Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examning writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.

This chapter argues that the 1850s Australian gold rushes profoundly challenged the stadialist developmental logic underpinning political economy and novelistic realism. An initial response, Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), cast gold digging in the language of romance, associated with financial speculation and social upheaval, and imagined the restoration of the stadialist norms of cultivation and culture. The emergence in Australia of the need for a new theory of subjectivity and society can be seen in W. E. Hearn’s Plutology: or, The Theory of the Efforts to Satisfy Human Wants (1864), which abandoned stadialism and labor in favor of a model of consumption based upon individual desire. The formal impact of such insights is also evident in works by metropolitan writers who had previously encountered the gold rushes. W. S. Jevons’ path-breaking “marginalist” Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s sensation novel John Caldigate (1878-79) both center upon and normativize a British subject defined by desire, and through this contribute to a newly deterritorialized understanding of British subjectivity.