In September 1851, a gushing account of Charles Harpur, “our native poet”, appeared under the heading, “Native Literature”, in the Sydney-based liberal newspaper, Empire. Empire’s editor, the future “father of Federation” Henry Parkes, understood Harpur to be on the verge of publishing a book of poems. By way of advertorial he printed Harpur’s “On Completing ‘The Wild Bee of Australia’”, a sonnet in which the poet as worker bee ruminates on a book that “like a hive, with love is stor’d”. Exploiting the honeybee as a familiar symbol of sweet sociability and domestic labour, this conceit served well Parkes’ and Harpur’s line that the literary productions of “native Australians” (i.e., second-generation setter-colonists) were indices of the colony’s permanence and colonists’ civility, and thus evidence of their capacity for self-government.
Although this book never eventuated, for several years beforehand Harpur had published poems in various organs, primarily The People’s Advocate and New South Wales Vindicator, under the heading “Morsels from Charles Harpur’s ‘Wild Bee of Australia’”. In this paper, I read these poems, overwhelmingly expressive of Harpur’s liberalism and proto-nationalism, in relation to the trope of the wild bee. Almost as soon as it was introduced to the colony in 1822 the European honeybee escaped the constraints of human management. It became, for Harpur and others, a convenient symbol of European nativisation in Australia; in its “wildness”, a mascot for freedom from oppressive regulation, and, as a bee, freighted with the associations of sociable virtue and sweetness brought to bear in recent British poetic treatments of bees. Ultimately, I ask, how did the wild bee with which Harpur identifies himself relate to the “wild white man”, a key trope (as Jonathan Dunk writes) in the nativisation fetish of settler-colonial Australian literature.
Alexis Harley is the Graduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe. There are two main strands to her research: the first of these, which grew from her doctoral project on the autobiographies of nineteenth-century atheists, agnostics and apostates, involves autobiography and life writing more broadly; the second considers the interplay of literary and aesthetic culture and natural history in the long nineteenth century. She is the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self (Bucknell, 2014), and the co-editor of Bees, Science and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2024), with Christopher Harrington.