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Notes
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E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature From its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 620 notes that 'Windabyne originally appeared in the Australian Magazine (Syd., 1878-79), and received commendation from W. B. Dalley, 1882 and Julian Thomas, The Vagabond, 1878.' The last section of Windabyne was in fact published in the February 1880 issue. The 'Letters About Windabyne' by William B. Dalley, 25.4.1882, 11.5.1882 and from Julian Thomas, October 1878 are reproduced in the 1895 edition of the work.
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'Related by Reginald Crawford Strath-clyde Maranoa in 1880; edited George Ranken.' (T.p.)
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Dedication: To Our Friends at Home, this Volume is inscribed as a record of Australian life, written at the birth-place of Southern Colonisation, by one who has done his share in the work of the pioneer. It tells of actual occurrences, under a thin veil of fiction.....The foundations of a great Dominion in the South Seas are being laid. In less than three generations, this Dominion will be occupied by a people as strong in numbers as many first-class powers, and the mark of to-day's work will be seen then for good or evil, deeply imprinted in inherited customs and institutions. That which is now in the germ will then be seen in the fruit...Sydney, 1894.
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H. M. Green's A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied (1961): 260 refers to the novel as 'a discursive but not uninteresting narrative of the same type as The Squatter's Dream, the original version of which appeared about the same time; but Ranken lacks Boldrewood's gift for story-telling and the sketching of character and is too often side-tracked; this novel also contains a description of a young stockman who might have ridden with Bert Poole.'
Affiliation Notes
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Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing
Although the history of the station Windabyne is related by the fictional character Reginald Crawford in Windabyne: A Record of By-gone Times in Australia Related by Reginald Crawford, Strath-Clyde, Maranoa, in 1880, it was edited (or authored) by George Ranken (1827-1895). Ranken was a surveyor, pastoralist, public servant, writer, as well as the Late Commissioner of Crown Lands in Queensland and Member of Royal Commission on Lands Department, New South Wales. In the dedication, Ranken stated that this volume of Australianlife wasintended to interest the British people in relation to what their kinsmen are doing in the antipodes, presented through a narrative thinly veiled as fiction. Written in the first person, Windabyne appropriated the style of a novel, but according to the dedication, the topics of colonisation that rise to the surface in narrativising the station were different to the topics of colonisation that the English Press reported on. In this way, the book works as a corrective to newspaper press that suggests ananalogy between parish jobs and politics within the colony. Ranken also wrote Bush Essays, The Squatting System of Australia, Colonisation in 1876, Grazing; Past, Present, and Future, The Land-Law of the Future, and The Federal Geography of British Australasia, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald on land questions under the pseudonym “Capricornus.”
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- New South Wales,
