Settler Romances and the Australian Girl

With incisive and highly original readings of popular late nineteenth and early twentieth century settler adventure romances and popular ethnography, [Fictive Europeans] unmasks a deep-seated anxiety about the stability of concepts of whiteness and femininity in colonial Australia. It considers in detail Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, Cathrine Martin’s An Australian Girl, the adventure novels An Australian Bush Track by J D Hennessey and Rosa Campbell Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush and the ethnographic works of Katharine Langloh Parker. By taking as a starting point the perceived fictitiousness of white settler subjects, the book suggests that our current knowledge of British colonialism needs to be radically rethought.