Barbara Baynton has a small oeuvre and a large reputation. Her first volume of short fiction, Bush Studies (1902), included just six stories, five of them published for the first time in that book. Bush Studies was highly regarded by Baynton's contemporaries--writers, reviewers and critics, and the reading public--for producing what was then seen to be a deeply felt and finely observed representation of life in small bush towns and on lonely selections (small holdings taken up in the latter part of the nineteenth century as the settlement of Australia expanded beyond the better farming and grazing land that had been acquired by earlier and luckier settlers). Baynton's other writing did not have the same impact. Human Toll, the novel she published in 1907, found a few enthusiasts for its extraordinary narrative and symbolic power, and for its equally extraordinary psychological insights into lives marked by social, physical, and sexual...