attracted a good deal of interest in
Australia even during its first appearance as a serial, but from
elsewhere came its recognition as one of the novels of the century.

The authors whose lives and writings are briefly sketched in this volume
are all noted in some degree for accuracy and sincerity in their
representation of life in Australia. They have all written from abundant
knowledge--from love, also, perhaps it may be added--of this great wide
land with its brilliant skies, its opportunities and its wholesome
pleasures. That they should fail to cover their field--that they tell
too much of country life and adventure and too little of the throb and
energy of the cities--is in a large measure explained by the fact that
their books are of necessity primarily written for English readers.

Somehow it is assumed that people in the mother-country continue to be
interested only in the picturesque, the curious and the unusual in
Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when
a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists
described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies:
their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic
gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of
topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records
of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least
a score of well-known novels there are charming country scenes, true in
every particular; but there is a distinct limit to the power of fiction
of this kind to interest remote readers, while much repetition of it
might well be misleading.

A writer in the _Australasian Critic_ once rightly observed, respecting
a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that
English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in
Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers,
stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences
are weatherboard homesteads with wide verandas, while the inferior ones
are huts and tents.' No foreign reader could understand from them that
'more than half the Australian population have never seen kangaroos or
emus outside a zoological garden, and that not one in a hundred, or even
a thousand, has seen a wild black fellow.' There is a well-known type of
Australian novel to which the same remarks might apply with almost
equal fitness.

Th