Romance of a magistrate.(Robbery Under Arms)(Book review)

Robbery Under Arms, by Rolf Boldrewood, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby; University of Queensland Press (The Academy Editions of Australian Literature), 2006, $175.

THE AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC Robbery Under Arms, first published in 1883 in serial form in the Sydney Mail, has been republished by the University of Queensland Press. The new edition comprises a book within a book because a significant section comprises a description of the project by which the text was reassembled on the basis of close comparisons with earlier editions. What the editors have attempted is not a facsimile of earlier editions but a correction to previous versions designed to remove mistakes, omissions and abbreviations that made the book confusing and often difficult to follow.

Rolf Boldrewood was the pen-name of Thomas Brown (who, after 1864, adopted the style Browne). He had quite an interesting life. He was born in London but came to Sydney at the age of five on a ship that was transporting convicts to the colony. He seems to have acquired early pretensions of social grandeur: feelings encouraged by endemic divisions in the penal colony. At the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to the Melbourne Club.

In 1871, following pressure deftly applied to influential relatives, he was appointed the Police Magistrate at Gulgong in New South Wales at 500 [pounds sterling] a year. In 1880 he was promoted to Police Magistrate at Dubbo. This new office coincided with widespread publicity about Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan in Victoria. Perhaps it was the drama and instant romance of the Kelly Gang or the stimulation of cases coming before him in court that persuaded Browne to write a story about bushrangers and other miscreants and their encounters with society and the law.

In the tradition of the times, Robbery Under Arms was serialised and then published in three volumes in Sydney and London. It immediately became a hit at both ends of the world. The book was adapted for the stage in the 1890s and brought a kind of fame to Browne, who died in 1915 in his ninetieth year.

Since then, the book has inspired two feature films and a mini-series on television celebrating its anti-hero, the fictional bushranger Captain Starlight. Reflecting the social values of his inventor, Starlight was born an English gentleman but for years led a roving life of adventure and crime. Robbery Under Arms tells the story of some of these adventures through the recollections of Dick Marston, an Australian bushranger who fell in with Starlight's gang. In form, the book is the autobiography of Marston, told at first as he languishes in jail under sentence of death. It describes the adventures, including romantic adventures, of Marston and Starlight, the trial of Starlight and his accomplices, the verdict of guilty and death sentence, the reprieve of Marston, an escape from Berrima jail, and some rather unlikely adventures as the book moves to its resolution.

The character development in this rather protracted yarn is pretty superficial. There is little reflection upon the social causes of the bushranger phenomenon. The author exhibits a deference and respect for the British upper class, and its values, that was to last in Australia well into the twentieth century. Yet despite these weaknesses, the book has become an Australian classic because of the way it records the bush culture of the time through picaresque adventures told with a healthy serving of apparently authentic slang and rough language.