accepted land grants (Martin 1973). Or, as one voice of 1825 stated,‘when they
become free they generally begin business’(Dyster 2007, p. 13).
But to Ward a deeper foundation of fraternity lay in the material circum-
stances of the new country. To Ward, the strength of fraternity sprang not
from ‘socialist or collectivist theories’but from‘conditions of Australian
geography and history’(Ward 1967, p. 13). Australia’s harsh frontiers had
taught the‘virtue of cooperation’. If all frontiers are harsh, including that
of the USA, then, in Ward’s contention, the arable agriculture of the USA
produced a‘peasant’individualism of log cabins and sodbusters, while the
pastoral agriculture of Australia produced a‘nomad’collectivism of canvas
camps and bushmen. In Australia the especially abundant land‘diminished
individualistic tendencies by diminishing competition for land’, and consti-
tuted‘sundering distances’that taught men‘to help one another’(Ward 1965,
p. 9). Following Frederick Jackson Turner, it was the frontier—the most idio-
syncratic and most extreme environment in any New World society—and not
the globalized cities that was the forcing ground of the characteristic national
type. To Ward, the epitome of the Australian frontier was the landless shearer
of the pastoral outback.
Ward’s account may appear to be wholly apiece of the one-dimensional
materialism of the pre-war Marxism that he would have absorbed at the
Hunters Hill Communist Group; the only creative features of human exist-
ence are technology and geography (Ward 1954).
But in Ward’s telling the material also fermented an intangible but active
agent, culture, that ensorcelled the broader public. To Ward, the palpable
Australian reality was not as important as the Australian Legend. The bush
proletarian—the shearer of the nineteenth-century reappearing in the world
wars in the form of the Australian Digger—came to constitute an almost
Jungian archetype for Australians, city bred and rural alike, serving as an
object, not so much for literal emulation, but for admiration (Ward 1976).
The key vehicle disseminating this image was, in his opinion, the nineteenth-
century‘bush ballad’, which he championed inThe Australian Legend.
It is troubling for Ward’s purpose that bush ballads have an‘inauthenticity’
in origin. The best-known bush ballad—The Wild Colonial Boy—seems not to
have originated in Australia, and was probably introduced to it by a global
music industry (Anderson 2002). And whatever the ballads’origins, their hold
on the imagination of the populace was feeble. The denizens of Australia’s
cities in the last decade of the nineteenth century crowded to hear Mendels-
sohn’sElijah—or the Georgia Minstrels—not bush balladeers.^12 And, despite
his partly rural upbringing, Ward himself only became acquainted with the
(^12) In 1967 a historian closely questioned seventy-five octogenarians and nonagenarians about
their youth in 1890s Brisbane: not one could recall singing an Australian song (Lawson 1980).
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism