The savage queen : a romance of the natives of Van Diemen’s Land

London : F. V. White & Co., 1891. Octavo, pictorial green cloth (canted, edges rubbed), pp. xi; [blank]; 324; a few light marks, a little shaken, a good copy.

‘I have brought together a few well-known or historical characters of that land of beauty and tears, at the time when Van Dieman’s Land was regarded as the Hades rather than the Garden of Australia. The events herein narrated are supposed to occur during the year 1813, although in reality I have had to compress the actions of several years into the one, but that they actually occurred as I have written them may be proved at a glance through the early records of the colony’. – the Preface

Nisbet was a prolific author who published no fewer than 40 novels between 1888 and 1905. He was a great traveller, and closely associated with Australia: in the mid 1860s, as a young man, he made his first visit to the Antipodes, where he spent seven years in Melbourne, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands, painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work. Much of his later fiction writing is based on his experiences during this period. Nisbet managed to pursue an artistic career as well as a literary one: in the mid 1870s in Edinburgh he worked as a scene-painter; in 1878-85 he taught freehand drawing at the Watt Institution and School of Arts; and he also exhibited oil and watercolour paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. His large-scale oil painting The Flying Dutchman is one of his best known artworks. Nisbet would again visit Australia (and New Guinea) in 1886, and Australia for a third time in 1895.