`The Colonial Monthly',
`The Melbourne Review', `The Sydney Quarterly', and `The Centennial Magazine'
were the most important of these. They cost more to produce
than their English models, and the fact that their contents were Australian
was not sufficient in itself to obtain for them adequate support.
Newspapers have played a far more important part in our literary world.
`The Australasian', `Sydney Mail' and `Queenslander' have done a good deal
to encourage local writers, but the most powerful influence
has been that of `The Bulletin', started in Sydney in 1880.
Its racy, irreverent tone and its humour are characteristically Australian,
and through its columns the first realistic Australian verse of any importance
-- the writings of Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson -- became widely known.
When published in book form, their verses met with phenomenal success;
Paterson's "The Man from Snowy River" (1895) having already attained
a circulation of over thirty thousand copies. It is the first
of a long series of volumes, issued during the last ten years, whose character
is far more distinctively Australian than that of their predecessors.
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