AustLit

A young man espouses platonic friendships until his friend Ada Montrose disappears to the sea for three months and returns to tell him she has discovered feelings of love for someone ... His pique points the way to his own feelings. (PB)

An ingenious burglary plot involving false telegrams and a trunk fitted out to accommodate a thief fails when it is repeated on cousins of a former vicitm. (PB)

Brief descriptions of people going to work along Sturt Street Ballarat on a winter's morning in July: overworked shop girls, a Sister of Charity and a fallen woman, a fisherman, policeman, fireman, doctors, orphan, a farmer, a trainee soldier fated to die fighting Zulus. Unrealised hints at the 'story of life'. (PB)

A father's wishes to avoid his youngest daughter following her eloping sisters and insists that his young steward marry before he is hired. Unbeknownst to either father or steward the lady chosen is the very girl the father is seeking to shelter. (PB)

A gentleman and mind-reader hires a new valet and they go to Paris. Some time later he confronts the valet with his thoughts and actions in stealing from his employer - all along using the valet as a subject in a mind-reading experiment. (PB)

Frontier tale. A trooper becomes lost on the plains and his panic and loneliness drive him to madness before he is found. (PB)

April 1824 and three convicts attempt to escape from the infamous Macquarie Harbour penal station in Van Diemen's Land. Striking down the cruel overseer of their timber gang they escape into the scrub then capture a boat from the pursuing military and head for open sea. They are wrecked on cliffs, one drowns and another is injured. The third, Hyde, strikes out on his own but remorse drives him to return for his mate - who has disappeared. Hyde is rescued by a US whaler ... The arrival of a mother and daughter of his fellow passenger and goes to cedar groves in the Illawarra to find her father - who is his former convict friend. Prosperity follows for all. (PB)

An artist falls in love with a Somerset farmer's daughter but she refuses to marry him until her father is financially secure. The artist tumbles into the farm's cavernous well and on his perilous climb out discovers a secret passage to a neighbouring abbey and a treasure trove. All ends happily, even with the rival neighbouring farmer who had tried to ensure his death so he could marry Bessie. (PB)

Father and son tale of the diggings. A motherless boy dreams of discovering a gold nugget to assist his luckless father - and sets off into the bush determined to locate the site of his dream and the gold. The heat, his thirst and weariness combine to kill him - but he finds the site at last and hears from two searchers that his father has struck gold before he dies. (PB)

A tailor's first encounter with a warehouse 'speaking tube' leads him to hear no good of himself. (PB)

A doctor adopts a six-year-old daughter of a dying patient. Eleven years later he asks her to marry him and she agrees - but the youthful military son of a neighbour wins her heart. When he abandons her to drown she learns his true nature. She is rescued by fishermen but believed dead for a year until a letter from America reveals her whereabouts. The doctor persuades her to return with him but only his near death in rescuing a fellow passenger fallen overboard reveals that she still loves him. (PB)

A woman attempts to help a fellow tram passenger put on her jacket only to find she wants it off. (PB)

A mob of 100 cavalry and waggon horses startled into a stampede by wolves are swallowed by a streambed of quicksands. (PB)

A Bathurst flirt falls for a handsome unscrupulous Frenchman who becomes engaged to her then leaves with a substantial cheque in his pocket to pay for a return visit to France. Ten years later she was still waiting - a generous old maid. A fate befitting a flirt in Bunster's and society's opinion. (PB)

A miner's mate on an old diggings nearly leaves him for dead after a horse accident. Only reading kind words in a letter from his mate's fiancee - the same woman he had hoped to marry himself - bring out his better nature. After rescuing his mate and sending the doctor he disappears - several months later after his friend is living happily married in Melbourne, he commits suicide during an alcoholic binge. (PB)

Set on a Riverina station, a motherless girl Dorothy grown up with almost no female supervision - wild, untidy and beautiful - is found a governess, a titled Englishwoman earning her own living because of her husband's dissipation. The girl's resentment is overcome by the lady's grace and the discovery that she has no intention of marrying her father, the Colonel. An infatuation for the dandy superintendent of the station is soon quashed when he reveals his calculating ways - and he and his brother, a former valet and thief, are eventually arrested and tried for robbing the Colonel, abducting and nearly killing him. Dorothy marries her governess' brother-in-law when he succeeds to the title, and the governess marries the local doctor - a gentleman. Interesting a little for the contrast between the wild girl and the lady. (PB)

Millie Marriott sacrifices her love when a rival suitor is disfigured and blinded in a hunting accident and needs her more. She marries him and he never knows she loved another. (PB)

Railroad story. A happy manly engineer on a Rockies line is heart-broken when his wife runs off with another man and takes his precious daughter with him. The girl mysteriously returns and he raises her. Then in 1887 his train is involved in an accident and his wife dies unconscious in his arms ... Slight warm sense of love of fellow railwaymen for him and his daughter; powerful description of the accident; moral failure of the wife stressed by her death ... (PB)