Australia Imagined : Views from the British Periodical Press 1800-1900

The articles in this anthology are British 'talk' about their Australian colony, a conversation between the British press and its readership about what is taking place 'out there'.

But the conversation is overheard, because the periodicals are also purchased in Australia by the colonisers, and so speculations and conjectures about retaining an essentially British nationality are responded to in debates that move back and forth...Australians have, until very recently, taken their British inheritance for granted.

Only now are we beginning to think and write about it.

This timely anthology, full of surprises, will stimulate ideas and discussion.

It is a collection of writing, and some cartoons, from the nineteenth-century British periodical press - which was the popular press of its day.

The pieces range from articles and book reviews to short stories and poetry, and practical advice to intending emigrants.

Some of the writers are anonymous, and others bear familiar and illustrious names: Charles Dickens, Caroline Chisholm, William Thackeray, Henry Parkes, Louisa Lawson.

At first, Australia was seen as an inferior, impossibly remote, antipodean place. And when the seeds of an independent political and cultural identity did begin to sprout, that identity held tightly to ideas of Britishness - to 'Home'.

Readers will be surprised at the variety of views expressed here.

A comic piece written just weeks after the first colonists arrived at the Swan River lampoons their pastoral ambitions and recommends the cultivation of literature instead. And there is trenchant criticism of the colonial position on land rights and of the prevailing male ethos.

Australia in the English Imagination is a rich source indeed.

It presents some of the earliest blueprints for Australian identity, and raises issues - such as water resources, the status of the Aboriginal people, immigration, the dominance of sport in the national psyche - that Australians are still debating today.