What was Australia’s first novel?

John Glover's painting of Hobart Town as seen from his garden, 1832.

Wikimedia Commons The first novel written and published in Australia is a multifaceted work of autobiographical and historical significance, a convict narrative and, arguably, Australia’s first work of crime fiction.

It’s a cautionary tale about the virtues of moderation, discipline, prudence and humility and the dangers of ambition and self-centred wilfulness.

And it offers the English reader (for whom it was intended), a topsy-turvy world where social hierarchies are overturned and the lines between crime and corruption – and the system administering justice – are blurry.

Quintus Servinton: A Tale Founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence was printed in Hobart Town, in the then penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, in three volumes, between 1830 and 1831.

The novel purports to be a fictionalised biography, written by an unnamed author narrator, who meets the 60-year-old subject, Quintus, when he is convalescing at the home of the Serviton family in Devonshire.

Quintus Servinton gives this third-person narrator a manuscript, which follows the eponymous hero’s journey from his birth in 1772 through childhood, education and marriage, before his turn to crime and subsequent downfall.

Of course, storytelling in Australia has a much longer history.

First Nations peoples have been sharing stories for millennia.

But the novel form, as its name suggests, with its realism and psychological depth, was still considered quite new at the time of the colonisation here in the 18th century.

It arose in Britain with the rise of the middle class, expanding literacy and new technologies of printing.

While Quintus Serviton has been republished multiple times and the subject of much scholarly discussion, less well known is that the first novel published on the Australian mainland was written and published in Sydney by an Irish-born woman in 1838.

Titled The Guardian: A Tale by an Australian , the author of the novel remained unknown until the 1960s, when she was revealed to be Anna Maria Bunn (1808-1889), a young Irish widow.

A note in the library of the Bunns’ property, written by her son , William, stated: “Mother was the author of The Guardian”.