THE LITERATURE OF THE STATION 297 



if not quite a brilliant, illumination. Characteristic 

 incidents, such as the bush-fire, are vividly narrated. 

 It has but one fault. Most of the personages are too 

 amiable— in plain English, too good — to be salient, or 

 even true to their originals ; but underneath the smiling 

 surface there are dark abysses of tragedy — a convict 

 tragedy, with bush-ranging accompaniments, as was 

 fitting in those far-back days. 



If Henry Kingsley paints station-hfe, his nearest 

 rival, Thomas Alexander Browne, alias Rolf Boldre- 

 wood, dehneates station-business and procedures. 

 A Squatter's Dreain describes the pilgrim's, the rake's, 

 or the fool's progress of a young squatter from peace 

 and prosperity, through bankruptcy, back again to 

 prosperity and contentment. Few features of station 

 life or business have been omitted. The forming of a 

 station, its daily tasks, the building of a woolshed, 

 the flood and the drought and their ruinous conse- 

 quences, the transactions with the bank, the squatter's 

 insolvency, his wanderings in a far country and his 

 exertions on a pioneer station there, his return and his 

 marriage, all taken together, make the most complete 

 transcript of the station and all its multiform and 

 connected activities that has been flung into literature. 



Mrs. Campbell Praed, a daughter of Colonel Murray 

 Prior and reared in Queensland, is the w^orthy third 

 member of the distinguished trinity of station-novelists. 

 With her we get away from the outsides of bush life, 

 which figure as mere accessories, and are carried 

 straight to the very heart of things. The inner natures 

 of the men and women of the high bush, their love affairs 

 and romantic passages, their rivalries and entanglements, 

 their angry passions and wild deeds, the visitations of 

 death and the doom that seems ever to lower over 

 them all ; such are her multiple and yet uniform 

 themes. For trouble must have come into her own 

 bright existence and darkened her happy disposition, 

 while the sun was still low in the morning sky ; and her 

 melancholy stories reflect the hidden tragedy of her 



