Parker launched his literary career in Australia, where he lived from mid 1886 until the end of 1889. He first won attention as an elocutionist, then was hired by the Morning Herald of Sydney, fulfilling assignments that brought him into direct contact with many phases of Australian life. In 1888, when he wrote his first play, a successful adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, which was performed for seven weeks, the Herald declared him "one of the most prominent writers in Australia."
Hoping to collect his Australian articles into a book (eventually published in 1892 as Round the Compass in Australia), Parker sailed early in 1890 for London, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. During the winter of 1890 he abandoned his efforts to publish his "Pike Pole Sketches on the Madawaska," several of which had previously appeared in the Sydney Mail, and instead began to work on the first of his many stories of the Canadian Northwest without ever having been there. That spring, while on a four-month visit to North America, he set aside several weeks to cross Canada by train, catching at least a glimpse of the region he was to use so successfully in his fiction.
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