There is much to admire, and much that still baffles, in the life and writings of Alexander Harris. He has rightly been praised for his informative descriptions and direct prose, especially in Settlers and Convicts; or, Recollections of Sixteen Years' Labour in the Australian Backwoods (1847), which reviewers agreed was "the best picture of life in Australia yet written," while his novel The Emigrant Family, or The Story of an Australian Settler (1849) is often cited as a seminal colonial romance. No less successful was Harris's faith-imbued, autobiographical writing. Testimony to the Truth; or, The Autobiography of an Atheist (1848) was singled out by the British government as matter fit for the libraries of ships, and Charlotte Brontë ranked it second only to the Bible as a source of consolation "in some states of my mind." This book was the work of a fervent convert, who two years before his...