Over the past decade, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver have been researching nineteenth-century Australian popular fiction with the aid of a succession of research grants. Associated publications have included a series of genre-based anthologies of gothic, romance adventure and crime stories, as well as a selection of extracts from the local journals in which many of these stories were first published. While these books included introductions by Gelder and Weaver, Colonial Australian Fiction is their most sustained account of the field.
As its subtitle indicates, Colonial Australian Fiction has a particular focus on the range of character types found in novels and stories set in Australia during the nineteenth century. The five chapters follow a broadly chronological path, taking us from the squatter novel of the 1840s through to the Australian Girl of the 1890s In between, we are introduced to bushrangers, detectives, shepherds, swagmen, larrikins and dandies, with city…