Though English by birth, he is wholly Australian in training and experience. In [p 191] 1830, being then four years old, he was taken by his parents to Sydney, and there educated. Early in youth he became one of the pioneer squatters of Western Victoria, sharing with a few others the danger of dispossessing the aboriginals, and soon acquiring considerable wealth. But some years later, going back to New South Wales, and venturing to establish himself there on a larger scale as a sheep-owner, he was involved in a disastrous drought and lost nearly everything.
In The Squatters Dream, which is understood to be partly autobiographical, he has minutely recorded the varying fortunes of pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitterness of failure never caused him to forget the happiness of his young enthusiasm, or to speak ill of a pursuit so much identified with the prosperity of the country. He refers to it as ‘that freest of all free lives, that pleasantest of all pleasant professions—the calling of a squatter.’
Abandoning his ambition to rank with the wool-kings, he entered the Civil Service as a police magistrate and gold-fields [p 192] commissioner. In these combined offices he spent twenty-five years, and, while continuing a good public servant, contrived, like Anthony Trollope, to find time for substantial work in literature. Though during a period of about twenty years he contributed several stories and other literary matter to the Sydney and Melbourne press, it was not until the publication of Robbery under Arms, at London in 1889, that his work obtained due recognition even in the colonies. Ten years earlier he had made an unsuccessful bid for an English reputation by the publication of Ups and Downs, the novel which, under the more attractive title of The Squatter’s Dream, reappeared in 1890 as a successor to the famous bushranging story. That the spirited opening chapters of Robbery under Arms should have been thought lightly of by Australian editors when the serial rights of the story were offered to them is somewhat astonishing. The author has related how these chapters were successively rejected by a number of the leading journals, including two of the best weeklies.
[p 193]
At length the manuscript was read by Mr. Hugh George, manager of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail, who promptly accepted it for publication in the latter newspaper.
Boldrewood at this time (1880) was well known to the Australian press. It must, however, be pointed out in justice to the editors, whom his story failed to impress, that his previous work had revealed little of the dramatic sense that contributed so materially to his success in presenting the careers of his highwaymen. But it is less easy to see why, when the full possibilities of the story had been realised, there should have remained a second difficulty, that of securing a publisher to issue it in book form. ‘An Australian house,’ the author has said, ‘refused to undertake the risk;’ and he adds, ‘as a matter of fact I had to publish it partly on my own account in England.’ This proof of his confidence in the attractions of the story has since been justified by its complete success throughout the English-speaking world.
[p 194]
A writer with so much experience of Australia, and continuing to reside in it, cannot be surprised if he is expected to take a large share of responsibility for the fact that Australian fiction—the fiction produced by writers known to the British public—only in a slight degree reflects the most interesting features in the present-day life of the country. At the same time, no such considerations can detract from the sterling merits of Rolf Boldrewood’s actual services to Australian literature. It is hardly possible to believe that the English people still prefer to look to Australia only for stories of adventure; but if they do—and as the first to welcome and appreciate colonial writers they are perhaps entitled to exercise a choice—it is well that such stories be written from complete local knowledge, and thus at least correctly describe the broader aspects of the country.
If Boldrewood were asked to explain his silence respecting Antipodean life of the present day, he might reply that the novel of modern manners did not form any part of the work which he had chosen to do. At [p 195] all events, he could claim to be as much a historian as a novelist. It has been his ambition to describe Australia chiefly as he saw it in his youth, about forty years ago—as it was immediately before and after the discovery of gold. That his record per se is strikingly vivid and faithful is the first general impression which his novels make upon the reader, whether English or colonial. There is about them much of that air of ‘rightness’ which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be. They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of the good than of the bad in human nature. There is no fondness of the sensational for its own sake. The conditions of probability are observed with a closeness which, in books dependent for their interest so largely upon plot and incident, amounts almost to a fault.
An English historian is said to have declared that he would willingly exchange a library full of the poets for a single good novel of the period in which he was [p 196] interested. One can readily imagine that if a generation or two hence there should be any Australian history left unwritten, any unsatisfied curiosity concerning the simple annals now so familiar to us, Rolf Boldrewood’s novels might be found, within their limits, a more satisfying source of information than all the rest of contemporary Australian literature combined, the formal chroniclers included, as well as the poets: that is to say, the general view they would furnish of certain features of pioneer life would be fuller and clearer, and, minor details apart, more reliable than could be gathered from any other source.
Where is there in the elaborate histories of Rusden, Lang, Blair, and Flanagan, or in any of the numerous books of sketches and reminiscences written by persons who have visited or temporarily resided in Australia, a view of the picturesque variety, colour, and splendid energy of the great first race for gold to compare with that given in the second volume of The Miner’s Right, or with the memorable account of what Starlight and [p 197] the Marstons saw at Turon during their temporary retirement from the highway?
Boldrewood, in these descriptions, has done what Henry Kingsley, with his more eloquent pen, if slighter personal experience, unaccountably neglected, and what Charles Reade, though he never saw Australia, vividly imagined, and regretted his inability to fully employ. Reade saw a theme for a great epic ‘in the sudden return of a society far more complex, artificial, and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man’s constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart; in the “siege of gold” defended stoutly by rock and disease; in the world-wide [p 198] effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at last according to Heaven’s long-published and resisted design.’