Carlton Dawe

Who was Carlton Dawe?

William Carlton Lanyon Dawe, generally known as Carlton Dawe, was a prolific Australian author of over seventy-seven books including romance, mystery and crime.

Dawe was born in Adelaide and came from an old Cornish family. Dawe came to Melbourne with his parents around 1880, and in 1885 published in London Sydonia and other Poems. In 1886 Love and the World and other Poems was published in Melbourne. Although these poems were possibly a little better than average, they did not suggest any particular promise. In the same year he published in Melbourne his first attempt at fiction, Zantha, and in 1889 another volume of poetry, Sketches in Verse, was published in London. The Golden Lake has been described as a Lemurian novel and is an adventure story based on the search for a cave of gold in Australia, and The Emu's Head is about the violent Australian gold mines.

Dawe was all his life a traveller, going round the world more than once and lived for a time in Asia, before settling permanently in England from 1892.