In 1898, Henry Gyles Turner, a banker and litterateur, and Alexander Sutherland, a schoolteacher and journalist, both from Melbourne, published The Development of Australian Literature. This opened with the first of many attempts to provide “A General Sketch of Australian Literature”, which devoted forty-seven pages to poetry, about thirty to fiction and eighteen to “general literature”: mainly history, biography, and works of travel and exploration. The bulk of Turner and Sutherland's book, however, consisted of biographies of the three Australian writers whom they thought were of greatest significance: poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall and novelist Marcus Clarke.

Turner and Sutherland's privileging of poetry, inclusion of what we would now call "non-fiction" and exclusion of more popular genres like children's writing and drama established a view of the terrain of Australian literature which was to hold good for at least the first half of the twentieth century. Further introductory accounts were provided by Nettie Palmer in 1924, the American historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan in 1929, and H.M. Green in 1930. In 1961 Green finally followed this up by producing his monumental two-volume A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied. As its title indicates, Green's account was by far the most comprehensive yet to appear, not only discussing the "pure" categories of poetry, fiction and drama, but a very wide range of "applied" works, from newspapers and magazines through to works of philosophy and anthropology. Indeed, for the period it covers - 1789-1950 - Green's is effectively a history of the Australian book and so has proved of continuing value as a work of reference.