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No Australian author can hope to extricate his hero or heroine, however pressing the emergency may be, by means of a spring panel and a subterranean passage, or such like relics of feudal barons … There are no ruins for that rare old plant, the ivy green, to creep over and make his meal of. No storied windows, richly dight, cast a dim, religious light over any Australian premises. With tongue firmly in cheek, Sinnett nails down the case. Apart from what he terms ‘the Aboriginal market’ and its ‘associations’, which he passes quickly over, there is ‘to be obtained in Australia not a single local reference a century old’. The problem, as Sinnett identifies it – and he was not the first and certainly not the last to conjure with it – was that Australia had no lore, no tradition, no myths and legends, in short, no rich past for a writer to call upon. In his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), Frederick Sinnett conducts an inquiry ‘into the feasibility of writing Australian novels or, to use other words, into the suitability of Australian life and scenery for the novel writers’ purpose and, secondly, into the right manner of their treatment’.
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