Writing the Colonial Adventure concerns the discursive construction of race, gender and nation in Anglo-Australian fiction during the period 1875 to 1914. My starting point is the simultaneous emergence in Britain, from the 1870s, of the New Imperialism and a revived form of romance, the novel of imperial adventure. It was the task of the New Imperialism as an ideology and the adventure novel as an ideological form to resolve contradictions in the lived experience of imperialism, usually by inscribing the male reader in tales of regenerative violence on the colonial frontier. Australia was not simply waiting as a subject to be exploited by writers of the new romance. From the 1870s down to 1914, Australia, along with India, Africa and the Islands was actively constructed as a preferred site of adventure, with all the ethical and political ambiguity that the term adventure came, almost immediately, to imply. In Writing the Colonial Adventure I examine the consequences of thinking about Australia and the Pacific as places where such adventure was possible for English people.