Australia Revenged

Transcribers Note
Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected.
LONDON: REMINGTON AND COMPANY, LIMITED 15, KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN AND SYDNEY 1894
All Rights Reserved
Each character in this work is a type. The Australian characters may be met with every day in the Colonies. Nor are Villiers Wyckliffe and the Detlij Club distorted figments of the imagination; and the broken heart is a symbol of the aims of the one, and the object of the others, softened down so that the cheek of modesty may be spared a blush.
In those parts of the work where Colonial Governors are mentioned, they appear in a less heroic light than that in which one ordinarily sees them in print. Therefore for the further enlightenment of the reader, an appendix has been added, in which the standpoint wherefrom Young Australia views them is fully explained.
Boomerang is the joint nom-de-plume of a Young Australian and his collaborator.
London, October, 1894.

In a handsome block of buildings in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly—a phrase which may embrace a considerable area, North, South, East or West—is located the quarters of that small and extremely select Club, known, and known up till now only to a favoured few, as the Detlij Club. The name, like the Club itself, is an uncommon one, and is simply indicative of the sad mischance which must befal each member before he can qualify for admission. No mysterious or secret rites were shadowed in the title, and the ultra-curious in search of the origin of the name, need no more overhaul their Hindu or Persian dictionaries, than they need their Liddell and Scott. A simple inversion of the letters is all that is necessary to solve the riddle, a process which discovers the word jilted, and discloses the character of the Club.
Briefly, the origin of the Club was in this wise. Some four years previous to the date our story opens, a certain Major Fitzgerald, a man of unenviable notoriety in Society, whose name was almost as well known in the Divorce Court as it was in the clubs and boudoirs—a fact which, though it caused his exclusion from some circles, made him more welcome in others—chanced to meet the young and charming heiress, Helen Trevor, at the time of her début .