SOURCE: Davison, Grame. “Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context of the Australian Legend.” In Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, edited by John Carroll, pp. 109-30. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Davison provides the cultural context for the Australian legend of the bush, a myth consolidated by the mostly urban-dwelling writers of Sydney's Bulletin during the 1890s.

‘It was I’, recalled Henry Lawson in his years of fame, ‘who insisted on the capital B for “Bush”’.¹ Lawson, as it happened, was not the first writer to adopt the convention and his pursuit of the bush idea was only one strand in a broader movement during the 1890s to make the rural interior a focus of Australian ideals. Though the bush, with and without a capital B, had figured in earlier writing, it remained for an expatriate Englishman, Francis Adams, in his...