AustLit

Two Irish new chums lose their way and find themselves at the Gap Diggings. They soon come to suspect their landlady and her son, their digging partner, of murdering their predecessor. A ghostly manifestation and a vengeful fiancee follow. (PB)

Drunken men, beggars, pretenders to learning, overdressers, extreme conservatives, larrikins etc. And such women as the very dressy girl, the pretended innocent, the woman trying to be a girl, etc. (PB)

On the joys of grandchildren. (PB)

Flippant story of 19-year-old Geraldine Grey's escape from her engagement to 49 year-old Carson Fortescue. Slight; probably not Australian; military background. (PB)

An old mysoginist is healed by the appearance of his once-beloved's daughter and her child at his cottage door. Set in a township. (PB)

A handsome bachelor loses two heiresses through the pursuit of mistaken beauty. Silly social snippet. (PB)

The arrival of a very rich stout old bachelor at a boarding-house throws the laadies into confusion and competition until his arrest reveals all ... (PB)

A minister's conviction that his son stole a pound note is proved wrong, but not before the punishment he administers turns the boy into an imbecile. (PB)

A gentleman's evening reverie while awaiting his wife's return from shopping gives him a vision of the world's poor begging for food - and it is traced to a fly buzzing in a jug. (PB)

Christmas Eve on one of the largest colonial goldfields, and two English gentlemen and a friend exchange idle chatter and a tale of a grief-stricken German mother. (PB)

Recounts the story told by a Chinese merchant after a San Francisco dinner. Full of anti-Chinese stereotypes (eg, eating dogs and cats etc), it is the tale of the farcical plottings surrounding the long-awaited birth of a male child to a rich merchant in China. (PB)

A visit to these New Zealand goldfield townships. (PB)

Arthur Sefton, after long delay, is to marry beautiful Miss Hetty in the Victorian mining township of French's Gap where he is manager of the Grand Constrictor Company. On the eve of the wedding his drunken wife appears ... and he makes a final escape. Well-written romance. (PB)

Of wit and humour. (PB)

A forger asks and is refused her brother's help after his release. He joins a gang of burglar's when he finds their target is the home of his sister, and that his former beloved is visiting her ... (PB)

A Melbourne broker's clerk, well-positioned and happily-married, is saved on the brink of the long slide to alcoholism. Light, 'sensible' moral tale. (PB)

A Christmas amidst snow in a small northern hemisphere township (probably US.) True romance and calculating plots interweave in a pleasant, well-written tale of old and young maids, fortune-hunters and restorers. (PB)

Set on the Turon River diggings near Sofala NSW in 1859. A near-penniless doctor determines to try his luck on Wattle Flat but his enterprise is cut short when his mining partner's mistress is followed to their hut by her long-term lover, knife in hand ... Smoothly told without the excesses usually associated with such melodrama - though gory enough. (PB)

On marriage and the lightness with which it is often entered into. (PB)

On improvements in savings, knowledge and character day by day. (PB)