AustLit

'MICHAEL HOWE—On Monday next, the 15th Instant, will be published, price Five Shillings, and to be had at the Gazette Office only, the Narrative of the chief Atrocities and Death of this Murderer and Robber, and of his Companions, whilst in the Woods of Van Diemen’s Land. Payment will be expected on Delivery.

'Thus ran an advertisement in the Hobart Town Gazette on Saturday 13 March 1819. Hobart Town was then a small penal settlement just fifteen years in the making (see front cover). About half of its three thousand or so souls were convicts and many inhabitants were illiterate. It was thus a rather unlikely setting for the publication of what Ferguson describes as Australasia’s first work of general literature.' (Introduction)

'From early in his life Walter Scott had strong personal relations with India but his contacts with Australia came much later in his life and were fewer in number. However, even though India was not, like New South Wales, a penal colony, and the British had been in India for centuries whereas they had colonized Australia within Scott's own life time, Scott's personal relations with India and Australia are remarkably similar in kind, though not in quantity. They take place in a well-defined context of imperial patronage which Scott used with skill and success to support a number of young Scots including, in the case of Australia, convicts. On the other hand Scott's imaginative involvement with the two countries differs considerably: India figures quite prominently in his fiction, but in all his published writing there is only one passage on Australia and it deals with quite different issues from those concerning India. This article considers a number of individual cases of Scott's patronage in India and Australia and examines the similar ways in which he was able to further the careers of his protégés. It also compares his writing about India and Australia and suggests that, though the themes in his writing about each country are quite different, in each case the dominant theme is one that was taken up by Scott in his early years.' (Publication abstract)

'Women have always been central to true crime stories: as victims, perpetrators, readers, and (increasingly) as tellers of these tales. Indeed, these tales, often dismissed as sensationalised violence, offer important opportunities to reflect on crime and crime control.

'Many true crime writers today – including numerous women, working in a once male-dominated market – have been biographers, coroners, detectives, historians, journalists, lawyers, and psychologists. These backgrounds bring a style of storytelling that educates us about, not just merely entertains us with, crime. Importantly, many privilege complex and nuanced storytelling over simplistic stereotypes of women as just 'bad' or just 'good'. (Introduction)