SOURCE: Mitchell, Adrian. “Fiction.” In The Oxford History of Australian Literature, edited by Leonie Kramer, pp. 27-172. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Mitchell concentrates on the principal Australian novels written between 1844 and 1889, categorizing most of them as romances and appraising the language, style, plots, and themes in these works.

James Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh is something of an anomaly in the history of Australian fiction. Written apparently in 1844-45, it was first printed in an abridged and re-written form as a volume of memoirs in 1929, and then published in full in 1952. Since then it has established itself as an impressive early novel, for it is both interesting for the particular light it sheds on convict life, and attractive in its own right.

It is highly entertaining, lively, and not least because it works by a muddle of styles. Tucker's delight in the manufacture of fictions is...