My starting point in Writing the Colonial Adventure has been the emergence in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s of a new generation of romance writers – including H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling – whose adventure novels expressed that strange mix of confidence and disillusionment that historians now identify as characteristic of the New Imperialism. If adventure tales were, as Martin Green once argued, ‘the energising myth of English imperialism’, they also expressed anxieties about the decline of empire, the relapse into barbarism, and what was perceived by some as the feminising of British culture in the years before World War I. As Bernard Porter observes, ‘“imperialism” … was, for Britain, a symptom and an effect of her decline in the world, not of [her] strength’.

In framing Australian writing of the period within and against this context, I have been mindful of Edward Said's arguments, particularly in Culture and Imperialism (1993), that literary criticism has tended to interpret texts too narrowly, using such explanatory categories as the aesthetic and the national, at the expense of understanding their imbrication in the broader context of imperialism. As Elizabeth Morrison argues, Australian literature ‘from the late 1880s … has customarily been critiqued as a phenomenon sui generis. [It was], however, … part of a wider process, in which the role of London-based publishers was crucial, involving their reaching out beyond the British Isles, to the outposts of Empire, to procure promising texts.’