Literary monuments (even if less visited than Australia’s Gothic cathedrals) are represented in the book’s first three chapters: the novels of Rolf Boldrewood and Joseph Furphy; those of Rosa Praed, ‘Tasma’ (Jessie Couvreur), Catherine Martin, Ada Cambridge, and Henry Handel Richardson; the verse of Marcus Clarke and Adam Lindsay Gordon. Gordon, who, as prototype of the daring colonial horseman, has impeccable biographical credentials for the mantle of chivalry, may at times seem the follower of McGonagall rather than of Tennyson, as here:

What ho! Art thou drunk, Sir Norman?
Has the wine made thy pale cheek red?
Now, I swear by Odin and Thor, man,
Already I count thee dead.

But his best work is technically proficient and illustrative of a medievalism that goes beyond the picturesque.

D’Arcens’s account of Gordon’s work, which pays careful attention to his critical reception, is one of the highlights of Old Songs in the Timeless Land. Her analysis of Gordon extends the arguments about the dominance of an Anglo-Norman model of racial purity as source of an ‘Australian’ identity, as this is applied to the fiction of Boldrewood, Clarke, and others. (Colonial writers were, needless to say, often comically ahistorical in their racial typologies; the obfuscating shadows cast by Walter Scott extended far beyond Britain.

The chapter on medievalist writing by colonial women begins with Rosa Praed’s intriguing memoir of an Australian homestead drawing room, with its slab walls adorned by a seventeenth-century Dutch altarpiece figuring an allegory of Time. The image is hybrid-medieval, of course, like so much of the literature examined in the study, but the argument about a ‘backwards-forwards’ historic sensibility resonates throughout the account of other, fictional, writing in this chapter. Colonial writing by women has received extensive, if belated, critical analysis, but D’Arcens is right to focus on the need for special treatment of its neo-medieval aspects. Of particular note is her discussion of ‘Tasma’s’ Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill (1889), a particularly suggestive, and well-written, scrutiny of the vexed relation between Aesthetic doctrines and the material realities of nouveau-riche colonial life, which anticipates Martin Boyd’s writing about Gothic architectural extravagance in Melbourne. D’Arcens, like Boyd, subjects material medievalism to a cool gaze; surely it is more than ‘strongly tempting’ to read Catherine Martin’s portrait of the fictional Godolphin House in Adelaide as a satire of the Arts and Crafts excesses of the Barr-Smiths’ Torrens House. Curiously absent from a meticulously researched study that mentions ‘the neglect of female-authored medievalism’ is any reference to Anna Maria Bunn’s epistolary novel The Guardian (oddly insouciant in its treatment of the Gothic theme of incest), the first work published in Australia by a woman (1838).

The final two chapters survey two bodies of work that are so diverse as to be almost intractable: a vast mass of largely ephemeral verse, much of it published in broadsheets and journals, and a range of dramatic texts from Shakespearean productions to burlesque. The chapter on popular verse – appropriately entitled ‘The Drivel of Our Fathers’ – presents a convincing case for its treatment of medievalism as a way of understanding conceptions of emergent national identity, but the reader may be excused for questioning the assertion that there is ‘an enormous trove, both of precious gems and of tawdry trinkets, yet to be uncovered’. There is a scarcity of ‘precious gems’ in the material quoted. Valuable as Chapter Five’s survey of drama may be, the author’s conjectures about reception are questionable, as for example in her attempts to locate settler anxieties about Aboriginal revenge and the penal system in melodramas by Conrad Knowles and Edward Geoghegan. These suggestions about possible audience responses require, at the very least, a return to the model of the Derridean ‘trace’, invoked promisingly in the Introduction, but then not revisited.

Despite some errors (for example, ‘Laura Romsbotham’) and awkward expression (the now near-ubiquitous ‘testament to’), this is a valuable contribution to an important area of historicist inquiry. Louise D’Arcens and her fellow researchers will no doubt continue their work by extending it to twentieth-century texts. Jessica Anderson’s 1978 novel Tirra Lirra by the River, with its layered references both to Tennyson-mediated chivalric allusion and its brilliant relocating of Aestheticism to a post-colonial setting, is one of several novels that lend themselves to focused ‘medievalist’ interpretation.