Novel
An Outback Marriage
Banjo Paterson · 1906
Opening lines
It was a summer’s evening in Sydney, and the north-east wind that comes down from New Guinea and the tropical islands over leagues of warm sea, brought on its wings a heavy depressing moisture.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Jim Carew, a young Englishman who has been to Oxford, arrives in Sydney on the recommendation of the wealthy grazier W. G. Grant; he says he is looking for experience of the bush, but he is secretly looking for a certain Patrick Henry Considine, a possible heir to a fortune that would otherwise go to his own family. Charlie Gordon, manager of Grant's stations, helps him find him. Mary Grant, the grazier's daughter, raised in England, arrives to take over the station of Kuryong, run by Charlie's brother Hugh, among neighbours reputed to be horse thieves.
Context
The novel first appeared in sixteen instalments in the Melbourne Leader, from 13 January to 12 May 1900, under the title In No Man's Land; its author reworked it so thoroughly for the volume published by Angus and Robertson in 1906 that the Orange Leader saw in it almost a new story. He was by then famous for his ballads and had carried on with Henry Lawson a friendly rivalry in verse about bush life. The blog ANZ LitLovers points out a passage in which an old bushman confesses to punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people.
Who it is for
A novel of adventures and marriages in English, of nearly three hundred pages; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Praised in 1906 by the Sydney Daily Telegraph and by The Age, which found in it humour and station life.
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