Rolf Boldrewood: A Life.(Review)

Roll Boldrewood: A Life, by Paul de Serville; Melbourne University Press, 2000, $65.95.

AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE has been conveniently divided up into two opposing camps, the nationalists who repudiated their British origin, and the Anglo-Australians who acknowledged it. Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery under Arms is undisputed as an Australian classic, but it presents one of the great mysteries of Australian literature. Why is it so much better than all Boldrewood's other novels, and why so different? His other novels promote conservative, Anglo-Australian values, but this one has bushranging as its subject, which situates it more in the opposite camp. By producing new evidence about Boldrewood's life, this book suggests certain answers to these conundrums.

Rolf Boldrewood (whose real or claimed name was Thomas Browne) is the last major Australian writer to receive a full biography, and it's been worth the wait. Paul de Serville, as a leading social historian of the upper classes in colonial Australia, is ideally suited for the task, being conversant with the genealogies of the families of Old Australia who were Boldrewood's acquaintances. He is acutely aware of the pronounced ups and downs of colonial life; Boldrewood, as a failed squatter, knew these at first hand. De Serville provides an enormous amount of new material on Boldrewood and the three distinct periods in his life--youth in an unsettled family, the decades as a squatter, and later life as police magistrate and successful novelist. This new factual material is more beneficial to us than endless "lit crits" of his novels, as we can now make much more informed readings of them.

With an intriguing piece of original research, de Serville has thrown Boldrewood's role as a product of the Anglo-Australian school into doubt. The family changed its name from Brown to Browne to make it sound more aristocratic, but de Serville has discovered that the family concealed two pieces of embarrassing genealogical evidence. Boldrewood's father, Captain Sylvester Brown, was in fact the illegitimate son of an Irish doctor from Galway named O'Flaherty. Secondly, Boldrewood himself may not have been the son of his putative father, Captain Brown. Boldrewood's Anglo-Australian views were taken up to become part of that group, not because he already was. Notions of heredity and breeding producing a superior type, so dear to Boldrewood, are partly rendered spurious by his own case, which he never revealed.

De Serville shows that the simple distinction between Australian demotic and English hierarchical behaviour doesn't hold up. In reality things were much more complex. Boldrewood was a nationalist in that he believed that Australians were an improvement on the English type. Just because he didn't repudiate the crimson thread of kinship made him no less an Australian patriot. As the response to the Tichborne case demonstrated, just as many nineteenth-century Australians aspired to be an English gentleman as a local larrikin.

These and other revelations in this biography allow us to look at Robbery under Arms in a new light. Three interpretations which explain its anomalies are now possible. The first is the rumour that Boldrewood never wrote the novel, but bought it as a manuscript from the Bulletin writer John Farrell. De Serville downplays this claim by relegating it to a footnote.

The second interpretation is hinted at by de Serville and made explicit in a review of this biography by Professor Elizabeth Webby--that Robbery under Arms is a transposed lament about Boldrewood's own life. Just as the Marstons regret their past life of delinquency and eventually atone for it, Boldrewood regretted his past life of reckless financial behaviour as a squatter and paid for it, and is here subliminally confessing this. This gives the book a personal verve missing in the other works.