In seeing Rolf Boldrewood as an ‘Australian’ writer we lose sight of the fact that Australian writing in the second half of the nineteenth century was locked into the broader arrangements of publishing throughout the British Empire. The text of Robbery Under Arms – first as a serial in Australia, then as a three-decker novel published in London, and later as a one-volume novel in Macmillan's Colonial Library – evolved over a number of years at a crucial period in the writing of imperial adventure/romance. Robert Louis Stevenson's landmark adventure novel Treasure Island was serialised in Young Folks in 1881–2 and published as a one volume novel by Cassell in 1883, the same year that Robbery Under Arms was serialised in the Sydney Mail. Stimulated by the success of Treasure Island, H. Rider Haggard published King Solomon's Mines in 1885, then She and Allan Quatermain, both in 1887. The publication of these novels sparked an intense debate in the late 1880s over the ethics of adventure which had an important bearing on writing in and about Australia.

The ethical dilemmas posed by adventure tales arose from the requirement that they suture together conflicting models of masculinity. On the one hand, pluckiness of spirit, physical prowess and military derring-do were admired as the traits of imperial boyhood.

In her essay ‘The Politics of Respectability’, Marilyn Lake argues that in the 1880s and 1890s the Sydney Bulletin and other organs of ‘the men's press’ actively promoted ‘a separatist model of masculinity’, praising mateship and male freedom, and warning of the dangers of feminine culture, including the emasculating effects of home and family life. Although Lake has been criticised for promoting another historicist ‘Legend of the Nineties’, her work remains valuable as a description of ‘the contest between men and women at the end of the nineteenth century for control of the national culture’. In this chapter I want to take up the argument advanced by Fiona Giles and Susan Sheridan, among others, that the genre of romance fiction was an important site of that contest for historical agency.

My particular interest is in the lost-race romance, whose narrative conventions focus on changing definitions of gender and power by bringing into conflict those two characters in my title, the New Woman and the Coming Man. Although the lost-race romance was essentially a masculine and metropolitan form, it also attracted authors from widely differing locations in the broader imperial culture, including a number of Australian men and, surprisingly perhaps, at least one Australian woman author.

In his book Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls for a new ethnography of the borderlands between cultures. Under classic norms, he argues, ‘the borders between nations, classes, and cultures were endowed with a curious kind of hybrid invisibility’. Ethnographers now look ‘less for homogeneous communities than for the border zones within and between them’. These cultural border zones, Rosaldo argues, are always in motion.

In this chapter I use the thematics of travel and border zones to frame a reading of a group of adventure novels that construct discursive boundaries between Australia, Asia and the Pacific immediately before and after Federation. They are Alexander Macdonald's The Island Traders (1909), Ambrose Pratt's The Big Five (1911) and Louis Becke's The Pearl Divers of Roncador Reef (1908). These texts inhabit a number of border zones. They were written by travellers who often lived on the margins of respectability. Their characters are also on the move: on horseback, under sail, under steam, and even in the new motor cars and airships. They travel in the mythologised borderlands of the new Australian nation: in the Northern Territory, Far North Queensland, South-East Asia and Melanesia.

In developing notions of the frontier, adventure stories tend to follow classic norms, affirming what Peter Hulme has called ‘the boundaries of civility’: they make visible the maintenance of discursive boundaries concerned with race, nation and gender.

Writing the Colonial Adventure concerns the discursive construction of race, gender and nation in Anglo-Australian fiction during the period 1875 to 1914. My starting point is the simultaneous emergence in Britain, from the 1870s, of the New Imperialism and a revived form of romance, the novel of imperial adventure. It was the task of the New Imperialism as an ideology and the adventure novel as an ideological form to resolve contradictions in the lived experience of imperialism, usually by inscribing the male reader in tales of regenerative violence on the colonial frontier. Australia was not simply waiting as a subject to be exploited by writers of the new romance. From the 1870s down to 1914, Australia, along with India, Africa and the Islands was actively constructed as a preferred site of adventure, with all the ethical and political ambiguity that the term adventure came, almost immediately, to imply. In Writing the Colonial Adventure I examine the consequences of thinking about Australia and the Pacific as places where such adventure was possible for English people.

It is a commonplace to remark that the late Victorian and Edwardian years were a golden age of crime fiction. This chapter relates the flourishing of the genre at that time to the imperial context by arguing that it was an important site for the narration of both national and imperial identities. It is perhaps for this reason that a number of writers whose work had strong colonial connections, such as Fergus Hume and Guy Boothby, became internationally best-selling authors, rivalling in sales the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. As John M. MacKenzie observes, the detective novel burgeoned precisely at that moment in the history of empire when the internal conflicts contained by the concept of ‘the nation’ were externalised on to the larger field of ‘the empire’. By the same argument, the fractures in imperial identity manifest in the mounting international tensions leading to World War I were expressed in narratives of domestic crime and conflict. The readings in this chapter move from the ‘internal’ conflicts enacted in Fergus Hume's best-selling detective novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which is set in Melbourne, to their enactment on the imperial stage in the Doctor Nikola novels of Guy Boothby.

In Rule of Darkness Patrick Brantlinger observes that much late-Victorian and Edwardian writing has an elegiac quality, ‘mourning the loss of adventure, heroism, [and] true nobility’. The late stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and those of Conrad, for example, consistently express the diminution of chances for heroism in the modern world. There is ‘a felt contradiction between trade and the heroic, aristocratic significance of adventure’, resulting in narratives that link together ‘imperial domination, the profit motive, moral degeneracy, parasitism, and ultimately murder or attempted murder’. Brantlinger is describing what amounts to a repudiation of adventure and imperialism from within. In his late stories, such as ‘The Beach of Falesa’ and ‘The Ebb-Tide’, Robert Louis Stevenson is still writing from within the adventure tradition, but the ‘romance’ of Treasure Island has collapsed under the ‘realism’ – and the imperial politics – of life in Samoa. The collapse of the heroic attitude to adventure, and with it the ideology of imperialism, is like the return of the repressed – and the repressed in adventure, as Joseph Bristow observes, is realism.

This final chapter of Writing the Colonial Adventure deals with the apparent collapse of the adventure mode from within as the symptom of a profound malaise in imperialism that would culminate in World War I.

As John Seward, the psychiatrist in Bram Stoker's Dracula, struggles to understand in scientific terms the effects of vampirism on the female subject, his colleague, Professor Van Helsing, recommends that he turn to the adjacent discipline of psychic research:

Van Helsing is trying to convince his colleague that in dealing with irregularities of female behaviour, the science of psychic research has an explanatory power at least equal to those of psychiatry and medicine. What Van Helsing cannot see is that all three discourses played a constitutive and not simply a descriptive role in the proper acquisition of gendered subjectivity. The same may be said of the genre of popular fiction to which Dracula in part belongs: the occult romance.

It is not by chance that Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing are discussing problems in the regulation of female sexuality, since this was a subject to which writers of occult fiction turned obsessively during the final decades of the nineteenth century.

From the time of its first publication in 1885, King Solomon's Mines was the most popular, the most successful and the most widely imitated adventure/romance of the period. In his biography of Henry Rider Haggard, Morton Cohen describes the novel's impact on its first generation of readers:

There are a number of recurring plot functions that define the genre's overall shape. Typically, a group of English adventurers plans a journey into unexplored regions to revive their flagging spirits and fortunes. At or near their destination they encounter a relatively advanced white, or partly white, civilisation presided over by a queen, and living in caves or underground. In addition to this fictional lost race, the adventurers also meet more realistic native peoples who are often divided into warring factions. If one of the Englishmen falls in love with a native woman of either the lost or the native race, she usually dies.

My starting point in Writing the Colonial Adventure has been the emergence in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s of a new generation of romance writers – including H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling – whose adventure novels expressed that strange mix of confidence and disillusionment that historians now identify as characteristic of the New Imperialism. If adventure tales were, as Martin Green once argued, ‘the energising myth of English imperialism’, they also expressed anxieties about the decline of empire, the relapse into barbarism, and what was perceived by some as the feminising of British culture in the years before World War I. As Bernard Porter observes, ‘“imperialism” … was, for Britain, a symptom and an effect of her decline in the world, not of [her] strength’.

In framing Australian writing of the period within and against this context, I have been mindful of Edward Said's arguments, particularly in Culture and Imperialism (1993), that literary criticism has tended to interpret texts too narrowly, using such explanatory categories as the aesthetic and the national, at the expense of understanding their imbrication in the broader context of imperialism. As Elizabeth Morrison argues, Australian literature ‘from the late 1880s … has customarily been critiqued as a phenomenon sui generis. [It was], however, … part of a wider process, in which the role of London-based publishers was crucial, involving their reaching out beyond the British Isles, to the outposts of Empire, to procure promising texts.’

Despite the implications of the Lone Hand's cover illustration of February 1909 – in which the Northern Territory was represented as a blank – the paranoid responses to this ‘no man's land’ discussed in the previous chapter suggest that it was not a blank space at all, but a difficult site of discursive boundaries already inscribed by other, positive forces. The national self is constructed at its boundaries by the always ineffectual exclusion of its others, and nothing is more calculated to disclose the anxiety attendant upon that process than the invasion of boundaries. As Chandra Mohanty observes, ‘It is not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the centre’.

The present chapter deals with fiction of the first Commonwealth decade in which the new nation is invaded and its population emasculated by Asian powers. I am concerned not with the historical presence of Asian people in Australia's north, so much as the paranoia their presence produced in texts concerned with the construction of discursive boundaries. Alice Jardine has argued that paranoia about the loss of boundaries is a particularly masculine anxiety, and the Australian discourse on nation, as Kay Schaffer and others have shown, is a distinctively masculine construction. The texts of imagined invasion are paranoid, masculine texts in which those others, upon whose exclusion the myths of the new nation depend, contest the centre by breaching their boundedness.

The significance of captivity narratives in American literature and popular culture has long been recognised, and is the subject of numerous books and scholarly articles. The principal study of their genesis in American literature is Richard Slotkin's monumental Regeneration Through Violence (1973). Slotkin was interested in the way archetypal narrative forms emerge under determinate circumstances in a nation's history to be incorporated into its art and literature. His definition of the American archetype as it emerged in the late seventeenth century is worth quoting at some length:

If the book-sellers' catalogues and the holdings of colonial libraries are any indication, the most popular novelist in the Australian colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century was Sir Walter Scott, whose novels were imported in their thousands. Scott wrote little that was directly about the empire, but his depictions of the Scottish Highlands were resonant with implications for England's colonies, past and present. This goes some way toward accounting for his remarkable popularity in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Following James Fenimore Cooper's example in America, the Australian writer Thomas Alexander Browne modelled his career, his dozen or so novels and even his pen-name ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ on a deliberate filiation with Sir Walter Scott. In this chapter it is argued that ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ found in Scott's novels a version of the adventure tale which had a shaping influence on his own fictional construction of Australia in the years before Federation. That formal influence is particularly apparent in The Miner's Right (serialised in 1880), his first major novel before Robbery Under Arms.

Narrative, as Fredric Jameson argues, is a socially symbolic act, a ‘form of reasoning’ about experience and society, whose task is to produce fictional resolutions to real social contradictions.