Rachael Weaver – författare

A bad-tempered squatter is murdered in country Victoria and the local townsfolk are swept up in the rush to solve the crime. Will the squatter's beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?

Ellen Davitt's Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush is a feisty account of a murder investigation in the colonies that takes the twists and turns of English sensation fiction in a uniquely Australian direction. The novel brings an innovative forensic eye to its crime, reinventing the squatter romance as it takes its characters from country to city and from public house to courthouse. Force and Fraud was serialised in the popular, long-running Australian Journal from 2 September to 18 November 1865.

This edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.

‘a romance with a tight mystery plot . . . an assured whodunnit’

Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015)

‘Force and Fraud is pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia . . .’

Kate Watson, Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 (2012)

An Australian Bush Track (1896) is a dark novel, a colonial fantasy-adventure by author J.D. Hennessey in the style of H. Rider Haggard’s She. The story of an expedition into the Queensland interior by a group of speculators hot on the trail of fabulous wealth, its heroine is a charismatic young bushwoman equipped with heedless courage, a fast horse and a rifle. The novel is unrepressed in its representation of colonial racism and the driving forces behind it: frontier violence and dispossession, land acquisition and the relentless pursuit of wealth and resources.

An Australian Bush Track takes us on an expedition to unknown territories, encountering lost worlds and inland seas. Along the way there are amorous train journeys, coach chases, Aboriginal attacks, shoot outs and unwanted marriage proposals. The novel also gives us an Australian girl who charts her own route through a speculative male fantasy.

The edition includes an introductions by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.