Old Colonials (Facsimile Edition)

19.0 x 13.0cms, 284pp, b/w illusts, first published in 1882, this book is a rural counterpart to R.E.N. Twopenny's Town Life in Australia (1883). It presents a gallery of over a score of bush types from The Drover, The Stockman, and the Cockatoo Farmer, to The Larrikin and The Loafer, besides a study of such bush institutions as The Grog Shanty, and the Gold Escort. These sketches were first published in The Queenslander in 1875-76 and give a documentary account, more than a decade before Henry Lawson, of the outback Australia that in Lawson's hands was to acquire the status of a national myth. Scarce.