At the end of 1850 Edward Hargraves returned to Sydney from a year on the other side of the Pacific. He was one of the ‘Forty-Niners’ who had converged on California in search of gold. Although unsuccessful in that quest, Hargraves was struck by the similarity between the gold country there and the transalpine slopes of his homeland. In the summer of 1851 he crossed the Blue Mountains to Bathurst and washed a deposit of sand and gravel from a waterhole to disclose a grain of gold in a tin dish. A revival of bushranging in the 1860s drew on the discontent of the rural poor, and the young men who joined Ned Kelly, the most legendary bushranger of them all, were sons of struggling or unsuccessful selectors. From 1877 England and Australia began playing regular cricket matches. The first Australian victory on English soil in 1882 gave birth to a mock obituary to England’s supremacy and thus the Ashes, which are the world’s oldest international sporting contest.

Violent conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people had ceased across most of the continent, but north-western Western Australia continued to witness clashes, brutal labour practices and sexual exploitation. In 1885, the missionary John Brown Gribble, fresh from a visit to London’s Exeter Hall circle, attempted to establish a mission in the Gascoyne River region. He quickly antagonised the region’s pastoralist interests and a press scandal eventuated, in which the pastoralist lobby sought to ridicule Gribble’s claims for sympathy toward Aboriginal people, and assert their own. Gribble aspired to what is often termed ‘muscular Christianity’, a form of masculinity that linked spiritual belief to more secular values of bravery and heroism, and his hero was African abolitionist and missionary David Livingstone. British anti-slavery sentiment framed Gribble’s notorious 1886 denunciation, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land. Yet the colonial public was sceptical regarding what many considered sensational and excessive. Gribble’s writing is typical of narratives of Christian heroism within a religious literary tradition of persecution, self-sacrifice and redemption that were ultimately modelled upon the life of Jesus Christ himself.

Adaptation study reached a new high in the mid-2000s with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptations. She generates categories of adaptation to organise the scores of examples she discusses, but her book fails to develop a theory to underpin the study.

She finds hints of one in metaphors of ‘transcoding’, in Katherine Hayles’s use of the ‘rhizome’ model and in John Bryant’s idea of ‘reception-generated changes’. Only Bryant offers a viable lead, allowing her to propose a reception ‘continuum’. That is not enough.

Chapter 9 argues, rather, that adaptation depends upon the concept of the work. An adaptation becomes part of the original work’s after-life, just as the original work may be considered part of the adaptation’s prehistory. The adaptation establishes a new production–reception continuum or slider of its own, which either stops there because the new work is ignored or itself endows a newer adaptation. The latter takes on its own textual and cultural trajectory while remaining substantively linked to the first by virtue of its transformation of at least some subject matter.

Adaptations of the Ned Kelly bushranger story in folklore, stage, novel and screen serve as a test case.