Cirrus@Austlit

A lost race adventure novel in which Captain Fisk searches for, and eventually discovers the island of Isk, the South Pacific home of the Awazils - a race of people descended from the ancient Greeks and who continue their traditions and culture. A review published in the Western Mail (Perth) in 1896 further records:

The Captain Flick of Mr Fergus Hume's romance is a modern edition of the adventurous, free-booting sea dog for which the Western counties of England were so famous in years gone by. The object of the expedition upon which he sets out, in a well-equipped and well found vessel from Plymouth, is as he naively puts it, to restore the civilization the statue of Aphrodite, carved by Praxiteles for the Temple of Cythera. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that the motive impelling him to this strange quest is not as pure and ardent desire to discharge a signal service to art, but the essentially sordid ambition to obtain possession of the statue in order that he may dispose of it for a huge sum of money. He and his companions experience some strange and thrilling adventures in their search for and on the island of Isk, located by the author off the coast of Australia, in the Indian Ocean. Whatever his defects, Mr Fergus Hume has no lack of imagination; and in The Expedition of Captain Flick, many are likely to find entertainment in turning to its pages for recreation (10 April 1896, p.5).  

"First published as a series titled Old Convict Times to Gold-Digging Days in the Sydney Evening News in 1891, this narrative was virtually unchanged by Louis Becke for this edition. William Derrincourt, or Day, describes his childhood in the English midlands, where he lived by his wits from an early age, and was exposed to the brutality of bull baiting and cockfighting. He was duped into receiving a stolen waistcoat, arrested and sentenced to 10 years transportation. He worked in the Justitia hulk at Woolwich before being transported to Van Diemen's Land on the Asia in 1839. He was placed in the convict barracks a Hobart Town under William Gunn, but after repeated attempts to escape was sent to Port Arthur. There he worked in irons, carrying timber for the construction of the Lady Franklin, and 'crushed down, worked like a beast of burden, and oppressed more than human nature could endure' under Commandant Charles O'Hara Booth. He attempted unsuccessfully to escape again. He came to be considered an 'incorrigible', and bore sentences of four years in chains, extended periods of solitary confinement and floggings, without becoming a 'sandstone' or 'soft crawler', as he refers to submissive convicts" (Walsh and Hooton 53-4).

Source

Walsh, Kay and Joy Hooton. Australian Autobiographical Narratives : An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra : Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, ADFA and National Library of Australia, 1993.