This paper concentrates on a little-remarked sub-genre of lament for Aboriginal suffering and related poems that appeared in the 1840s, explaining their sudden appearance as partly a result of historical accident and partly of an emerging international taste, in effect a discourse, duly communicated to the colonies. I locate this discourse especially in the influential Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, who adapted the elegiac Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott, James Macpherson and Thomas Campbell into a new discourse for the lamentation of colonisation. It was this discourse that Australian laments were echoing or addressing and that the most able of the poets (Charles Harpur and Eliza Dunlop) were actively hybridising in some notable and moving contributions. The essay lastly traces a later regression in sympathy as the century wore on, an ideological rigidifying on the part of many writers, but with intriguing exceptions.
Paul Eggert is an editorial theorist, scholarly editor and book historian within the broad field of English literature. He is the editor of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (SUP, 2019), and with Chris Vening, of The Letters of Charles Harpur and His Circle (SUP, 2024). A fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1998, he served as the general editor of its Academy Editions of Australian Literature (10 vols, 1996-2007) and as chair of its English-discipline section (2009-11). He received the Centenary Medal for services to the study of literature in 2003 and, later, various awards from the Association for Documentary Editing (USA, 2005), the Society for Textual Scholarship (USA, 2011 and 2017) and, in 2022, a lifetime achievement award from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America.