingham would disqualify Burne-Jones) (61). She contends, with force and justice, that “Well-known Australian paintings like McCubbin's A Bush Burial or Longstaff's Burke and Wills not only would have been perfectly at home in the exhibition, they would have transformed it” (61).

The title, A Bush Burial 1890 (Figure 11), indicates the subject and implies the emotional register of McCubbin's 1890 painting. Kerr's point is that the narrative of the burial in a heavily wooded and apparently remote setting would be legible to European viewers, as is the narrative of Millais's “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” (1892, included in Love and Death, from the Auckland Art Gallery), in which a male figure is vanishing into a snowy landscape leaving a woman nursing a baby in the foreground. But the Australian vegetation and light make the scene in A Bush Burial exotic, at once intensifying and distancing the scene for a northern hemisphere viewer. To such a gaze, the Australian painting is disorienting, offering a variant on recognized tropes, in Thieme's terms, complicity in some respects, contestation in others. Such a capacity to work with and against recognized European conventions is at the heart of the debate, as postcolonialists well know. Kerr's contention is that the richest understanding is to be derived from the fullest set of contexts: for A Bush Burial, both English narrative and Australian topography (of the landscape as strangely beautiful) and iconography (of the bush as inimical). The argument is one which in both literature and art is conducted between national and international perspectives, variously theorized by many critics. In Australia currently, interesting work is being done by colleagues at the University of Queensland, Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly notably, who understand the circulation of cultural capital as closing the gap between colony and metropolis in an attainment of simultaneity, a sense of the international felt locally–emerging most strongly in work on international, commercial popular entertainment.

Frederick McCubbin. A Bush Burial. Oil on canvas, 1890. Photograph courtesy of the Geelong Art Gallery, Australia.

The questions with which it is now most illuminating to engage have to do with re-interpreting canonical Victorian texts. The contemporary novelist Peter Carey has been imaginatively confronting Victorian vestiges in several novels, to my mind most powerfully in Oscar and Lucinda, published in 1988, the year of the Bicentenary of white settlement. Carey performs a version of what Kerr is demanding, situating national texts in relation to the English canon, while keeping the reader aware of the present. Like Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), it is a novel which writes back to Victorian texts (or other versions of the Victorian period). The titular hero, Oscar Hopkins, is written in relation to Edmund Gosse's Father and Son; his counterpart, Lucinda Leplastrier, is written in relation both to George Eliot and to one of the great Victorian novelist's self-projections, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (Harris 112). But Lucinda, the Australian girl, does not drown as Maggie does (in some readings because her author could not visualize a future other than death by drowning). Oscar, however, does drown; he cannot survive in the New World. With the end of Oscar and Lucinda “her real life could begin,” and Lucinda becomes “famous, or famous at least amongst students of the Australian labour movement”(506). George Eliot bulks large in Oscar and Lucinda. She never appears, though Carey provides her with a letter describing her meeting with Lucinda. This is appropriate because she is in every sense a woman of letters. Yet even George Eliot's power, including the power to dispose of her characters, is displaced in this re-writing.

In a later novel, Jack Maggs (1997), Carey tackles the ultimate narrative of transportation to and transformation in the colonies, Dickens's Great Expectations, in a complex set of intertextualities that involves narratives of Dickens's life and avatars of Dickens himself. More explicitly in this novel than in Oscar and Lucinda, Carey backs a concept of an Arcadian Australia, where people flourish, transcending the dark stain of Australia as a penal settlement–complicity and contestation indeed. Yet he is also showing the folly of looking for a single authoritative interpretation, especially of myths of origins. Here I think he offers us, entertainingly and earnestly both, tuition in how to live with Victorian vestiges.