SOURCE: “Kingsley's Geoffry Hamlyn and the Art of Landscape,” in Southerly, Vol. 37, No. 3, September, 1977, pp. 274-99.

In the following essay, Dixon interprets Geoffry Hamlyn within the symbolic and aesthetic contexts of landscape art, describing the work as a historical novel and a “sympathetic social document.”

When writing on “Geoffry Hamlyn and its Australian Setting” in 1963, J. C. Horner was interested in explaining the quality of Kingsley's descriptions of the Australian landscape with reference to the demands of the novel's genre.¹ He wished to correct the “surviving attitude” to the book as a “conventional saga of colonial life, written for the English market”, and asserted unequivocally that “It is not a social treatise, or a travel book, or emigration propaganda disguised as a romance, as many of its predecessors were”. “Other novelists”, Horner suggested, “whose primary aim was not literary, had attempted to give their works cohesion and interest...