of the primitive industries. Their strenuous pioneering days
were followed by the feverish excitement of the gold period and a consequent
rapid expansion of all industries. Business and politics have afforded
ready roads to success, and have absorbed the energies of the best intellects.
There has been no leisured class of cultured people to provide the atmosphere
in which literature is best developed as an art; and, until recently,
we have been content to look to the mother country for our artistic standards
and supplies. The principal literary productions of our first century
came from writers who had been born elsewhere, and naturally brought with them
the traditions and sentiments of their home country.

We have not yet had time to settle down and form any decided
racial characteristics; nor has any great crisis occurred
to fuse our common sympathies and create a national sentiment.
Australia has produced no great poet, nor has any remarkable innovation
in verse forms been successfully attempted. But the old forms
have been so coloured by the strange conditions of a new country,
and so charged with the thoughts and feelings of a vigorous,
restless democracy now just out of its adolescence, that they have
an interest and a value beyond that of perhaps technically better minor poetry
produced under English skies.

The first verses actually written and published in Australia seem to have been
the Royal Birthday Odes of Michael Robinson, which were printed as broadsides
from 1810 to 1821. Their publication in book form was announced
in `The Hobart Town Gazette' of 23rd March, 1822, but no copy of such a volume
is at present known to exist. The famous "Prologue", said to have been
recited at the first dramatic performance in Australia, on January 16th, 1796
(when Dr. Young's tragedy "The Revenge" and "The Hotel" were played
in a temporary theatre at Sydney), was for a long time attributed