Ken Gelder

And I don't just mean Henry Lawson's story, as good as they can be.

I mean a whole load of writers that we've probably forgotten who wrote a lot of crime fiction.

I mean, remember that the first crime novel, the first detective novel in the world was published in Australia or published by an Australian.

No, no, way before that, back in 1853 by John Lang.

It's called The Forge's Wife.

It's a wonderful novel.

I mean, it's a bit creaky as well, but it's a,

It's a really buoyant, bouncy novel with a detective from Sydney who's a very tough guy, although he has some sort of sentimental features as well.

But he's a very tough guy.

He beats up a man in his cell, for example, and he's corrupt as well.

He takes money.

It's very Australian.

It's a very Australian account of a detective.

But he's the first detective in a novel in the Anglophone world.

I think a lot of reasons, really.

I mean, one is that I have wanted to

become more and more connected to Australia's relationship to its species.

And in colonial fiction, which is the thing I look at, I have been looking at most of all, I guess, over the last eight to ten years or so, it turns out that colonial fiction is very connected to species and has a lot to say about species, native species and so on.

And it also turns out that there's a lot of hunting in colonial fiction

And of course there is possum hunting and emu hunting and so on.