firm. He was promoted to Retail Manager. In 1954, when the firm moved to start a separate company, F. W. Cheshire Publishing Pty. Ltd., to handle its growing publishing activities, he was appointed its Publishing Director. Until the late 1960s he built up "an impressive and wide-ranging list of titles". The main emphasis in the list was secondary school textbooks which generated profits for F. W. Cheshire year after year. However, the Cheshire list went beyond utilitarian titles and "books about the distinguishing characteristics of Australia" and ranged across "the whole breadth of national interests, from fiction and poetry to economics, politics and sociology". The first two trade books Fabinyi accepted for publishing, early in his career with F. W. Cheshire, were W. Y. Tsao's Two Pacific Democracies: China and Australia with an introduction by the historian, R. M. Crawford, and Wilfred Burchett's Pacific Treasure Island: New Caledonia (1941). The latter work became a bestseller when the United States opened a major naval base in New Caledonia during the Pacific War and the Australian public's interest in that territory soared. In the two following decades he picked and published works of little known authors, many of which would later be adjudged by critic Geoffrey Dutton as being among "Australia's greatest books". These included the architect Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness (1960), Alan Marshall's autobiography I Can Jump Puddles (1955), and Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). Other distinguished authors and works published by Fabinyi at Cheshire were predominantly in the fields of the arts, history, biography and the social sciences (and frequently with a distinctively Australian connection) and included Kenneth Cook (Tuna, 1967), Bruce Dawe (No Fixed Address: Poems, 1962), C. P. Fitzgerald (The Empress Wu, 1955), Brian Fitzpatrick (The Australian Commonwealth, 1956), Xavier Herbert (Disturbing Element, 1963), David Martin (Spiegel the Cat, 1961), Barry Oakley (A Wild Ass of a Man, 1967), Cyril Pearl (So, You Want to Buy a House and Live in It!, 1961), Clive Turnbull (Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1943) and Judah Waten (Distant Land, 1964). He also published Peter Coleman's Australian Civilisation (1960), a symposium on the state of Australia at the start of a "new and promising decade" with essays from Australian intellectuals such as Vincent Buckley, Max Harris, Sol Encel, Donald Horne and Robert Hughes. This book inspired later updates, notably John McLaren's A Nation Apart (1983)