Over the course of the nineteenth century a remarkable array of types appeared – and disappeared – in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the “currency lass”, the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies’ developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic circumstances of life in the colonies. In Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver explore the genres in which these characters flourished: the squatter novel, the bushranger adventure, colonial detective stories, the swagman’s yarn, the Australian girl’s romance. Authors as diverse as Catherine Helen Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Barbara Baynton, Rolf Boldrewood, Mary Fortune and Marcus Clarke were fascinated by colonial character types, and brought them vibrantly to life. As this book shows, colonial Australian character types are fluid, contradictory and often unpredictable. When we look closely, they have the potential to challenge our assumptions about fiction, genre and national identity. The preliminary pages and introduction to this work are available free to download at the Sydney eScholarship Repository: https://hdl.handle.net/2123/16435 Contents Introduction: The Colonial Economy and the Production of Colonial Character Types 1 The Reign of the Squatter 2 Bushrangers 3 Colonial Australian Detectives 4 Bush Types and Metropolitan Types 5 The Australian Girl Works Cited Index About the series The Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series publishes original, peer-reviewed research in the field of Australian literature. The series comprises monographs devoted to the works of major authors and themed collections of essays about current issues in the field of Australian literary studies. The series offers well-researched and engagingly written re-evaluations of the nature and importance of Australian literature, and aims to reinvigorate its study both in Australia and internationally.

Grisly corpses, ghostly women and psychotic station-owners populate an unforgiving landscape that is the stuff of nightmares. These compelling stories are the dark underside to the usual story of colonial progress, promise and nation-building, and reveal the gothic imagination that lies at the heart of Australian fiction. This anthology collects the best examples of colonial Australian gothic short stories by authors such as Marcus Clarke, Hume Nisbet, Henry Lawson and Katherine Susannah Prichard, among others.

From the editors of The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction comes this fascinating collection of disturbing mysteries and gruesome tales by authors such as Mary Fortune, James Skipp Borlase, Guy Boothby, Francis Adams, Ernest Favenc, 'Rolf Boldrewood' and Norman Lindsay, among many others. In the bush and the tropics, the goldfields and the city streets, colonial Australia is a troubling, bewildering place and almost impossible to regulate—even for the most vigilant detective. Ex-convicts, bushrangers, ruthless gold prospectors, impostors, thieves and murderers flow through the stories that make up this collection, challenging the nascent forces of colonial law and order. The landscape itself seems to stimulate criminal activity, where identities change at will and people suddenly disappear without a trace. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction is a remarkable anthology that taps into the fears and anxieties of colonial Australian life.

"The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fictioncollects captivating stories of love and passion, longing and regret. In these tales women arriving in the New World make decisions about relationships and marriage, social conventions, finances and career--and even the future of the nation itself. The 'slim and graceful' Australian girl becomes a new character type- independent, self-possessed and full of promise. These stories also show women gaining experience about the world, and the men, around them. They are put to the test by a new life and a new place. And not every relationship works out well. The best of colonial Australian romance fiction is collected in this anthology, from writers such as Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, Francis Adams, Henry Lawson, Mura Leigh and many others."

Charts the history of South Asian diaspora, weaving together stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire.

Voted The Times' Book of the Year, Salt Creek is an Australian historical novel about a family pursuing their dreams, duty, and displacement. ‘Salt Creek is a love song to a lost world' The Guardian A story of love, duty, hardship and intolerance through the eyes of a strong woman in 1850s colonial Australia. The comfortable and respectable life Hester Finch now leads in Chichester, England, could not be further from the hardship her family endured on leaving Adelaide for Salt Creek in 1855. Yet she finds her thoughts drawn back to that remote, beautiful and inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there, far from the city society in which they had been raised. Encounters with the few travellers passing along the nearby stock route and the local indigenous people, in particular a boy, Tully, whom Hester's father seeks to educate almost as his own son, would change the fates of the Finches forever; nor would life ever be the same again for those who had long called the area home.

This book explores imperial ideology through the narrative themes of popular texts.

Draws on scholarship from leading figures in the field and spans Australian literary history from colonial origins, indigenous and migrant literatures, as well as representations of Asia and the Pacific and the role of literary culture in modern Australian society.