Australia's trail-blazing first novelist - John Lang by Sean Doyle

This book is about an Australian - John George Lang, who was born in Parramatta in 1816 and went on to be educated in England. He was an author, a journalist and barrister.

Sean Doyle charts the life journey of John Lang. It is a story of the gain and loss of fortune. While he was a brilliant scholar, John Lang’s personality was viewed as troublesome and this was to be his ultimate undoing.

When John Lang returned to New South Wales in 1841, he was admitted as a barrister to the Supreme Court but soon found it necessary to relocate to Calcutta. There he moved into the world of journalism and literary works. His published works included nine novels. John Lang died in Mussoorie (India) in 1864 aged 47.

John Lang is painted as a complicated man who was polarising to say the least. Sean Doyle puts forward the premise that John Lang was “instrumental in creating and defining Australian Literature” and yet records that “he left Sydney under a cloud in 1842 and never returned”.

John Lang did write “Legends of Australia – Frederick William Howard”, the first novel set in Australia and written by a person born in Australia. Sean Doyle puts forward the proposition that John Lang’s career “marks the dawn of Australian literature”, however the reader can be left unconvinced by Doyle’s arguments. This book, though marketed as a biography, fits well in the genre of faction. Despite the list of sources and endnotes included at the end of the book, the line between fact and fiction in this book is blurred by the prose. Sean Doyle takes license to dramatise events and include thoughts, opinions and feelings that cannot be known.

The reader may wish to undertake their own research, after reading this book, to better understand the place of John Lang in the defining of Australian Literature.

Themes: Australian authors, Colonial Australia, India, Journalism, Relationships, Belonging.

Linda Guthrie