Carlton Dawe

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Willian Carlton Lanyon Dawe, generally known as Carlton Dawe (30 July 186530 May 1935), author, was born in Adelaide, Australia.

Dawe belonged to an old Cornish family and was born in Adelaide in 1865. He came to Melbourne with his parents about 1880, and in 1885 published in London Sydonia and other Poems. In 1886 Love and the World and other Poems was published in Melbourne. Though the merit of these poems is possibly a little higher than the average of most youthful verse, 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. He travelled round the world more than once and lived for a time in the east, before settling permanently in England from 1892.

Dawe wrote a few plays; The Black Spider was produced in London in 1927, and he also had two plays filmed. He published more than seventy books during his life (listed in E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature) covering romance, mystery and crime. These included:

  • The Golden Lake (1891)
  • Mount Desolation (1892)
  • The History of Godfrey King (1893)
  • The Emu's Head (1893)
  • The Pilrims (1894)
  • The Confessions of a Currency Girl (1894)

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.

Dawe died in London in 1935.

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This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from
Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.