This paper draws from a larger interdisciplinary project that seeks to establish the influence of British Romanticism on the way early colonial authors envisioned and theorised child development, teaching, and education in Australia. We introduce the work of Louisa Anne Meredith (1811-1880) as a case study of the way Romantic preoccupations such as sympathy and reason emerge within a latent colonial logic in writing for and about colonial Australian children. Meredith published a range of books for children exploring the island of Tasmania from her colonial perspective. Her work was printed in Australia and England, in multiple editions and widely circulated. In this paper, we focus on two of her works: Loved and Lost! The True Story of a Short Life (1860) and Waratah Rhymes for Young Australia (1878) to argue that Meredith’s contribution to the history of Australian children’s literature rests in her desire to author a contextualised account of ‘island life’ for the white Australian colonial child. Meredith’s project is to encode a new genre that reconfigures familiar English modes such as the ‘moral tale’ which was developed by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Lamb, amongst others, while also advancing a distinctive aesthetic of the miniature that finds expression in the island of Tasmania and the child as inquisitor. There is limited work on the migration and subsequent development of Romantic-era British pedagogy and children’s literature across colonial lines. This paper reads the status of the colonial child in Meredith’s works as the idealised mini-colonialist whose discovery of the landscape through fictional encounter positions them to craft the nation in their image.