Frank Dalby Davison is best known for his sensitive animal fables and sharply observed short stories of life in bush settlements. Starting his career as an author quite late in life--his first novel appeared when he was thirty-eight--Davison quickly became one of the leading writers of the 1930s. He was a regular contributor of stories and reviews to periodicals such as The Bulletin, a pivotal figure in the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) and literary politics generally, and an artist whom novelist M. Barnard Eldershaw--pseudonym of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw--described in her Essays in Australian Fiction (1938) as "one of the most deeply significant figures in Australian literature today." Subsequent developments did not entirely bear out the optimism of this judgment: at the height of his fame, soon after his novel Dusty: The Story of a Sheepdog was published and won a competition in 1946, he left the city...