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'For much of its history since British colonisation in 1788, Australian literature has been a 'literature of immigration'. Across the nineteenth century those who write and published in the Australian colonies were mostly born overseas, by far the majority from the United Kingdom, then including Ireland. Large numbers of immigrants from southern China arrived in Australia after the discovery of gold in the 1850s, reproducing the effect of the Californian gold rushes, but as far as we know no significant literature was produced by this group, although some of the descendants of these early Chinese immigrants have published writings in later periods. Interestingly, Australia's most famous writer from the late-nineteenth century, Henry Lawson, was the son of a Norwegian father.' (Author's introduction : 250)
