Who is Guy Boothby that the Australian author of My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin should write like him and Rudyard Kipling admire him? Boothby is one of the many Australian authors who sold millions of books but who have remained largely ignored by literary scholars. While “literary” fiction and its authors should be celebrated, they represent only a portion of the Australian fiction landscape. This chapter documents one century of Australian popular fiction — popular is that fiction designated “genre” fiction, the crime, adventure, romance, and western novels that achieved widespread appeal and sold millions of copies in Australia and overseas. This chapter begins with the nineteenth century because Australian popular fiction is inexorably tied to fiction serialized in newspapers — the most common form of publishing in Australia.

The Colonial Period, 1860–1899

From the eighteenth century, “Australian” readers found their fiction in newspapers (especially weekly newspapers), and/or magazines (see Webby and Morrison). Not surprisingly, most of the early fiction came from “home,” the United Kingdom; what is generally not known is that a considerably amount of popular fiction also came from the United States and most particularly from the penny storypapers such as the New York Ledger. Indeed, since the earliest days of mass-produced fiction, the periodical world was much smaller than the geographical one; it was possible to read French fiction in New York, American fiction in Melbourne, and Australian fiction in London. But by the mid-nineteenth century, Australian periodicals increasingly offered material written by Australians for Australians.