Series: Australian Classics Library

An autobiographical novel set in the musical culture of 1890s Leipzig, where Richardson was a student from 1889 to 1892. An international cast of music students perform, debate, love, and drink in an intense and self-possessed world in Leipzig. This forms the context to Maurice's consuming obsession for the elusive Louise Dufrayer, an Australian femme fatale. Maurice Guest immerses readers...

The Workingman's Paradise is set in the context of the defeat of the shearer's and maritime strikes of the early 1890s. The novel is essential reading for an appreciation of the context of the rise of the union movement in Australia. William Lane was born in Bristol, England in 1861, and died in Auckland, New Zealand in 1917. In 1885,...

Tales of the Early Days (1894) is a collection of historical tales primarily concerned with the social abuses of the convict system of early Australia, such as 'Secret Society of the Ring,' set in the penal colony of Norfolk Island. Warung's stories are filled with imaginative truth and symbolic veracity, though he draws on documentary fact and social realism.

Caroline Leakey, writing as Oline Keese, published her first and only novel, The Broad Arrow, in 1859. It tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, a young middle-class woman lured into committing a forgery by her deceitful lover, Captain Norwell, and then wrongly convicted of infanticide. The novel's title describes the arrow that was stamped onto government property, including the clothes...

A timeless narrative of suspense and intrigue, Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) is the original Australian best-selling crime novel set in pre-Federation Melbourne. From the salons of the city's elite to the slums of Little Bourke St, the exquisitely plotted story follows the investigation, inquest, and trial of the murder of a little-known English migrant. At...

The Moods of Ginger Mick is a collection of poems about Ginger Mick, the larrikin hero of Gallipoli. On its release it was described by the Bulletin as'finely patriotic' and 'uniquely Australian'. It articulates the Anzac legend through the verses about Mick's feats in the Dardenelles and its values of courage, mateship, nationalism and sacrifice. This new edition of The...

The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses was published in 1895 and contains many of Paterson's most famous works, including the title poem which is regarded as one of the quintessential national narratives. Among other poems, the work includes 'Clancy of the Overflow', 'How Gilbert Died', 'A Bush Christening', 'In Defence of the Bush' and 'The Man from Ironbark'....

Oh Lucky Country (Paese fortunato) uses a first-person point of view to inflate migrant oppression to such absurdist proportions that its swirling narrative boils over into a maelstrom, washing away all migrant clichés. It is a witty, tragi-comic view of Australian society, culture and prejudice. Rosa Cappiello was born in Naples, Italy, in 1942. She migrated to Australia in 1971...

John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942) is Australia's great lyric poet and Collected Poems (1934), dedicated to Louise Dyer, bears his imprimatur. Encouraged by his editor, Robert Croll, Neilson was totally involved in its publication and promotion, selecting the poems, rewriting lines, adding new stanzas and restoring A.G. Stephen's earlier changes.