Vintage Science Fiction from Australian Newspapers

Why focus on 1901-1939 for vintage science fiction in Australian newspapers?

Regarding 1901

The First Nations peoples of Country do not have a collective name for Australia, considering there were at least 250 known groups inhabiting the land when the British Empire first colonised it. 'Australia' comes from 'Australis' latin for Southern, and was first popularised in the country by Matthew Flinders in 1804, and endorsed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1817. However, it had been used in print as early as The Zoology of New Holland in 1794 according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Australia and no doubt the name was already part of common discourse before then. Officially, though, 'Australia' at the time was just a group of British Empire colonies for all of the 19th century, and the British Empire did not acknowledge Australia as a separate country before 1901. 01/01/1901 represents the beginning of modern Australia with the start of Federation linking all the disparate colonies into States and Territories overseen by a collective Australian government of the Commonwealth. Hence, vintage science fiction or modern science fiction from Australia began officially in 1901.

However, there is also a difficulty in identifying authors as Australian as, until 1949 there wasn't a citizen act. Essentially people were identified by the colony they were born in rather than the country, and were still British subjects, even if they said they were Australian. So, in the case of Victoria, people were Victorians rather than Australians.

Further compounding this is, for much of colonisation history, 'Australian history' has been divided into two main viewpoints. The British Empire viewpoint of Australia as a discovered land by Janszoon (1606), Hartog (1616), Tasman (1642), Dampier (1688), Vlamingh (1696),  Cook (1770), with the colonisation of 'New Holland' beginning in 1788. There is also the Chinese version of Zheng He's Ming Dynasty fleets visiting in the 1420s. More importantly, there is the First Nation's People's viewpoint of having lived relatively peacefully on Country from somewhere between 65,000 (archaeological) and 50,000 (biological) years ago and having developed rich cultures, languages, heritages, advanced farming practices, multigenerational understanding of flora, fauna and the seasons, and a complex oral story tradition in that time that is still not widely recognised across all of Australia today. i.e. either officially, no Australians existed before 1949 or historically, anyone born on Country is retroactively 'Australian' for scholarly convenience. It's not my focus to go into this argument as I am neither qualified nor experienced enough to cover the moral, legal, ethical and historical issues to state any of this with certainty, however by pointing this out, you will understand why some authors that later claimed citizenship in another country would previously have been considered Australian for scholarship.

I should point out that as my argument that modern Australian science fiction existed from 1901 overides the argument that science fiction didn't exist before 1928 until Hugo Gernsback gave the 'science in fiction' genre its name, means it can also be argued that this can be replaced by another - science fiction texts written by those living in the colonies of New Holland are vintage science fiction by Australians. Hence, I have also added basic information about vintage science fiction stories from 1832-1900 by 'Australians' to Infinite Anthologies with the caveat that these have yet to be properly researched.

Regarding 1939

On the other end of the era is the beginning of World War II in late 1939, with Australians joining it in early 1940. This saw a massive change to local and international fiction with paper restrictions, bans on the import of books from the USA and a drop in fiction in newspapers due to the steady migration to magazines in the 1930s. The period 1940-1955 deserves a much deeper analysis, including an analysis of our rapid magazine uptake, and why fiction had become more popular in magazines than in newspapers. My research is not looking at Australian magazines so to explore this era here without that area of research would be only telling a small part of the story. I leave that up to future researchers. As a result, while I have added several science fiction stories from Australian newspapers from the period 1940-1945 to Infinite Anthologies to continue the point that Australians have been writing science fiction for almost two centuries, only the basic information for these is available as these are not the subject of my thesis.

A note about copyright.

In Australia, basic copyright law for published stories is that they become public domain 70 years after publication and the death of everyone associated with them. So, authors, publishers, illustrators etc. There are other rules that might extend that. It does mean that for those long lived authors, a few of the stories on this site won't reach public domain until the 2030s. Please contact the decendents of the author and check copyright laws before reprinting. It is also my reason for not including any stories beyond 1945 as no Australian newspaper publication is in the public domain beyond that yet.