Cirrus@Austlit

A column reporting snippets of personal information on Victorian identities, particularly writers and those involved in the newspaper business. This column includes reference to William McLellan's efforts to have his poetry published in a Melbourne newspaper. The newspaper editor was disinclined to publish McLellan's efforts, but instead offered to print 'The Dove of Ararat's' work 'on slips' for private circulation. The columnist comments: 'The wily editor scored twice that time - he kept the stuff out of the paper, and secured a contract for the jobbing department'.

A humorous par contributed by the editor in response to a spate of suicides and attempted suicides by Melbourne men rejected in love.

Written in response to the stance of the Victorian Alliance and the W.C.T.U. opposing the employment of barmaids.

The 'Panned Off' column reports on Randolph Bedford's return to Melbourne from 'Westralia' and prints some samples of Bedford's experiences in the West.

A doctor's lover, coming out of anaesthetic and overhearing the idle conversation of her surgeons, discovers her lover is already married. On heaing this news, the woman takes her own life on the operating table.

A column canvassing current literary news including an announcement on the publication of A. B. Paterson's The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses and a note that Ethel Turner's The Little Duchess and Other Stories has gone into print in London. The column also notes publication of Louis Becke's The Ebbing of the Tide and states that this novel received a 'full-page complimentary notice in the usually slashing and unmerciful Saturday Review'. (Sections of the review are quoted in the column.) Brief mention is made of publication of stories by Ada Cambridge and Ethel Turner in the Windsor Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly for Men and Women, July 1896.