Savouring of the Australian Soil?: on the Sources and Affiliations of Colonial Newspaper Fiction Author(S): Graham Law Source: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol

Home , Edward Braddon, Illustrated Sydney News, The Herald (Adelaide), Waseda University

Savouring of the Australian Soil?: On the Sources and Affiliations of Colonial Newspaper Fiction Author(s): Graham Law Source: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 75-97 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20084030 Accessed: 05-04-2021 09:52 UTC

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The passage below comes from the Illustrated Sydney News of 20 March 1890 and is found in the section devoted to "Queensland: Notes from Our Special Correspondent". The note follows a lengthy lamentation on the loss of the steamship Quetta on its voyage from Brisbane to London and precedes a discussion of the need for imported labor in the sugar plantations in the tropical north of the colony.

An absurd story of journalistic error comes to us from North Queensland. An important and well-known weekly had purchased the copyright of a story by Miss Dora Russell, through the medium of its agent in England, which was duly announced in large capitals and infinite display. A few weeks later it published a bust portrait of the authoress, and the gratified readers thought that although the course was somewhat unusual, it was but proof of the go-ahead nature of the journal. Closer examination of the intelligent features of the authoress led them to conclude that they would probably enjoy a story from her pen. It was therefore with considerable surprise that in the next issue they read an explanation from the management. It appears that the block came to hand without advice, and with a spirit of divination strong upon them, they at once concluded that it must repre sent the one woman who occupied their thought, Miss Dora Russell. The follow ing mail they received a letter from their agent, which read as follows: - "I sent out lately in a parcel a block of the Princess Victoria of Teck," etc., and they had actu ally published her Royal Highness in the disguise of one who was yet to burst upon the world through the medium of their print.

On one level, what follows will serve simply as an extended explication of this brief and apparently trivial text. But, in thus creating a "thick" descriptive context, I hope to do more than shed light on its specific obscurities. The larger intention is to engage with the provenance of the

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Illustrated Sydney News, 20 March 1890 varied fiction material appearing in Australian newspapers towards the end of the nineteenth century, the different print contexts in which it appeared, and the complex forms of identity affiliation which it reflected and encouraged.1 By way of conclusion, I will take issue with Franco Moretti's charting of the relations between center and periphery in the rapidly developing international market for fiction.

A. The Newspapers The Illustrated Sydney News took as its model the world's first newspa per to sell itself on the quantity and quality of its pictorial content, the Illustrated London News, founded in 1842 and still around today.2 The resounding success of this modernizing enterprise ensured that there were soon many European imitators, notably the Illustration in Paris and the Illustrirte Zeitung in Leipzig, both starting up the following year. Rivals in the New World were not far behind. Foremost here was Harper's Weekly founded in New York in 1857 and running successfully until the First World War, while the Canadian Illustrated News led a more precar

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ious existence in Montreal from 1869 to 1883. Yet the first English clone of the Illustrated London News to appear outside the mother country was probably in the distant young Australian colony of New South Wales. The first weekly issue of the Illustrated Sydney News appeared as early as 1853, onr7 twelve years after the end of convict transportation, and nearly eight before Great Expectations began its serial run in Household Words} The separation of Victoria was a recent memory (1851), effective self government was still around the corner (1855), and the creation of Queensland remained several years in the future (1859). Despite extensive assisted immigration schemes from 1841 and the beginnings of the gold rush in 1851, when the Illustrated Sydney News first appeared the Euro pean population of the entire continent stood at only around half a million and internal systems of communication remained largely unde veloped. The founding of the paper was thus a remarkably ambitious enterprise, and the opening address dwelt on "what our friends at Home will think of our daring spirit in venturing to mimic the acts and capabili ties of our very distinguished parent" back in London (3 October 1853, 2). The format (16 large pages in triple columns), intended audience (the family circle), and political line (liberal and royalist) were much the same as those of the Illustrated London News itself, but the price was double while the quality of the letterpress and engravings was noticeably inferior. Almost inevitably, the life of the paper in this guise was rather brief. Less than two years later, the paper had to deliver a valedictory address that assigned the failure chiefly to complaints that "we cannot bear compari son with our more illustrious contemporary in the mother country" (30 June 1855, 1). But this was not to be quite the end of the story. Perhaps stimulated by the appearance of the Illustrated Melbourne News from 1863,4 the Syd ney paper was resurrected as a pictorial monthly the following year and continued to appear in this form until the later 1880s, when there was a shift to fortnightly publication, with the price halved to sixpence and the size of each issue expanded from 24 to 32 pages, However, this move must have been a sign of weakness rather than of strength, as the Illus trated Sydney News finally expired in 1894. From the outset the chosen title had expressed not so much a recognition of a limited local circula tion, but rather - by analogy with the London model - a claim for Sydney as the capital of an emerging Australian national community. In this, of course, it signally failed, though the more prosaic commercial reason for the demise of the paper must be seen as the strength of the competition. This was not only from the recently created Australasian edition of the Illustrated London News itself, but also from the growing range of colo nial weekly journals of wide distribution. As reflected in the Australian Newspaper Directory, the second half of

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the nineteenth century witnessed a boom in the production of colonial newspapers that paralleled developments in the mother country, though obviously on a smaller scale. This rapid development of the local news paper industry was a source of considerable pride to early colonial com mentators. A lecturer on "Australian Literature" in 1864 was happy to "commence with the newspapers. Although New South Wales is consid erably behind in other literary matters, the progress she has made in this department of literature since the first dawn of colonial letters in 1803,iS remarkable" (Walker, 5). By the mid-century, there were established dai lies in all the major population centers along the Eastern seaboard: the Sydney Morning Herald (1842-), the Argus (1848-) and the Age (1854?) both in Melbourne, and finally the Brisbane Courier from 1861.5 Soon each of these was to found a companion weekly journal - respectively, the Mail (i860-), the Australasian (1865-), the Leader (1856-), and the Queenslander (1866-) - which combined the functions of a summary of recent news and a literary miscellany. Slightly later other weekly com petitors were started up in the biggest cities, notably the (Melbourne) Australian Journal (1865-) and the (Sydney) Australian Town and Coun try Journal (1870-). The former was weighted distinctively towards pop ular literary matter, with the radical London Journal as an obvious model,7 while the latter served as weekly companion to a new Sydney evening paper, the Evening News. The Town and Country Journal con centrated more on current affairs, and, as the title suggests, served the requirements of more conservative readers in both the urban centers and the rural hinterland. By 1890, though still selling at its original price of sixpence, it also offered a cornucopia of features packed tightly into more than fifty pages with ample illustrations of fair quality. Since it then claimed on its heading banner a readership "three times that of any other Weekly Newspaper in Australasia," the Australian Town and Country Journal clearly represented a less than friendly rival to the national pre tensions of the Illustrated Sydney News. Yet the Australian press boom was by no means limited to Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. By the early 1880s, with the population of the continent approaching three million, numerous smaller Australian towns had started up their own daily papers. Many, however, were economi cally unstable and distinctly short-lived so that the local weekly miscel lany continued to provide the staple diet of recent news and contemporary literature for most communities. With the help of syndi cated material brought in from Sydney, Melbourne, or London, it was not difficult for a jobbing printer or news agent to start up a Saturday paper in a township of little more than a thousand souls. To take the example of Queensland, by the earlier 1880s there were established week lies in all the notable communities dotted up the northern coast - the

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Rockhampton Northern Argus, the Mackay Standard, the Townsville Herald, and the Cairns Post - as well as in Brisbane's hinterland with the Ipswich Herald and the Darling Downs Gazette of Toowoomba. The paper that was pilloried by the Illustrated Sydney News in 1890 for mis taking the princess for the lady novelist was in fact the Townsville Herald (Plate 1). Founded in 1876 and thus by no means the youngest of the Queensland papers, at the time of the pictorial gaff the Herald was a six penny weekly paper of around 24 pages, which may serve as a good example of the local colonial weekly of middle size.9 The paper's main platform was "separatism" - the campaign for the creation of an autono mous colony of "North Queensland" fuelled by grievances against exces sive taxation and insufficient investment by the Colonial Office in Brisbane. In 1891, when an upstart movement based in Rockhampton for the establishment of a separate colony of "Central Queensland" was threatening to muddy the diplomatic waters, the Herald was transformed into the North Queensland Bulletin. The paper survived in this form until shortly before the First World War, but by then the dream of separation had long been overtaken by the realities of federation, as the Common wealth of Australia Act received the royal assent in mid-1900 and was put into effect at New Year 1901. The role of the Australian weekly news miscellany in stimulating the local economy and strengthening communal identity was recognized early by David Christie Murray, a journalist-novelist from the British Midlands who visited Australasia in 1890. On his return, he wrote not only a serial novel set in Australia, Bob Martin's Little Girl,10 but also a series of articles on "The Antipodeans" for the Contemporary Review. In the first article he commented on the colonial press:

In one respect Australian journalism surpasses the English. We have nothing to show which will at all compare with the Australasian or the Leader ... [which] owe their especial excellences to local conditions. These great weekly issues give all the week's news, and all the striking articles which have appeared in the daily journals of which they are at once the growth and the compendium. They do much more than this, for they include whatever the gardener, the agriculturist, the housewife, the lady of fashion, the searcher of general literature, the chess-player, the squatter can most desire to know. They provide for all sorts of tastes and needs, and between their first sheet and their last they render their readers what we in England buy half a score of special journals to secure. (Murray, 305-06)

Yet, despite his own training on the staff of the Birmingham Morning News, Murray was mistaken as regards the situation back in Britain in one important respect. While the nineteenth-century metropolitan press could indeed provide no equivalent to the likes of the Leader, the same

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8o Victorian Periodicals Review 37:4 Winter 2004 was far from being true at the periphery. As I have argued in detail else where, the effect of the abolition of the "taxes on knowledge" in Great Britain was even more immediate in the provincial than in the London press (Law, Serializing Fiction, 2}-}i). Daily morning and then evening papers were soon to spring up in the industrial cities and larger market towns, but the most immediate effect was seen in the weekly press. From the mid-1850s, the provincial urban centers began to produce cheap weekly journals, serving both as weekly newspapers and literary maga zines and reaching a wide geographical and social readership, such as the (Dundee) People's Journal (1858-), the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (1864-), and the (Cardiff) Weekly Mail (1870-). These papers, and the many others that followed their lead, constitute a fair equivalent to the Australasian or the Queenslander. The "local conditions" that encour aged their existence were much the same as those suggested by Murray - that the market for "special journals" was far less developed in the outly ing regions and among the lower social ranks. The interesting question that remains concerning the British provincial and Australian colonial weekly miscellanies, however, is which should be seen as the original and which the replica, or whether indeed both should be treated as indepen dent developments shaped by similar peripheral conditions. There is no simple or immediate answer to this question. However, some light is shed on the question if we look to the matter of the supply of serial fiction, always one of the most popular and prominent features of the weekly news miscellany, whether colonial or provincial. For here at least the Brit ish provincial papers appear to take the lead. B. The Stories There had been scattered attempts to publish fiction serially in British newspapers around the 1840s - notably in London weeklies like the Sun day Times and the Illustrated London News - but the existing tax regime ensured that they were short-lived (Law, Serializing Fiction, 14-23). However, after the removal of the "taxes on knowledge," the cheap pro vincial news miscellany rapidly became a major player in the serial fiction market of the United Kingdom. Thus by 1890 the Lancastrian journalist novelist William Westall could justly claim that "there is hardly a small town in the kingdom without at least one local sheet, whose chief attrac tion is a serial romance" (79). By then the statement was equally true of the townships in the older Australian colonies.11 In both cases, the prove nance of this sea of stories was mixed, and varied a good deal from paper to paper. It is nevertheless possible to outline a couple of general patterns. Firstly, "complete tales" - as shorter fiction was generally described - were rather more likely to be by local writers, while full-length serial novels tended to be signed by authors with established metropolitan rep utations. Secondly, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century sources

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of supply were generally casual or irregular - through informal arrange ments with individual authors or unauthorized "borrowing" from peri odicals serving other communities; but by the fourth quarter serial stories were far more likely to be provided systematically by professional agen cies. Thirdly, the smaller the subscription base of a paper, the more likely it was to remain dependent on a single source of fictional material. The most important of the new fiction agencies were the syndication bureaus set up by British provincial newspaper proprietors, like Tillotsons of Bol ton or Leng & Co. of Sheffield (Law, Serializing Fiction, chs. 3-4), though metropolitan literary agents such as A.P. Watt also became active in sell ing the secondary serial rights to stories published in London weeklies like the Illustrated London News and the Graphic (Law, Indexes to Fic tion, 4-6). The client newspapers concerned were found not only in provincial Britain but also in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Here, however, there was an additional role for the services of local distri bution agencies like the firm of Gordon & Gotch, which already had offices in Melbourne, Sydney and London by 1870.12 Many of the small est Australian weeklies seem to have relied for their fiction material almost exclusively on supplies from Tillotsons. distributed in the colonies by Gordon & Gotch. Let us take a specific example. In 1889 one of the bright new stars in the firmament of British fiction was the Manxman Hall Caine. Serial rights to his new novel of that year, The Bondman, a pseudo-biblical saga set in Iceland, were sold to the Fiction Bureau in Bolton. The novel duly appeared as a serial not only in Tillotsons's own group of "Lancashire Journals" but also in a syndicate of major British provincial papers, including the Weekly Scotsman and the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. In the Australian colonies, the serial has been traced in more than a dozen papers, the list including not only more substantial journals like the Melbourne Telegraph and Adelaide Observer but also a string of papers serving small townships beginning, alphabetically, with the Alexandra and Yea Standard and the Avoca Mail.13 The few runs of the papers concerned that I have been able to view suggest that most if not all must have been regular recipients of fiction material from Tillotsons around this time. The extent of the Australian syndication of Caine's romance suggests that distribution in the colonies must have been carried out by Gordon & Gotch, the only firm then capable of broadcasting material on this scale. Though a rather more substantial enterprise than, say, the Avoca Mail, the Townsville Herald also seems to have received almost all of its fiction from the Bolton firm. In the incomplete run of the Herald held on micro film at the British Library - from mid-1886 until the change of title in 1891 only - all of the longer serials found were syndicated by Tillotsons,

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 82 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:4 Winter 2004 with only the occasional shorter tale from more informal sources to fill in the gaps. Typical examples here are the American novelette "Virginia of Virginia", by Amelia Rivers, lifted from Harper's Monthly in mid-1888, or a year later a series of "Herald Prize Competition Stories," complete tales full of local color such as "A Village Maiden She", by "Waddigala". The serials furnished by Tillotsons, on the other hand, are almost always original full-length novels by authors with established metropolitan repu tations: Margaret Oliphant's The Son of His Father, William Black's Sab ina Zembla, Mary Braddon's Like and Unlike, Walter Besant's Herr Paulus, H. Rider Haggard's Colonel Quaritch V.C., S. Baring-Gould's The Penny come quicks, W.E. Norris's Misadventure, then Oliphant again with The Heir Presumptive and the Heir Apparent. Though not all of these authors remain familiar names, this was a star-studded cast in its own day, aimed to add considerable kudos to the Townsville weekly. This is certainly the implication of the mammoth display notices heralding new serials (see Plate 2), as noted ironically in the Illustrated Sydney News. This list represents a complete sequence of the novels appearing in the paper from 1886 to 1891 - with a single exception. This was A Bitter Birthright, by Dora Russell, running from 26 April to 11 October 1890, which was, in more ways than one, the odd one out. From the beginning, Tillotsons had supplied an eclectic range of stories to a wide variety of client newspapers, from expensive star authors for big city journals, down to anonymous local writers sold on the cheap to sin gle-sheet papers deep in the country. Dora Russell's position was some where between these two extremes. As I have shown in detail elsewhere (Law, "Women's Sensation Narrative"), Russell was a native of Northumberland whose earliest efforts won prize competitions in the local Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, but who began a professional career as a writer only in her forties under the pressure of economic necessity. Though she made a small hit in London with her early sensation novels Footprints in the Snow (1877) and Beneath the Wave (1878), and much of her subsequent work appeared in the triple-decker editions aimed at the circulating libraries, in the metropolitan reviews she was never considered a writer approaching first rank. In fact, she found a much larger and more appreciative audience in the pages of the provincial and colonial miscella nies.14 For over twenty years from her first success down to her retire ment from active literary service due to illness, virtually all of her output was sold directly to Tillotsons. In 1888 she had, in fact, signed a long term contract with the Bolton firm, which gave her the status of a staff writer, engaged to produce 200,000 words per year at a salary of ?500. By then she had established a reputation for romances with a good deal of local northern color, a mildly evangelical sympathy for the poor in heart, and heroines considerably less touched by corruption than the likes of

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Lucy Audley or Lydia Gwilt. The list of "Tillotsons' 1894 Newspaper Novels" (Tillotsons's Fiction Bureau records I) thus advertised Russell's fiction as being "of powerful domestic interest... moderately sensational without being unreal in any sense" - in other words, eminently safe for a family audience. Ironically, as the subtitle "Lady's Gilmore's Temptation" might sug gest, the social setting of Russell's A Bitter Birthright was a rather uncom fortable rank or two above her normal level, and the serial proved by no means one of her most assured. The full absurdity of the Townsville Her ald's "journalistic error" in passing off a German princess still in her early twenties as a minor Geordie novelist about to hit sixty - or, to make the incongruity even more historically stark, mistaking Her Royal Highness who was soon to marry an heir to the English throne and, thus, in 1910 to attain the title of Queen Mary as the wife of George V, for a spinster who (to borrow Walbank's phrase) would never quite make it into the ranks of the "Queens of the Circulating Libraries" and who was lost to literary history well before her death in 1905 - may only have become apparent to later readers. Yet the Queensland correspondent of the Illustrated Sydney News is clearly aware of the potential ironies.15 Indeed, those ironies would have had a special appeal to a paper which not only regularly drew its subscribers' attention to news concerning "Court and Society" in its column of "English and Continental Gossip," but also showed a strong preference for local Australian fiction over products offered by the syndi cation agencies. Indeed, Toni Johnson-Woods's calculations suggest that the Illus trated Sydney News contained almost the highest percentage of fiction with local settings amongst the journals she indexes (Index, 35). In the early manifestations of the journal as a weekly in the 1850s, and as a monthly in the 1860s and 1870s, fiction is far from being a regular or prominent feature. When stories are found, they are generally shorter anonymous tales of local color, with "Lucy Cooper: an Australian Tale" (4 Nov-23 Dec 1854, probably by John Lang) representing a typical title.1 Occasionally, though, there appear longer stories, most notably soon after the revival of the paper in the mid-1860s, when two consecu tive Australian serials by F.S. Wilson catch the eye - Woonoona and Broken Clouds. But by the early 1880s the paper consistently carries an illustrated installment from a full-length original novel stretching to sev eral pages. Around half of these are clearly by local authors, whether named (Jean Lockhart with "Margaret Leigh" and A. Spurzheim with "His Australian Bride"), pseudonymous ("Old Saltbush", "Silverleaf" [Jessica Lloyd] and "Australie" [Emily Manning]), or entirely anony mous (as in the case of the story "Iris" in early 1889 and "The Haunted Cave" in the second half of 1890). Most of these stories seem never to

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 84 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:4 Winter 2004 have been reprinted in book form, and several of the named authors have yet to be satisfactorily identified. The best known author is probably Jessica Lloyd, whose "Silverleaf Papers" evoking the physical and social landscape of New South Wales ran as a regular feature in the pages of the Illustrated Sydney News. Her serial "Retribution", in thirteen lengthy installments from June 1884 again under the signature "Silverleaf", is undoubtedly the outstanding lit erary production of the series. The story concerns a young man of charac ter falsely accused of embezzlement and his epic struggle to establish his innocence and expose the true criminal. Along the way there are disturb ing scenes of sexual jealously and marital discord before the romantic ful fillment accompanying the long-awaited d?nouement. Lloyd consciously attempts a panoramic portrait of colonial life, with the action set by turns in the coastal cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart. But there are also dramatic scenes of adventure when the hero volunteers to risk his life in joining an exploratory expedition to traverse the outback from north to south, which give full rein to the author's descriptive skills:

On they went, their sun-burnt faces peeling from the effects of the heat, their fee ble bodies tottering from the weight of their burdens. Fear was in each heart, though unacknowledged. That night they had to camp without water; all ahead of them looked as dry and parched as that they had passed; there was no talk of going back, as those water holes they had stopped at would be dried up; their only chance was to press forward ... (Ch. 36 "The Exploring Expedition," 17 Jan. 1885, 6)

The narrative also offers a number of sensational turns, as when the hero's pregnant sister reads in the Sydney Morning Herald that her estranged husband has taken passage for England on The Golden City, a vessel of the latest design, only to hear by chance a few weeks later that the ship and all aboard have been lost. A final twist remains when the erring hus band makes a ghostly reappearance, having failed at the last moment to take his berth on the ill-fated ship. With its depictions of Aboriginal cul ture in the outback, scenes which are by no means always likely to strike readers today as insensitive or offensive, "Retribution" represents a fasci nating Australian newspaper novel of the later colonial period that would amply merit reprinting. Perhaps inevitably, the Illustrated Sydney News occasionally falls back on material from the English agencies. Of note here are two sensation novels furnished by Tillotsons - Mary Braddon's Phantom Fortune run ning from April 1883 and Joseph Hatton's By Order of the Czar from late 1889. A further, unintended irony is thus created by the fact that an installment of Hatton's novel appears on the page following that on

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GRAHAM LAW h which the Townsville Herald was scorned for its blind faith in material sent out by the same Lancashire firm. Nevertheless, the proportion of serial narratives located principally within Australia in the Illustrated Sydney News is rendered even higher by the careful selection of novels by metropolitan authors who, following Anthony Trollope's well-publi cized example, take advantage of visits to the Antipodes to produce tales with local settings while also making dramatic use of incidents on the voyage out or back.17 The most notable case in this category is the Irish author Margaret Hungerford who sold two such stories to the Sydney paper: "Did I Love Her?" (prominently advertised as "An Original Story of Australian Life", 2 Sep. 1882, 2) and "A Daughter of Herodias" of 1887, which goes behind the scenes in the world of the colonial dance halls. When we consider that the complete tales appearing in holiday issues or filling gaps between serials tend to focus on local color - "The Little Australian Match Boy" signed "M.F.H" is a typical title (15 July 1887) - we must conclude that the fiction department made a valiant effort to abide by the instructions the paper gave to potential contribu tors. As celebrated in the title of this essay, these were: "All matter sent in should savour of the Australian soil, and there should be the ring of sum mer gladness in every syllable." ("To the Contributor", 24 Sep. 1892). Thus, with regard to the range of sources of their serial fiction, the Townsville Herald and the Illustrated Sydney News stand close to the edges of the spectrum - the one relying almost entirely on metropolitan material, the other strongly preferring to carry stories with a local prove nance or a local theme. In order to complete this brief survey of novels in colonial newspapers, we need now more briefly to indicate the variety of positions between these two extremes. All four of the long-running weekly miscellanies attached to the big dailies - the Leader, the Australasian, the Mail, and the Queenslander - show a long-term preference for the novels of established English authors, though there is occasionally space for French or American work, or a local writer beginning to make a name in London, like Marcus Clarke or Ada Cambridge. Up until the early 1870s, though, the fiction depart ments of these four papers vary a good deal. In Melbourne, the Australa sian and Leader make individual arrangements to serialize the latest novels of the most prestigious English authors - Trollope, Eliot, Lytton, and especially Dickens - with the Leader tracking the course of All the Year Round very closely. Meanwhile, the Queenslander offers a mixture of American and English sensation, and only the Mail in Sydney goes in regularly for local color, in the form of serials by "Ariel" (Eliza Winstan ley) or "Old Boomerang" (J.R. Houlding). But by the end of the 1870s the paths tend to converge, as all four choose the pick of the crop of the latest English novels from the agencies, with Mary Braddon and Walter

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Besant the writers perhaps most consistently in demand.18 All four papers clearly make use of a number of British agents, though in the later 1880s the Queenslander seems to lean heavily on Leng 6c Co. in Sheffield, while the Mail's sequence of serials begins to bear a strong resemblance to that in the London Graphic and clearly derives from A.P. Watt's "Literary Agency" (Law, Serializing Fiction, 26o-in2i). The most eclectic mix of fiction is found in the best-selling weekly mis cellany, the Australian Town and Country Journal of Sydney. By the late 1870s, the literary section of the paper is large enough to carry two serials at once, and thus London authors of the stature of Robert Louis Steven son rub shoulders with local Australian talents like Lilian Turner, and American men of mystery like Harry Stilwell Edwards. By the 1880s, the Australian Journal, by then a popular literary monthly, is inclined to "borrow" its serials from overseas periodicals. These prove to be not so much English "penny-fiction-journals" like the London Journal or Fam ily Herald, as American dime papers like the New York Ledger or World (Johnson-Woods "Virtual Reading Communities"). We must assume that the motivation here was not only economic (the absence of overseas copyright protection for the work of American authors) but also ideolog ical (the attraction of a successful example of the frontier spirit and the will to independence from British authority). Certainly the Australian Journal was also prepared to give considerable space to local serials and short stories, especially in its earlier decades, when Marcus Clarke (then on the editorial staff) and "Waif Wanderer" (Mary Fortune) contributed frequently (Sussex and Gibson, 1-11). Thus it comes closest to challeng ing the Illustrated Sydney News in its dedication to fiction of local prove nance and theme. If none of the news miscellanies flourishing from the late 1850s come close to the impassioned literary nationalism of the Sydney Bulletin, the most prestigious intellectual weekly magazine of the closing decades of the century, a number do nevertheless play a significant role in the forma tion of what we might call, borrowing Benedict Anderson's phrase, the "imagined community" of Australia. C. The Identities Stable periodical publications provide a rich source of information about those who subscribe to them, groups that we can characterize as "communities of readers." Given that all but the most restricted local publications serve a geographically amorphous region, if we broadly accept Benedict Anderson's analysis of modern socio-cultural identity, the term might be refined further to "imagined communities of readers". Towards the beginning of Imagined Communities, it may be recalled, Anderson finds a primary factor contributing to the origin and spread of nationalism in the development of "print-capitalism, which made it pos

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sible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways" (36). He draws particular attention to the novel and the newspaper as the "two forms of imagining which . . . provided the technical means for re presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" (24-5). Though it is not a point that Anderson stresses greatly, this last formula tion implies that nationality is by no means the only geographical affilia tion capable of generating stories, that the imagined national community emerges by taking over journalistic and narrative space from competing allegiances, and even allows the possibility that this process is always provisional, never complete. This is very much my own reading of the situation of the colonial Australian weeklies towards the end of the nine teenth century, which dramatize complex tensions between attachments to locality, colony, emerging nation, empire, and even supra-national entities such as the West or the World. The wish to foreground the con tingency of the process explains why I have chosen to center the discus sion on the liminal moment of 1890, still a decade before federation, and to take my cue from the "absurd journalistic error" spotted by the Illus trated Sydney News. The print contexts in which colonial serials were encountered are richly dense and varied in terms of both provenance and allegiance. The most reliable sociological data about readership derives from marginal sections of the paper that tend to be overlooked by those seeking evidence of political or cultural debate within the community. These would notably include:

* Classified local advertising in close columns (as opposed to large displays draw ing attention to brand goods like Pears' Soap or Eno's Fruit Salts);19 * Contributions from specific readers, such as items in the "Answers to Corre spondents" columns or submissions to prize competitions, as well as formal let ters to the editor;20 and * Announcements by the publishers or editors of the journal, such as subscription details or lists of distribution agents, as well as formal addresses to the reader on auspicious occasions such as the first issue of each new year.21

More complex representations of the ideological issues preoccupying readers at a particular place and time are obviously better seen in the cen tral pages devoted to news and features. Table 1, listing the major illus trated features found in a single weekly issue of the Illustrated Sydney News from 1890, reflects a typically wide range of concerns, in both geo graphical and cultural terms. Occasionally the editorial material found in the paper impinges directly on its serial stories. On the "Art and Literary Notes" page in the issue

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Table i. Major illustrated features in the Illustrated Sydney News, 20 March 1890

Page(s)* Title/(Byline) "Subtitle" or Regional focus Type of feature < o 4-6, 7 Sports and Pastimes Predominantly colonial REGULAR C-r O 6 Art and Literary Notes Mainly London REGULAR ?' 8-9 Social and General Items "English and Continental Gossip" followed by an unheaded page of Sydney gossip REGULAR ?-1 10 South Australian Social Items South Australia REGULAR 5' O 11-12 Art in the Home "Hints on Decorating & Furnishing o" Australian Homes" REGULAR 13-15 The Story of a Famous Prisoner Eighteenth-century France SPECIAL !* 16-17 Sketches at the National Park Near Sydney SPECIAL < 18 Rambling in New Guinea/ By Breechloader" New Guinea SERIES 19 Queensland: Notes from our Special Correspondent Queensland REGULAR 20-22 By Order of the Czar/By Joseph Hatton Installment of serial, set in Europe SERIES 23-24 Sights on the Southern Line: Bowral New South Wales SERIES "Melbourne Institutions" SERIES O 25-26 The District Hospital/By "Benvolio" o 28-29 The Fortune of War/ By "L.M.A" "A Story of the Days before the Indian Mutiny" SPECIAL 4^

* Pages 1-3, 27, and 30-2 are devoted principally to advertising, though "Our Chess Corner" occupies a substantial portion of page 31, while the front cover offers an engraving from an animal painting with no associated letterpress.

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epitomized above (6), the Illustrated Sydney News cites an ironical attack on Australian trade protectionism in the London Daily Telegraph:

It is rather odd ... that the protectionist craze, which has such a hold in the colo nies, stops short at art and literature. Fancy the spirit it would give to local genius if tariffs were clapped upon the works of Shakspere, Ruskin, Tennyson, Leighton and Millais!

Negotiating a delicate comprise between loyalty to "Home" and the assertion of colonial autonomy, the Sydney paper responds that such a proposal had indeed been put forward in Victoria, "but fortunately the majority of artists in that colony had the sense to protest against the scheme." This serves not only to defend Australia generally against the accusation of an illiberal trading policy, but also to justify the paper's own position in, for once, acquiring a serial story by a London author from a British agency. But more often the engagement is less direct, and subtle conflicts of cultural allegiance can be detected even in the most unpromising places, like the page or so devoted to Cricket and Aquatics in the same issue (5-6). Over half of the Cricket columns are given over to a decidedly patronizing account of the intercolonial match played in Syd ney at the beginning of March between the New South Wales eleven and a Queensland fifteen. In spite of the handicap, the contest resulted in "a rather easy victory for this colony's representatives": the "bananalanders" were all out for 36 in their first knock, with "sundries" as second top scorer, and lost eventually by an innings and 111 runs. In conclusion, the Sydney paper expressed the hope that, "by constant contact, the time is not far distant when these two colonies will meet in the cricket field on even terms." Yet the corollary of the New South Wales sense of superior ity over Queensland is the growing fear of inferiority to Victoria. Beneath the report on the intercolonial encounter, there is a brief and bitter note on the "discouraging forebodings" accompanying the departure of the Australian Eleven for its seventh tour of England. This reveals the anxiety that Melbourne may be overtaking Sydney as the sporting as well as the cultural capital of an imagined Australia. With several stars from the "older colony" dropping out and a number of Victorian players preferred over (in the opinion of the Sydney journalist) better men, for the first time New South Wales had not provided the majority of the squad. The columns devoted to Aquatics, however, strike a considerably more upbeat note. With the recent arrival in Sydney of the "champion sculler of America", Willam J. O'Connor of Toronto, and the prospect of his "try ing conclusions with one of our best men before long", the reporter remains confident that on the Paramatta, "the sport-loving visitor may see the grandest contingent of scullers belonging to any country in the world, America and England not excepted."

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If the sports pages can be mined in this way for evidence of the uneven emergence of national identity, it is hardly surprising that an even richer yield is provided by the headline news, which, in the colonial weeklies of early March 1890 inevitably focused on the loss of the mail steamer S.S. Quetta. The Quetta was a modern vessel built in 1881 to carry both pas sengers and cargo for the British India Company. Although originally intended to ply the passage to India, from 1883 the Quetta regularly undertook the six-week journey between London and Brisbane. Tragedy struck on the homeward leg of its twelfth voyage on a clear moonlit night in calm seas. After leaving Brisbane and calling at Townsville and other northern ports, before ten o'clock on the evening of Friday 28 Febru ary, the ship hit an uncharted rock in the Torres Straits between the Great Barrier Reef and Cape York. The Quetta was travelling at full speed and the force of the impact was such that the starboard side was torn out and the ship went down in only three minutes. With the loss of over 120 lives among both passengers and crew, this represented Australia's worst mari time disaster. The first news of the accident began to reach the coast only by the Saturday afternoon, so that coverage in the weekly papers had to wait until the following weekend. Nevertheless, many pages were given over to the disaster in both the Townsville Herald and the Queenslander, in particular. Already on March 8 there were dramatic accounts of lucky escapes by those who had failed to board the vessel by a hair's breadth, or had made it to Thursday Island by clinging to the debris, like the teen agers, Miss Lacy and Miss Nicklin. By March 15, divers had been down to survey the wreck, a tally of the lost and found was available, and more than one of the survivors had reached home to a hero's welcome, ready to tell his or her own story to the press. A key point of debate in the post mortem conducted by the weekly press concerned the influence of both race and gender on the death tally. In the event, over two thirds of the "coloured" passengers and crew were saved (130 out of 185), while a similar proportion of the "white" people on board had been lost (6j out of ^6), with a particularly heavy toll among the female saloon passengers, all of European origin, with the two young heroines the only survivors. All the papers were quick to exonerate the European crew of dereliction of manly duty, with the Illustrated Syd ney News of March 20 even offering a sonnet by "E." in praise of "All the engineers [who] perished at their posts" (26). The same was by no means always true of the Chinese deck hands and, especially, the Javanese deck passengers bound for Batavia, who were accused of rushing the lifeboats and thus "depriving women and children of the means of escape" ("Top ics of the Day", Townsville Herald, 8 March, 5). (A more detached analy sis might suggest that deck passengers and deck hands are rather more likely to survive than saloon passengers and those in the engine room

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GRAHAM LAW 91 when a vessel goes down so quickly during the hours of darkness.) There was a particular preoccupation with this question in Townsville, where the use of cheap imported labor in the sugar plantations was an explosive political issue dividing the white bourgeoisie and proletariat, and thus even the campaign for separation from Brisbane was laid aside for a few issues. The "Topics of the Day" column in the Herald of March 8 attempted to maintain a political balance, but nevertheless concluded that "the coloured men on the Quetta behaved very badly" and agreed "with the recent decision that these mail steamers shall in future be manned solely by Europeans". Here, we can see in action many of the ideological materials that were to enable the emerging nation to move so quickly and resolutely towards the institution of its notoriously illiberal "White Aus tralia Policy."21 On the other hand, in the same article the Townsville paper argued from the loss of the Quetta that Australian girls would ben efit from a rather different plan of education and code of manners to their cousins back in Britain. It saw the cumbersome outer clothes worn by the ladies on their journey back, together with their reluctance to remove them even in the direst straits, as contributory factors in their deaths. Here a contrast was drawn with the Javanese female passengers who wore light cotton clothing - and knew how to swim. The Herald thus con cluded that, for girls as well as boys, lessons in "the art of natation" would be "of more practical value than many of the subjects taught in State Schools." Here, in contrast, are some of the ideological materials that helped gradually to bring about female suffrage in Australia well in advance of the mother country, with the first major step taken in 1894 when women were granted the franchise in liberal South Australia, and the process completed in 1908 when the more conservative State of Victo ria passed a similar measure. Universal adult suffrage, of course, was delayed until long after it was admitted at Westminster, and the franchise was granted to all Aboriginal people only with the amendment of the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 1962.

The ground of my argument is that serial fiction appearing in the pages of periodicals, and more especially in the columns of newspapers, speaks volumes about the shared identities of its initial readership in a way that is rarely possible when novels are published in book form. This - together with the egalitarian assumption that publication among, say, reports of shipping disasters, local cricket scores, and soap advertisements, does not of itself imply literary inferiority - has indeed been one of the principles underlying the work of the post-war generation of students of early Aus tralian literature led by Elizabeth Webby. Understandably, these were

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 92 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:4 Winter 2004 not insights that were readily available to scholars pioneering the field at the turn of the twentieth century. In The Development of Australian Lit erature (1898), Henry Gyles Turner established his Australian fictional canon by "leaving out of count the hundreds of stories that began and ended their career in the local magazines and weekly journals" (78).23 In The Cultivation of Literature in Australia (1902), Thomas G. Tucker took the procedure to its logical conclusion. There he instructs Australian authors to shun "all deliberate quest of local colour" (23), since colonial culture manifests "a lamentable deficiency, which renders the prospect of the higher literature among us very remote" (37). However, it is regrettable that the insights gained by Webby and her colleagues are not taken account of in that accessible and influential account of relations between center and periphery in the nineteenth century fiction market, Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel. The omission is doubly surprising given Moretti's indebtedness to Bene dict Anderson. While it is true that Imagined Communities never explic itly acknowledges that news and novels often occupied the same publishing space, Moretti's unwillingness to conceive of narrative fiction except in the shape of bound volumes held in national libraries represents a far more serious oversight. One consequence is that he overdoes the centripetal forces governing the production of narrative and considerably underestimates the ability of the periphery to write back (Moretti, 170 1).24 At the same time, overlooking the massive expansion, in both geo graphic and demographic terms, of the role of the roman feuilleton in the nineteenth century allows Moretti to strip away the material publishing context in which most fiction produced at the periphery first appeared, and thus to treat it with a superiority bordering on disdain:

In the case of the less powerful literatures (which means: almost all literatures, inside and outside Europe)... the success of the Anglo-French model on the inter national market implies an endless series of compromise formations; and fragile, unstable formations: impossible programs, failures, and all the rest ... And is this all? "Half-baked" replicas of a few successful models all the world over? Almost always, yes. Almost. (Moretti 194-5)

Here, "half-baked" is especially troubling. As the relevant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary attest, though examples of the culinary meta phor can be found rather earlier, it is one which gains considerably in res onance in Anglo-India, where it corresponds to cutcha, a slang term deriving from the Hindi meaning "immature" or "underdone", as opposed to pukka, "ripe" and "ready". One of the earliest extended uses of the pairing is found in the local building industry, where cutcha refers to makeshift constructions of sun-dried mud as opposed to permanent

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GRAHAM LAW 93 pukka edifices of kiln-baked brick. By Kipling's time, the social-Darwin ian overtones are unmistakable.25 Whether he is aware of these reso nances or not, Moretti's casual employment of the term "half-baked" here suggests a collusion with a cultural hierarchy that fits more comfort ably with the imperious world view of a Thomas Tucker around a hun dred years back. The only peripheral fictional constructions granted solidity and permanence under Moretti's parsimonious terms of excep tion are the novel of ideas in Russia, and Latin American magic realism, while the fiction of the rest of the outer world, with colonial Australia included, is condemned to the dust heap. I hope I have done enough here to suggest that seeking out nineteenth-century newspaper novels which "savour of the Australian soil" does not inevitably represent a lack of higher vision or an offence against good taste. Waseda University

NOTES

i Practical constraints largely limit the focus to New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, that is, the territory of the "old colony" of New South Wales as it existed up until the mid-century. 2 For recent studies of the seminal role of the Illustrated London News, see Sin nema, and Plunkett. 3 We should perhaps note the even earlier example of the short-lived Illustrated Australian Magazine (1850-2), which attempted to emulate the pictorial qual ity of the Illustrated London News, though it in fact assumed the format of a monthly magazine. 4 Lurline Stuart has analyzed the reasons underlying the failure of both the Illustrated Melbourne News and the Illustrated Australian Magazine in "Colonial Periodicals." We should also note here another, and longer-lived, competitor following the model of the Illustrated London News, the Mel bourne Illustrated Australian News, which ran as a monthly from 1864 until 1896. 5 The Herald, Argus, and Courier had all started up earlier as weekly news papers under slightly different titles: the Sydney Herald in 1831, and the Melbourne Argus and Moret?n Bay Courier, both in 1846. 6 In the case of the Age and the Courier, the daily counterparts continued to carry literary material in their weekend editions. 7 The Australian Journal switched to monthly publication in 1869 - see Johnson-Woods Index, 17. 8 Generally on the development of the weekly press in nineteenth-century Queensland, see Tiffin. 9 By then there was also a companion daily, the Townsville Daily Bulletin.

This content downloaded from 133.9.1.20 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:52:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 94 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:4 Winter 2004 io The novel was syndicated by Tillotson's - see Trade Ledgers, Tillotsons's Fic tion Bureau records II. Serial appearances have been traced from early 1892 in both the English provinces (the Ashton Reporter and the Birmingham Weekly Mercury) and the Australian colonies (the Australian Town and Country Jour nal and the Leader) - see Johnson-Woods Index, 120. 11 As with the British provincial press, there remains a great deal to be learned about both the quantity and quality of the fiction carried in Australian colo nial newspapers. Building on the work of Elizabeth Morrison (in "Newspaper and Novelists" and "Serial Fiction"), Toni Johnson-Woods's recent Index to Serials represents a major advance, but it can cover only the major city jour nals and is forced to exclude shorter fiction. 12 For a brief history of the company, see A Retrospect 1853-1903. 13 Personal communication from Elizabeth Morrison, who has traced a number of similar examples. 14 Russell seems also to have been read in volume form in the Australian colo nies. Around 7000 fiction titles published before 1915 survive from the Mechanics Institute Collection, Launceston, Tasmania, founded in 1842. The catalogue reveals the following figures for titles by leading women sensational ists: Ellen Wood 31; Mary Elizabeth Braddon 27; Florence Marry at 16; Rhoda Broughton 13; Dora Russell 8. The Dora Russell titles include the first book edition of A Bitter Birthright from Hurst and Blackett in 1891. The collection is now held at the Launceston Reference Library, State Library of Tasmania (see "Popular Fiction Author Catalogue"). 15 A counter-irony might be noted in the fact that a second German princess, Elizabeth von Wied, Queen of Romania from 1881, was at this time one of Tillotsons's most distinguished client authors, under her nom deplume of "Carmen Sylva." See Notebook A, Tillotsons's Fiction Bureau records I. 16 The attribution is by Victor Crittenden whose edition of the novel appeared from Mulini Press, Canberra (1992); the tale was previously attributed to Eliza Winstanley (Johnson-Woods Index, 82). 17 See Trollope's travelogue Australia and New Zealand (2 vols; 1873) an(ltne serial story Harry Heathcote ofGangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life (The Graphic, Christmas 1873). We should note, however, that Trollope was by not the first metropolitan author to work in this way. William Howitt had pub lished^ Boy's Adventures in the Wilds of Australia (1854) and Tallangetta, the Squatter's Home (1857), on his return to London following a two-year stay in New South Wales. 18 On Braddon's popularity in the Australian colonies, see Johnson-Woods "Mary Elizabeth Braddon." Though Braddon never visited Australia, her brother Edward Braddon emigrated to Tasmania in 1878, serving as premier of the colony from 1894-9 and taking a leading role in the movement towards federation. Slightly earlier, while serving as Tasmanian Agent General in Lon don, Edward Braddon had written an article in response to those of David

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Christie Murray (see Braddon). Mary Braddon's own interest in the life of the colonies is apparent in scenes found in, most notably, To the Bitter End (1873) and Wyllard's W?r?(i885). 19 For example, in the Australian Town and Country Journal, 22 March 1890, the opening seven pages were given over to advertising; although the second page was devoted to a pictorial display for Pears' Soap, the remaining six contained classified ads for Shipping, Missing Friends, Auctions, etc. The final eight pages were also devoted to advertisements, mainly of smaller display type. 20 For example, in the Illustrated Sydney News, 20 March 1890, there were "Answers to Correspondents" accompanying the "Art in the Home" column (12), while on pages 10-11 there appeared "'On the Wing' Sydney Visitors List", a list of several hundred names with affiliations (city, ship, organization) based on cards handed in at the Town Hall or major hotels. 21 For example, The Townsville Herald, 4 January 1890, devoted a column to subscription details and a geographically arranged list of agents, with Gordon & Gotch featured prominently both inside and outside Queensland. 22 The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was one of the first pieces of legisla tion passed after federation, while local regulations restricting Chinese immi gration went back to the time of the Gold Rush. 23 We should note that Turner later adds the following comment: "Few Austra lians are aware of the large amount of serial fiction that has been published in the pages of the numerous magazines which have struggled through a che quered and generally brief existence during the last quarter of a century, in the weekly journals of the chief cities and in the supplements to the country papers. Amongst the hundred of stories so published, it is no exaggeration to say that a dozen, or perhaps twenty, would, at an earlier period in the history of fiction and under more favourable circumstances of circulation, have made a permanent reputation for their authors." (302-3). 24 A considerably more nuanced analysis of the forces of centralization can be found in Love. 25 For example, in the words of the narrator of "Thrown Away" from Plain Tales from the Hills (Calcutta, 1888), Imperial India itself has become "a slack, kutcha country where all men work with imperfect instruments".

WORKS CITED

ARCHIVAL SOURCES Tillotsons's Fiction Bureau records I, in the possession of Michael Turner, Bodle ian Library, Oxford. Tillotsons's Fiction Bureau records II, Bolton Evening News Archive, Bolton Central Library, Greater Manchester. PUBLICATIONS

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(Items from colonial newspapers are cited fully in the text or notes but excluded here.) A Retrospect 1853-1903: A Brief Description of Fifty Year' Progress in the History of Gordon & Gotch. [Melbourne]: Gordon & Gotch. [1903]. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso, 1991. Australasian Newspaper Directory: Advertisers' and Subscribers' Guide. 3 edi tion. Melbourne: Gordon & Gotch, 1892. Braddon, Edward. "Mr Murray and the Antipodeans." In Contemporary Review 6 (December 1891) 801-16. Johnson-Woods, Toni. Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers: Nineteenth Century. Canberra: Mulini Press, 2001. ?. "Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Australia: Queen of the Colonies." In Beyond Sensa tion: Mary Elizabeth in Context, edited Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, 111-25. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000. ?. "The Virtual Reading Communities of the London lournal, the New York Ledger and the Australian lournal." In Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, edited Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein, 350-61. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Law, Graham. Indexes to Fiction in "The Illustrated London News" (1842-1901) and "The Graphic" (1869-1901). [Victorian Fiction Research Guide 29]. St Lucia: Victorian Fiction Research Unit, University of Queensland, 2001. ?. "Women's Sensation Narrative and Newspaper Fiction: On Dora Russell's Beneath the Wave" In (Waseda University Law Society) Humanitas 42 (March 2004) 1-21. ?. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Love, Harold. "Modelling Centre-Periphery Relationships in Book Publication and Information Transfer." Paper delivered at the SHARP Regional Confer ence, "Books and Empire: Textual Production, Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial Countries," Women's College, University of Syd ney, 30 Jan.-1 Feb. 2003. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Morrison, Elizabeth. "Newspaper and Novelists in Late Colonial Australia: Serial Fiction in the Melbourne Age, 1872-1899." M.A. Thesis, Monash University, 1983. ?. "Serial Fiction in Australian Colonial Newspapers." In Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, 306-24, Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1995. Murray, David Christie. "The Antipodeans." In Contemporary Review 6 (August-October 1891) 293-312; 450-468; 608-23. Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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"Popular Fiction Author Catalogue," Launceston Reference Library: Victorian and Edwardian Collection, State Library of Tasmania. URL: http:// www.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/vande. Last visited: i Jan. 2004. Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the "Illustrated London News. " Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Stuart, Lurline. Nineteenth Century Australian Periodicals: An Annotated Bibli ography. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979. ?. "Colonial Periodicals: Patterns of Failure." In Bibliographical Society of Aus tralia and New Zealand Bulletin 13 (1989) 1-10. Sussex, Lucy, and Elizabeth Gibson. Mary Helena Fortune: A Bibliography. [Vic torian Fiction Research Guide 27]. St Lucia: Victorian Fiction Research Unit, University of Queensland, [1998]. Tiffin, Chris. "Literature and Politics in the Queensland Colonial Press." In Vic torian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic, edited by Barbara Garlick and Marga ret Harris, 141-54. St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1998. Tucker, Thomas G. The Cultivation of Literature in Australia. Melbourne: Echo Publishing Co., 1902. Turner, Henry Gyles, and Alexander Sutherland. The Development of Australian Literature. London: Longmans, Green, 1898. Walbank, Felix Alan. Queens of the Circulating Library: Selections from Victorian Lady Novelists, 1850-1900. London: Evans Brothers, 1950. Walker, William. Australian Literature. Sydney: Reading & Wellbank, 1864. Webby, Elizabeth Anne. "Literature and the Reading Public in Australia 1800 1850: a study of the growth and differentiation of a colonial literary culture during the earlier nineteenth century." Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1973 Westall, William. "Newspaper Fiction." In Lippincott's Monthly Magazine 45 (Jan. 1890)77-88.

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