Mobilising Fictions: or, Romancing the Australian Desert, 1890-1908

This paper looks at Australia's 'lost race romances', published between 1890 and 1908, so-called because they described the discovery of an unknown race in the middle of the Australian desert. Like other adventure-romances of this era, these novels have been presented as the literature of 'imperial Gothic', given to the expression of 'the mood of accumulating crisis that characterises the Edwardian period'. In this paper, I draw on the ideas of Nicholas Daly and Meaghan Morris to argue that the lost race romances are better understood as 'mobilising fictions', actively engaged in the creation of Australia's interior as a landscape of fabulous modernity. Novels like The Lost Explorer (1890) and The Silver Queen (1908) sought to mobilise their readers to embrace Australia's interior as a realm of the fabulous: a place steeped in fable, gold and other "vast potentialities", but also in the capacity to be fabulated - made up and transformed through a combination of will, imagination, water engineering and science.