‘Home’ was complicated in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. Throughout the century, domestic fiction of Britain's ‘antipodal’ colonies reflected and at times struggled with shifting definitions of settler identity. The resulting ambiguities created an opportunity not only to articulate anxieties about colonial settlement, but also to renegotiate attitudes to the home, homemaking and women's changing roles. Settler domesticity was variously conceptualized by ideologies of empire, in emigration propaganda and within ideals of transportable ‘English’ domestic values. The realization of this imported domesticity, it was often pointed out, could be crucially limited by the realities of everyday life in the bush, at remote stations as well as in the colonies’ rapidly expanding urban and suburban spaces. Most significantly, however, ‘home’ did not only, or even necessarily, mean the weatherboard cottage that had proudly been decorated and made homely, and which might sport china vases, prints taken from British newspapers and magazines, rows of well-thumbed books and perhaps even a piano, successfully shipped overseas. Nor did it easily encompass a landscape that remained, for many a settler, an unfamiliar and at times hostile environment. ‘Back home’ long continued to refer to the places that emigrants had come from, where settlers' families originated, or with a growing vagueness, to an imperial centre that many nineteenth century Australians and New Zealanders had never seen or perhaps only briefly visited. The nationalist movements of the late nineteenth century changed and further complicated prevailing attitudes.