Canadian-born author and politician Sir Gilbert Parker came to Australia in 1886 and was for some time associate editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. While in Australia, Parker began his literary career by publishing stories and articles in the newspapers. In 1888, when he wrote his first play, a successful adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, which was performed for seven weeks, the Sydney Morning Herald declared him 'one of the most prominent writers in Australia.' Another adaptation, this time of the novel Mr Barnes of New York (1887) by American author Archibald Clavering Gunter, was performed with the title 'The Vendetta' in 1889.
Parker left Australia in 1889. Hoping to collect his Australian articles into a book (eventually published in 1892 as Round the Compass in Australia), Parker sailed for London, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. During the winter of 1890 he abandoned his efforts to publish his 'Pike Pole Sketches on the Madawaska,' several of which had previously appeared in the Sydney Mail, and instead began to work on the first of his many stories of the Canadian Northwest, establishing a successful career for himself as a romantic novelist. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1902 and knighted in 1902. Parker describes the stories in his selection Cumner's Son and Other Stories as representing 'the life which for nearly four years I knew and studied with ... affection' (Introduction to 1913 edition).
(Sources: Dictionary of Literary Biography; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)
