SOURCE: Turner, Henry Gyles, and Alexander Sutherland. “Fiction.” In The Development of Australian Literature, pp. 78-106. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

In the following excerpt, Turner and Sutherland present an overview of Australian fiction from the later years of the nineteenth century, including the works of many notable female writers.

Excluding the numerous Australian stories which have been published in England by writers as yet unknown to fame, many of which may have been written in the Colonies, and leaving out of count the hundreds of stories that began and ended their career in the local magazines and weekly journals, a list of something over two hundred books and booklets devoted to Australian fiction may be catalogued. Some of these, published in Sydney, date back to the Forties, and acquired a certain local popularity, though their authors are long since forgotten. Bushrangers and convicts—the former generally an...