SOURCE: Wilding, Michael. “‘Weird Melancholy’: Inner and Outer Landscapes in Marcus Clarke's Stories.” In Studies in Classic Australian Fiction, pp. 9-31. Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1997.

In the following essay, Wilding follows the link between Marcus Clarke's descriptions of natural settings and his likely drug-induced exploration of internal landscapes in his short fiction.

When Hamilton Mackinnon collected Clarke's stories in The Austral Edition of the Selected Works of Marcus Clarke (1890),¹ he placed as the first item of the ‘Australian Tales and Sketches’ section two pages entitled ‘Australian Scenery’. This justly famous passage, originally part of the text accompanying reproductions of two paintings, Louis Buvelot's ‘Waterpool Near Coleraine’ and Nicholas Chevalier's ‘The Buffalo Ranges’ in Photographs of the Pictures in the National Gallery, Melbourne (1874), had been incorporated into Clarke's preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon's poems in 1876 and frequently reprinted.² It was certainly not a tale...