Christmas in fiction - a time when families reunite and love blossoms, when evil is overcome and tragedy is averted. Cruelty and revenge are offset by heroism and forgiveness, and constancy in love is rewarded. But in Australia Christmas stories are also marked by fire and flood, cyclone and drought, and the perils of isolation. Cattle drovers find themselves stuck in a gumtree, a pitiless squatter learns the cost of cruelty, and love’s ‘cooee’ is heard as far away as London. All the drama of nature and humanity is vividly recounted in this collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian Christmas stories.

Professor Imelda Whelehan has researched and published in the fields of women’s writing, feminism, popular culture and literary adaptations and is currently the Dean of Higher Research at the Australian National University.

To Be Continuedis an Australian Research Council funded project, led by Associate Professor Katherine Bode, that has unearthed an astonishing bibliographic index and full-text archive of fiction in Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1955.