SOURCE: “Is Geoffry Hamlyn a Creole Novel?”, in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, May, 1974, pp. 269-76.

In the following essay, Croft perceives Geoffry Hamlyn as a study of English outsiders in Australia who, rather than adapting to their new environment, exert their own culture upon it.

When Henry Kingsley wrote Geoffry Hamlyn¹ he expressed in it a view of Australian society which was still valid until the Second World War. That view was of a society divided culturally between those who followed in speech, behaviour, and ideology the values of traditional English society, and those who had adopted the differing manners of indigenous white society. Such a division was not wholly the product of the expatriate and the native-born as there were many native-born who followed the English models and probably a number of expatriates of whom the converse was true. I think it is obvious that the...