THE BULK OF GRAHAM’S most outspoken anti-imperial works were focused around 1895–6, where, apart from ‘Fraudesia Magna’, they were confined to small circulation periodicals, a pamphlet, and a provincial newspaper known for its radical opinions, where they would have been little read, and had no discernible influence other than to attract Garnett to him. There was, however, a more subtle but related canon of work that found a wider readership, sketches set in exotic locations, which gave him more scope to develop his impressionistic skills, and which were a more consistent conduit for his views on the lasting impact of imperialism’s economic and cultural impositions.

It appears that it was from Ébélot that Graham, at least at the beginning, derived his inspiration. He did indeed use his own memories as a means of celebration, of documentation, but, more often, like Ébélot’s work, they were a means of communicating loss. If his anti-imperialist polemics dealt with the moral questions of conquest and annexation, these pieces would mourn the consequences of colonisation, and the advance of ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’, and the subsequent passing of uniqueness, of customs, of whole populations, as well as the loss of habitat. An excellent example of this was his early sketch ‘Un Angelito’ (1899), which described the gaucho custom of displaying the corpses of recently deceased infants: