Julie Evans reads Grimshaws early 20th century novels, set in Papua New Guinea, Polynesia and Melanesia, to 'demonstrate how race and gender were deeply imbricated in the production of the very social inequalities upon which empire depended' (187). She concludes that the wide readership of Grimshaw's fiction is an indicator of 'the extent to which prevailing constructions of the absolute primitiveness of the region's inhabitants ... served both British and Australian interests' (197).