Instead, she is killed by a falling gum tree while saving the life of her brother, leaving the future fulfilment of the domestic ideal to her sister, Meg, whose subsequent story occupies Little Mother Meg (1902). Turner does not allow Judy’s unconventionality to prosper. Judy’s grandmother describes her ‘restless fire’ as something that ‘would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her’, or ‘would flame up higher and higher and consume her’. In contrast, Australian domestic fiction, this chapter argues, is unable to accommodate bracing female heroism, postulating ambiguous outcomes at best for heroines who deviate from the feminine ideal. British fictional imaginings of Australian girls lauded their lack of conformity and physical abilities and often showed them bravely defending the family property with firearms. The ubiquity of the myth problematised any attempt to situate women heroically within the nation outside of the home. Turner’s Judy Woolcot is distinct among her six siblings as a plucky girl who instigates trouble, while Franklin’s aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn is informed that ‘girls are the helplessest, uselessest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.’ The 1890s saw an agricultural depression in Australia that only fuelled the urban perpet-uation of the idealised and nationalistic bushman myth in literary and popular culture. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) feature intelligent girls who are not able to be effectively socialised to embrace domesticity. Two canonical Australian novels that focus on the maturation of girl protagonists who live on bush homesteads were also published in this period. Rosa Praed's An Australian Heroine (1880) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890) gave voice to the lived experience of Australia for young women, and their publication in Britain contributed to an emergent reciprocal transpacific flow of literary culture. From the 1880s, however, Australian authors produced several milestone fictions of girlhood for both adult and juvenile audiences. ‘Daughters of the Southern Cross’ were more likely to have access to the Girl’s Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that had proven popular with British girl readers than any locally produced depictions of girlhood. The vast majority of novels and periodicals read by colonial Australian girls were written and published in Britain.
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