AustLit

Where the Day Begins (1911) 'closes with an episode of the Boer War relating to Lieutenant Harry Morant of the Bushveldt Carbineers ... The character of Henry Mordaunt in the novel is built round the personality of Morant. The story opens with romantic incidents following upon an explosion in the Kembla mines. After a sojourn in South Africa the leading characters return to New South Wales and re-enter politics. Mordaunt goes again to South Africa in command of a bushmen's contingent and meets an unhappy fate.'

(Source: Miller, Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935, 1940.)

'A light coloured tribe of aboriginals [sic] is supposed to exist, the descendants of ship-wrecked European mariners who, like the mutineers of the Bounty, married aboriginal women, whose descendants in time might therefore almost be designated Australian demi-semi-aboriginal [sic] Pitcairn Islanders.

'When one finds that the daughter and the adopted daughter of a bush shanty-keeper are two charming girls whose adventures bulk largely in the book, and that, in the wonderful and mysterious tribe, a half-caste girl has reared an emu which she can direct by a signal heard many miles away, and which emu with its mate arrives when wanted by her, and on the back of which she rides away as if on the wind, one recognises the Munchausen character of, at all events, one phase of this wonderfully imaginative tale.'

Source: Rev. of The Silver Queen, by William Sylvester Walker. The Queenslander 29 Jan 1910.