William Pember Reeves: Writing the Fortunate Isles
William Pember Reeves seldom appears in studies of Australians in London, for the simple reason that he was from New Zealand. Nonetheless, he was one of the leading ‘Anglo-Colonials’ in London in the late 1890s (Sinclair, WPR 247), and appears often in the pages of the British-Australasian and other journals interested in colonial life and topics. A journalist, politician, socialist, legislator, economist, diplomat, historian, and poet, he produced a good deal of writing in many genres. Most of his work was concerned with ‘writing New Zealand,’ or, in one of his favourite classical allusions, ‘the fortunate isles.’  This paper traces his political and literary career, arguing that his move from New Zealand to London allowed him not only to write with the clarity of distance and the authority of being published in the cultural metropolis, but to liaise or mediate between
‘The Sweet Uses of London’: The Careers ‘Abroad’ of Louise Mack (1870-1935) and Arthur Maquarie (1874–1955)
This paper examines the careers of two Australian writers who left Sydney for London at the end of the nineteenth century to explore questions of cultural, as well as literary, identity and affiliation. 
 
Louise Mack, as a poet, novelist, writer of romances, journalist and war correspondent, combined a fluid sense of national identity with a flexibility in writing across genres and readerships that makes her hard to categorise. Arthur Maquarie’s career as an Australian poet aspiring to fit into an essentially ‘English’ cultural niche provides a model of Anglo-Australianness that appears to fit a conservative model, called somewhat imprecisely from an Australian perspective, expatration - but which nonetheless retains layers of identity and experience which made complete assimilation virtually impossible. 
 
At a time when there was no clear or inevitable choice between being British or Australian, it is apparent that these writers never fully renounced (indeed, could not completely lose) either their British heritage or their colonial identity, whether working in commercial or literary milieux. Living and working in London, they were not simply expatriates or exiles, but carriers of complex and often shifting roles and identities that insisted on hybridity. Despite this theoretical hybridity being inevitable to some extent, it is still possible to distinguish between them. The colonial transnational writer’s position is differently inflected from the expatriate’s, as it entails the carrying of several layers of identity without an ideologically driven impulse to assert, renounce or choose between them. 
By comparison with Maquarie, Louise Mack appears to be far less troubled by notions of cultural identity, whether political or more broadly literary. Her greater mobility between genres, and her lack of any fixed status or position in social or institutional settings of the kind that Maquarie adhered to, correspond to a greater flexibility in her cultural affiliations, and produced a more fluid form of ‘colonial transnational’ identity.
Negotiating the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Archive
There is an identifiable 'archive' of colonial Australian popular fiction consisting of romance, adventure fiction, Gothic fiction, crime fiction, Lemurian fantasy and a significant number of related subgenres (bushranger fiction, convict romance, Pacific or 'South Sea' adventure, tropical romance, 'lost explorer' stories, and so on). Looking at this archive soon reveals both its sheer size and range, and the fact that so little of it is remembered today. Rachael Weaver, Ailie Smith and I have begun to build a digital archive of colonial Australian popular fiction with the primary aim of making this material available to an interested reading public, as well as to scholars specialising in colonial Australian (and transnational) literary studies. At the time of writing we are really only about 20% complete with around 500 authors represented on the site, although many with only a fraction of their work uploaded and with only the bare bones of a scholarly apparatus around them: a few short biographical notes, a bibliography, and the texts themselves: first editions in most cases .The first entry in this digital archive is J. H. M. Abbott (1874-1953), and we have so far uploaded three novels by this author, beginning with Sally: the tale of a currency lass (1918), published as a cheap paperback by the NSW Bookstall with a cover illustration by Norman Lindsay. I should note that we take the colonial period to run at least as far as the First World War and arguably beyond, into the 1920s: where by this time the 'colonial' functions as an enabling signifier, a point of reference (as well as a point of origin), already receding from the present even as it continues to be animated, and reanimated, to generate a set of often increasingly nostalgic and nationalist sensibilities. In fact, J.H.M. Abbott's Sally does exactly this: it is one of seven historical novels he produced about the early colonial period, three others of which were also published by the NSW Bookstall. Abbott was a journalist and a historian of colonial events (he wrote histories of William Dampier and Ben Hall); he wrote famously about the Boer War in Tommy Cornstalk (1902), and about the London poor in Letters from Queer Street (1908); and he was a long-standing contributor to the Bulletin, the Australian Town and Country Journal and the Lone Hand. But this remarkably prolific and varied writer is barely mentioned in Australian literary histories. His Boer War experiences are noted in passing in the Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) and again in The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998); he isn't mentioned at all in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000); and the recent Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2010) invokes him just once, where a passage from Abbott's Letters from Queer Street is quoted in Peter Morton's chapter on Australian writers in England - where Morton seems to view Abbott's account of poverty in London and his homesickness for Australia as a sort of peculiar curiosity (272). The most recent entry on Abbott in AustLit is Shirley Walker's article on Australian writing about the Boer War published in Australian Literary Studies in 1985; the previous entry is Norman Lindsay's short biographical account of him twenty years earlier in Bohemians of the Bulletin (1965). He is one of a large number of highly productive colonial writers who largely remains outside the Australian literary archive as we know it today.The colonial Australian popular fiction digital archive is one of many hundreds of digitised literary archives around the world designed primarily to facilitate access to material that might otherwise languish in the special collections of university libraries. It is now in fact continuing in partnership with the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne, and we expect it to achieve some level of comprehensiveness by the end of 2013. …