Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood (epub read online books TXT) 📕
Description
Robbery Under Arms, subtitled A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia, was published in serial form in the Sydney Mail newspaper between July 1882 and August 1883. It was published under the name of Rolf Boldrewood, a pseudonym for Thomas Alexander Browne, a police magistrate and gold commissioner.
Robbery Under Arms is an entertaining adventure story told from the first person point of view of Richard “Dick” Marston. The story is in the form of a journal written from jail where he’s waiting to be hanged for his crimes. Marston and his brother Jim are led astray as young men by their father, who made money by cattle “duffing,” or stealing. They are introduced to their father’s associate, known only as Captain Starlight, a clever and charming fraudster. After a spell in jail, from which he escapes, Marston, his brother, and father are persuaded by Starlight to operate as bank robbers and bushrangers. They embark on a life continually on the run from the police. Despite this, Dick and Jim also manage to spend a considerable time prospecting for gold, and the gold rush and the fictitious gold town of Turon are described in detail.
The character of Captain Starlight is based largely on the real-life exploits of bushrangers Harry Redford and Thomas Smith, the latter known as “Captain Midnight.”
Regarded as a classic of Australian literature, Robbery Under Arms has never been out of print, and has been the basis of several adaptations in the form of films and television serials.
This Standard Ebooks edition is unabridged, and restores some 30,000 words from the original serialization which were cut out of the 1889 one-volume edition of the novel.
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- Author: Rolf Boldrewood
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You think it fortunate after reading this, I daresay, that we are separated forever, but we may meet again, Richard Marston. Then you may have reason to curse the day, as I do most heartily, when you first set eyes on Kate Mullockson.
Not a pleasant letter, by no manner of means. I was glad I didn’t get it while I was eating my heart out under the stifling low roof of the cell at Nomah, or when I was bearing my load at Berrima. A few pounds more when the weight was all I could bear and live would have crushed the heart out of me. I didn’t want anything to cross me when I was looking at mother and Aileen and thinking how, between us, we’d done everything our worst enemy could have wished us to do. But here, when there was plenty of time to think over old days and plan for the future, I could bear the savage, spiteful sound of the whole letter and laugh at the way she had got out of her troubles by taking up with a rough old fellow whose chequebook was the only decent thing about him. I wasn’t sorry to be rid of her either. Since I’d seen Gracey Storefield again every other woman seemed disagreeable to me. I tore up the letter and threw it away, hoping I had done forever with a woman that no man living would ever have been the better for.
“Glad you take it so quiet,” Jim says, after holding his tongue longer than he did mostly. “She’s a bad, cold-hearted jade, though she is Jeanie’s sister. If I thought my girl was like her she’d never have another thought from me, but she isn’t, and never was. The worse luck I’ve had the closer she’s stuck to me, like a little brick as she is. I’d give all I ever had in the world if I could go to her and say, ‘Here I am, Jim Marston, without a penny in the world, but I can look every man in the face, and we’ll work our way along the road of life cheerful and loving together.’ But I can’t say it, Dick, that’s the devil of it, and it makes me so wild sometimes that I could knock my brains out against the first ironbark tree I come across.”
I didn’t say anything, but I took hold of Jim’s hand and shook it. We looked in each other’s eyes for a minute; there was no call to say anything. We always understood one another, Jim and I.
As we were safe to stop in the Hollow for long spells at a time we took a good look over it, as far as we could do on foot. We found a rum sort of place at the end of a long gully that went easterly from the main flat. In one way you’d think the whole valley had been an arm of the sea some time or other. It was a bit like Sydney Harbour in shape, with one principal valley and no end of small cover and gullies running off from it, and winding about in all directions. Even the sandstone walls, by which the whole affair, great and small, was hemmed in, were just like the cliff about South Head; there were lines, too, on the face of them, Jim and I made out, just like where the waves had washed marks and levels on the sea-rock. We didn’t trouble ourselves much about that part of it. Whatever might have been there once, it grew stunning fine grass now, and there was beautiful clear fresh water in all the creeks that ran through it.
Well, we rambled up the long, crooked gully that I was talking about till about halfway up it got that narrow that it seemed stopped by a big rock that had tumbled down from the top and blocked the path. It was pretty well grown over with wild raspberries and climbers.
“No use going farther,” says Jim; “there’s nothing to see.”
“I don’t know that. Been a track here some time. Let’s get round and see.”
When we got round the rock the track was plain again; it had been well worn once, though neither foot nor hoof much had been along it for many a year. It takes a good while to wear out a track in a dry country.
The gully widened out bit by bit, till at last we came to a little round green flat, right under the rock walls which rose up a couple of thousand feet above it on two sides. On the flat was an old hut—very old it seemed to be, but not in bad trim for all that. The roof was of shingles, split, thick, and wedge shaped; the walls of heavy ironbark slabs, and there was a stone chimney.
Outside had been a garden; a few rose trees were standing yet, ragged and stunted. The wallabies had trimmed them pretty well, but we knew what they were. Been a corn-patch too—the marks where it had been hoed up were there, same as they used to do in old times when there were more hoes than ploughs and more convicts than horses and working bullocks in the country.
“Well, this is a rum start,” says Jim, as we sat down on a log outside that looked as if it had been used for a seat before. “Who
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