Rosa Campbell Praed published ‘A Daughter of Greater Britain: The Australian Girl’ in the English periodical Girl's Realm in 1899. Although Praed asserts that Australian girls are similar to English girls, she points out that bush girls are unique in their refinement despite the uncivilized nature of their environment: ‘She may be poorly educated, she may run almost wild, hobnob with blacks, ride after cattle, and scrub, cook and clean … but withal, the squatter's daughter is almost always a natural little gentlewoman’. Praed's perspective is similar to the admiring depictions of Australian girls in British girls’ fiction of the period, which frequently exult in their physical strength, bravery, horse-riding skills and heroism while dispelling ideas of colonial savagery. Yet such imagined freedoms and heroics inspired by colonial life, enacted effortlessly and without conflict with feminine domestic expectations, were distinct from the lived experience of Australian girls at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.