In the last decade of the nineteenth century as Australia moved towards Federation, fiction writers began to depart from the generic conventions of romance and melodrama, and from the construction of the reader as essentially a British consumer looking for exotic and colourful tales of the colonies. Writers like Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy were more interested in depicting what was “Australian” from an insider's point of view; the Australian landscape and ideas about the Australian “national character” moved to the foreground in fiction around the turn of the century.

This, at least, is how things appear to be. The truth is more complicated: in this as in all eras, the kind of fiction that had the best chances of survival, in both the short and the long term, was the kind encouraged by editors and publishers. As Susan Sheridan and others have argued, during this period women writers of "romance" fiction were edged out of the Australian picture by writers whose work addressed more overtly the issues around nationhood. Barbara Baynton, if anything an anti-romance writer, survived this particular cut but still had her work heavily edited, the better to fit prevailing ideas about what it ought to be. In turn-of-the-century Australia where editors and publishers were scarce, the few who did exist had disproportionate power over what sort of literature would be published, read and valued in its own society. An obvious example is the legendary A.G. Stephens of the Bulletin, an inspired and interventionist editor, later a publisher, with strong views about what Australian literature was and ought to be.