Tip de rendimiento 1

Decade

l46

School of Arts. The Colonial Literary Journal, while agreeing with Carmichael that, '»The name of BIRKBECK, should he a household word in the family of every mechanic", doubted whether the Sydney institution wap the best means of imparting "sound practical know­ ledge — such knowledge as can be grafted in, and made subservient to the wants of our daily avocations ... No man [the Journal added] can acquire a mastery over any art merely by the information he may derive from popular lectures ...." The Journal deplored the absence of classes while admitting that "by some strange and unaccountable fatality" the classes that had been attempted were "blighted as it were in the bud, and — perished" for lack of popular support. The Institute’s library, however, "afforded the materials by which the ardent and untiring mind’T might "learn to grapple with the diffi­ culties of [aj profession", and where a man might "work the crude designs of his brain into symmetry and beauty ....". [Dr. Lang, while not wishing to find fault with the appropriation of money for

the maintenance and support of the Sydney Institute, did not share Bourke’s and Carmichael’s high opinion of "this m o d e m panacea for popular ignorance ...." He maintained "that the surest and most effectual mode of permanently elevating the great mass of the commu­ nity of this colony in intellectual attainment, is to raise a few of iterative youth to the highest elevation of learning and science'” by subsidizing high schools and colleges fsuch as his Australian

College] rather than leaving the higher branches of learning "to the mercantile principle .... of demand and supply; conceiving that

those who were desirous of attaining a higher elevation on the hill of science, being generally of a wealthier class of society, should be left to pay for more costly conveyance ...."

Despite widespread evidence of colonial intellectual aspira- tions^Vice-regal personages, distinguished visitors, judges, the 63. Colonial Literary Journal. 11 July, 1844» P« 42.

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64a. Quoted Michael Cannon, Who’s Master? Who’s Man? p. 82 P /+7.

higher lureancracy and the intellectual elite of the colonies -- preachers, teachers and editors -- continued to cry out against what they considered the gross materialism of the general run of colonists, native-born and immigrant alike, "The whole popu­ lation, poor and rich, are (sic) bent on acquiring wealth

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1

If

of her dominion and empire". Standing in the rain at the south­ east c o m e r of Collins and William Streets in the infant Melbourne the newly arrived Superintendent, Charles Joseph La Trobe, replied to an Address of Welcome with added warning words:

It wap not by individual aggrandisement, by the poss­ ession of numerous flocks and herds, or by costly acres, that the people shall secure for the country enduring prosperity and happiness, but by the acqui­ sition and maintenance of sound,religious, and moral institutions, without which no country can become truly great.^

There was no lack of local pundits to underline this sort of Established Whiggism. "There is perhaps, on thiiwide earth, no place where the god mammon has so firmly fixed his throne," insist­ ed the secular utilitarian Australian. "... men seem slaves,

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dragged at the chariot-wheels of Mammon". In the Chronicle, the Catholic and Romantic W. A. Duncan declared that "in Mew South Wales, wealth instead of being an index of superior class or talent, was for the most part the companion of ignorance and assumption, and often brutality and ignorance". The Reverend David Mackenzie,

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1838

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Decade 148

who taught classics at Dr. Lang’s Australian College, declared, ”11 othing is considered disgraceful here hut want of money.”

While the musician Isaac Dathan, in his odd publication The South­ ern Euphrosyne, quoted with approval the following verses by ”F. J. M.” describing the author as ’’one of those rarae aves we some-

Xo times find in Australia — a Gentleman” :

A sordid spirit rules this barren land! Do love of art, nor worship of the wise, Do moral virtues, nor domestic ties Dor any sense of greatness doth expand

The sterile minds that seek this distant strand! E ’en at the festal board, when warmed with wine The talk is still of flocks and fatted Kine, Wool, tallow-oil and stations weakly manned. Methinks that Mammon here has rear’d her throne And that all men walk within his willing yoke All, self-involved and wrapt as with a cloud In selfishness and sensual thoughts, that own Do Law of moral life, no high desire

Dor any touch of love that self doth not inspire!

According to other critics, many of the middling classes lack­ ed what Sydney College committeemen called ’’personal ambition for honourable distinction” and a laudable desire to ’’elevate the char­ acter” of the country ”of which so large a portion is theirs . ...” ^ For every James Martin and Thomas Drown there were scores, lamented

the Reverend William Woolls, who plunged ’’into scenes of vice and dissipation which eventually undermine the character and reputation, until at length they in some degree resemble the Roman youth in the days of Catiline” . Allowing for clerical exaggeration of normal male transgression there seems some point in the reverend critic’s attribution of shortcomings in the products of colonial advanced edu­ cation to ’’the culpability of parents in removing their children from school before they’ve acquired a competent knowledge of moral and

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3

cellany .... (Sydney,

1848