AustLit
Latest Issues
Includes
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1y The Forger's Wife, or, Emily Orford 1853 Z1228137 1853 single work novel crime
'The Forger’s Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forger’s wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets Detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, inspecting colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.
'First serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, The Forger’s Wife was popular in its time and was reprinted many times over. It is Australia’s first detective novel – and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.' (From 2017 edition)
Melbourne : Grattan Street Press , 2017 -
2Force and Fraud : A Tale of the Bush 1865 single work novel crime mystery Scottish immigrant squatter Mr McAlpin is found murdered. Suspicion centres on Herbert Lindsey who is betrothed to McAlpin's daughter Flora. McAlpin's overseer Pierce Silverton also loves Flora and tells her that Herbert has married someone else. In her despair, she agrees to marry Silverton. Silverton is strangled by the man whom he paid to murder McAlpin and who is blackmailing him. Flora marries Herbert and they stay in Australia. Melbourne : Grattan Street Press , 2017
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3y An Australian Girl in London London : T. Fisher Unwin , 1902 Z234415 1902 single work novel Melbourne : Grattan Street Press , 2018
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4y An Australian Bush Track London : Sampson Low, Marston , 1896 Z120418 1896 single work novel
A lost-race romance story. Typically, in this popular late-nineteenth century genre, male English adventurers travel beyond the edges of the known world and have their masculine and racial identities tested, but ultimately affirmed, in encounters with a lost race, remnants of an ancient civilisation often led by a female chief.
Source: Carter, David. How people have imagined Queensland. Queensland Historical Atlas, 2010.
Parkville : Grattan Street Press , 2018 -
5y Melbourne and Mars : My Mysterious Life on Two Planets : Extracts from the Diary of a Melbourne Merchant Melbourne : Joseph Fraser , 1889 Z942501 1889 single work novel science fiction Follows the story of Adam Jacobs, born in 1818 in Lancashire, who moves to Australia with his family when his father is sentenced to transportation for his involvement in a fight. The story then follows Adam's life as he grows up, marries, enters business, and then follows the goldrush. At the age of 45, he begins to have dreams of a child on Mars. It becomes clear that he is living two lives at once, one on Earth, the other as a child in a utopian Mars. Parkville : Grattan Street Press , 2020