AustLit

A thorough knowledge of country life in New South Wales, the life of the pastoralist on his large holding, and of the small farmer struggling to make good on his insufficient acreage, together with the social groupings and overlappings of the different classes, is entertainingly disclosed in the mystery story entitled 'The Box', which will begin publication in the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday next.

This tale, by Miss E.M. Chapman, whose story entitled 'The Three Waterholes' won much favourable criticism when published in the Herald last year relates the unusual but entirely natural events that follow when Peggy Mackay, an artist's daughter, travelling in a second class railway carriage to take up a job on a station in southern New South Wales, is induced by a man, who jumps into her carriage, at a wayside stopping place, to accept the custody of a small black tin box, the contents of which are unknown, and to keep until he calls for it. It is supposed that gold has been found somewhere in the Goulburn district, and the tale unfolds the progress of the hunt for the gold and also for an illicit still for the manufacture of moonshine in the wild range country....

'Our New Serial', Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 1932 (pg. 4)