ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how An Australian Heroine and three other domestic novels by Australian women writers represent the conflict between the Australian Girl figure and the domestic ideal. The majority of girls' novels and periodicals read by Australian girls throughout the nineteenth century were written and published in Britain. Daughters of the Southern Cross were more likely to have access to the Girl's Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that were popular with British girl readers than to locally produced depictions of girlhood. Australian colonial domestic fiction exhibits greater contradiction between the situation of the Australian Girl and the domestic expectations placed upon her, than is imagined in 'A Daughter of Greater Britain' and British girls' novels of the period. In Domesticity, Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel, Diana Archibald contends that British novels demonstrate the uneasy relationship between domesticity and imperialism.
