The English colonisation of Australia from 1788 coincided with a vast increase within the parent culture of both general literacy and the ready availability of reading matter. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all of the white adult population of Australia could read and write, with the Australian colonies making up one of the major overseas markets for English publishers. By 1900, too, Australian readers were beginning to develop something of a taste for writing about Australia and about themselves. Though the local publishing industry was still printing very few books, the many newspapers and magazines, which had flourished since the 1860s in particular, regularly serialised novels by Australian authors, as well as printing poems, short stories and essays. Through the pages of the Sydney Bulletin, established in 1880 to rapidly become Australia's most popular magazine, writers like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson became well known. When, in the mid-1890s, volumes of their poems and stories were issued by the fledgling publishing house of Angus & Robertson, they sold in their thousands. Certain works of the earlier novelists Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood, which had also been serialised locally before achieving book publication in Britain, remained popular thanks to their adaptation for the stage. But for much of the nineteenth century, and indeed afterwards, Australian readers were mainly interested in books by English authors and Australian authors were largely dependent on the English publishing industry. This chapter will trace some of the major changes in what people read and wrote in Australia from 1788 to 1901, with a particular focus on nonfiction, fiction, poetry and writing for children.