AustLit

'By 1871, he had retired from the post office, put his beautiful house at Waltham Cross on the market, abandoned his parliamentary ambitions, and resigned as editor of the miscellany Saints Pauls. The reasons for her presence are not explained in Trollope's Australian memoir; possibly the plain fare at the sheep station had something to do with it-but I am inclined to think there was another reason, one that this essay will explore shortly. The only previous visitors of note to Australia were Charles von Hügel, botanist and explorer (a limited tour in 1833-34); Charles Darwin, the naturalist, who spent two months in Australia in 1836 as part of his voyage on the Beagle, but this was twenty years before publication of On the Origin of Species; Charles Dilke (1867), later to achieve fame and notoriety as an English politician, who included some brief Australian experiences in a book titled A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries; Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, fourth child of Queen Victoria, who called at major ports during his naval service on HMS Galatea; and Lola Montez, the exotic and erotic dancer who left California for a tour in 1855 of the Australian goldfields. Subsequently he (at the age of fifty-six) descended mines, spent a month with shearers and wool-shed workers, rode his horse into the loneliness of the bush, penetrated the opium dens of the goldfields, and slept rough (on the ground) during a long cross-country trek in Western Australia.' (Publication abstract)