"The New Republic in the South": Kipling's Australia.(Literature)(Critical Essay)

RUDYARD KIPLING visited Australia only once, for a total of thirteen days: he arrived on November 12, 1891, from Bluff in New Zealand, and left on November 25 for Colombo. Yet the country's impact on him was profound and long lasting, as his writing makes clear, and he went on revising his view of Australians, and recording them in prose and verse, for forty years after his visit. The response to Australia of one of the greatest and most controversial of Modernist artists is both revealing and surprising.

Charles Carrington, the biographer chosen by Kipling's daughter, devotes just one paragraph to Kipling in Australia:

 
   Rudyard's visit to Australia was briefer even than 
   his visit to New Zealand. He spent a few days at 
   the Melbourne Club, where the newspaper-men 
   took him up, chaffed him because Plain Tales had 
   just been banned by the public library for its 
   impropriety, and begged him to "report" the 
   Melbourne Cup, the greatest horse-race in the 
   world, for one of the papers. He would not; he 
   wrote no revelation of Australia except--ten years 
   later--the vivid poem called "Lichtenberg", and 
   that was based upon no more than a train journey 
   to Sydney and back. After three weeks in Australia 
   he left Adelaide in SS Valetta for Colombo, again 
   in the company of "General" Booth. 

Lord Birkenhead, whose biography was stopped for decades by the objections of Kipling's daughter, has even less to say about this visit:

 
   After New Zealand he made his way to Australia, 
   but his visit was brief, and his memories of 
   Australian travel "mixed up with trains transferring 
   me at unholy hours from one too-exclusive State 
   gauge to another, of enormous skies and primitive 
   refreshment rooms, where I drank hot tea and ate 
   mutton, while now and then a hot wind like the 100 
   of the Punjab boomed out of the emptiness". 

Almost all of this is simply quoting from Kipling's unreliable memories of the trip in Something of Myself.

The degree of untrustworthiness of his autobiography (left unfinished at his death and put into publishable form by his wife, who had no personal knowledge of this trip) is shown by the fact that it places the visit to Australia before the New Zealand trip. There are many other such slips of memory: Kipling says that on his trips round New Zealand he saw Pelorus Jack, "the big white-marked shark", at the entrance to Wellington Harbour, but Pelorus Jack was a greyish dolphin which frequented a stretch of water off Admiralty Bay and was never reported at Wellington. Kipling says he visited Sir Edward Grey in Hobart; though he did spend a few hours in that city, he in fact met Sir George (not Edward) Grey in Auckland.