'The book presents us with some life-like scenes in the Australian bush, and with sensations enough to satisfy the taste of the confirmed novel reader. The characters are powerfully drawn, and the plot is worked out with truth and force and judgement.
'The chief character is a philanthropist doctor in Melbourne, whose practice gives him only too thorough an insight into the state of destitution, deprivations, and indecent crowding in which the 'submerged' vegetate in the slums of a great city.'
Source: Rev. of The New Arcadia, by Horace Tucker. Dungong Chronicle, 11 May 1894.