Australian Writers

At a lonely sheep-station a hundred miles inland, Marcus Clarke lets the day drift among fern-hills and creek-beds—and devours French novels until the village postmaster takes notice. What kind of writer is being formed in this unlikely solitude?

In his late-nineteenth-century survey, Desmond Byrne looks at a young Australia still searching for a literature of its own. Clarke’s sharp eye could catch both the gloom of the old penal system and the pretensions of colonial society, but his restless talent ranged from country life to Melbourne journalism, with little patience for steady work. Could this brilliant, erratic observer give the new country the vivid, truthful fiction it needed—and what might he have made of the society around him?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.