Robbery Under Arms

First published in 1888
Second Edition (1 Vol. Crown 8vo.), June, 1889
Reprinted August and December, 1889: February, June, September and November, 1890: February, May,
and September, 1891, 1892: January and November, 1893, 1895 (twice) 1897, 1898, 1899, 1901, 1902, 1904,
1906, 1909, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1937, 1947, 1949, 1951,
1955, 1957. Published by Seal Books 1970. This edition published by New Holland in 2008

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E-ISBN 9781921655333

Publisher: Fiona Schultz
Managing Editor: Lliane Clarke
Designer: Hayley Norman
Cover Photograph: ‘Stagecoach Hold-up, Eugowra Rocks’, 1894, Patrick Marony.
Courtesy National Library of Australia.
Production Manager: Linda Bottari
Printer: McPherson's Printing Group, Maryborough, Victoria

FOREWORD

ROLF BOLDREWOOD was the pen-name of THOMAS ALEXANDER BROWNE (1826–1915), the son of Sylvester John Browne, employee of the East India Company. He was born in London on 6th August, 1826, and accompanied his parents to Australia as a child of four. He received his education at Sydney College, under W.T. Cape. At the age of seventeen he took up station life in Western Victoria, and from 1844 to 1856 was the owner of Squattlesea Mere station in the Port Fairy district. He later purchased other station properties, but suffered such heavy losses during the droughts of 1866 and 1869 that he abandoned squatting altogether.

A few years later he became a Police Magistrate and Goldfields-Warden at Gulgong (N.S.W.), and was afterwards transferred to Albury. From 1870, he contributed to Sydney and Melbourne periodicals under the nom de plume of “Rolf Boldrewood.” An ardent admirer of Scott, he tells us that he “fell across these lines in the introduction to the first canto of Marmion:

And that Red King, who, while of old

Through Boldrewood the chase he led

By his loved huntsman's arrow bled.

The name took my fancy. So much so that, prefacing it with a Norse or Saxon one, I adopted it permanently.”

His book, The Squatter's Dream, was published in London (1878), under the title Ups and Downs. Then followed Old Melbourne Memories (1884).

“My friend George Henry Cox said to me one day, ‘You would write a good bushranging story.' So I said I would try.” Robbery Under Arms was the result. It first appeared as a serial in the Sydney Mail during 1881, but was published in book form in 1888. According to Browne's own statement, the main facts of the story are true, though often changed as to time and place.

Though he continued to produce until 1906, and wrote in all nearly twenty books including The Miner's Right (1890), and A Sydney-side Saxon (1891), it was Robbery Under Arms that established his reputation in the literary world, and by which he is still most widely known. It is a well-constructed novel with a definite plot and thoughtfully organised development.

Browne knew and believed in his adopted country. “Australia! birthplace of my soul, more loved than even my native land,” he said, “thee and thine I claim to know.” And in this romantic novel he embodied much of the bush life of the Australia of his time; he inspired faith and optimism in the country at a time when these were sorely needed even among Australians themselves. And though he loved and extolled superb and hazardous daring, he did not condone the wrong-doing of the bushranger, for he made his heroine say: “I wonder that any man should be content with a wicked life and a shameful death.”

W. A. MORRIS

CHAPTER I

My name's Dick Marston, Sydney-side native. I'm twenty-nine years old, six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. Pretty strong and active with it, so they say. I don't want to blow—not here, any road—but it takes a good man to put me on my back, or stand up to me with the gloves, or the naked mauleys. I can ride anything—anything that ever was lapped in horsehide—swim like a musk-duck, and track like a Myall blackfellow. Most things that a man can do I'm up to, and that's all about it. As I lift myself now I can feel the muscle swell on my arm like a cricket ball, in spite of the—well, in spite of everything.

The morning sun conies shining through the window bars; and ever since he was up have I been cursing the daylight, cursing myself, and them that brought me into the world. Did I curse mother, and the hour I was born into this miserable life?

Why should I curse the day? Why do I lie here, groaning; yes, crying like a child, and beating my head against the stone floor? I am not mad, though I am shut up in a cell. No. Better for me if I was. But it's all up now; there's no get away this time; and I, Dick Marston, as strong as a bullock, as active as a rock-wallaby, chockfull of life and spirits and health, have been tried for bush-ranging robbery under arms they call it—and though the blood runs through my veins like the water in the mountain creeks, and every bit of bone and sinew is as sound as the clay I was born, I must die on the gallows this day month.

Die—die—yes, die; be strung up like a dog, as they say. I'm blessed if ever I did know of a dog being hanged, though, if it comes to that, a shot or a bait generally makes an end of ‘em in this country. Ha, ha! Did I laugh? What a rum thing it is that a man should have a laugh in him when he's only got twenty-nine days more to live—a day for every year of my life. Well, laughing or crying, this is what it has come to at last. All the drinking and recklessness; the flash talk and the idle ways; the merry cross-country rides that we used to have, night or day, it made no odds to us; every man well mounted, as like as not on a racehorse in training taken out of his stable within the week; the sharp brushes with the police, when now and then a man was wounded on each side, but no one killed. That came later on, worse luck. The jolly sprees we used to have in the bush townships, where we chucked our money about like gentlemen, where all the girls had a smile and a kind word for a lot of game upstanding chaps, that acted like men, if they did keep the road a little lively. Our “bush telegraphs” were safe to let us know when the “traps” were closing in on us, and then—why the coach would be “stuck up” a hundred miles away, in a different direction, within twenty-four hours. Marston's gang again! The police are in pursuit! That's what we'd see in the papers. We had ‘em sent to us regular: besides having the pick of ‘em when we cut open the mail bags.

And now—that chain rubbed a sore, curse it!--all that racket's over. It's more than hard to die in this settled, infernal, fixed sort of way, like a bullock in the killing-yard, all ready to be “pithed.” I used to pity them when I was a boy, walking round the yard, pushing their noses through the rails, trying for a likely place to jump, stamping and pawing and roaring and knocking their heads against the heavy close rails, with misery and rage in their eyes, till their time was up. Nobody told them beforehand, though!

Have I and the likes of me ever felt much the same, I wonder, shut up in a pen like this, with the rails up, and not a place a rat could creep through, waiting till our killing time was come? The poor devils of steers have never done anything but ramble off the run now and again, while we—but it's too late to think of that. It is hard. There's no saying it isn't; no, nor thinking what a fool, what a blind, stupid, thundering idiot a fellow's been, to laugh at the steady working life that would have helped him up, bit by bit, to a good farm, a good wife, and innocent little kids about him, like that chap, George Storefield, that came to see me last week. He was real rightdown sorry for me, I could tell, though Jim and I used to laugh at him, and call him a regular old crawler of a milker's calf in the old days. The tears came into his eyes reg'lar like a woman as he gave my hand a squeeze and turned his head away. We was little chaps together, you know. A man always feels that, you know. And old George, he'll go back—a fifty-mile ride, but what's that on a good horse? He'll be late home, but he can cross the rock ford the short way over the creek. I can see him turn his horse loose at the garden-gate, and walk through the quinces that lead up to the cottage, with his saddle on his arm. Can't I see it all, as plain as if I was there?

And his wife and the young ‘uns’ll run out when they hear father's horse, and want to hear all the news. When he goes in there's his meal tidy and decent waiting for him, while he tells them about the poor chap he's been to see as is to be scragged next month. Ha! ha! what a rum joke it is, isn't it?

And then he'll go out in the verandah, with the roses growin' all over the posts and smellin' sweet in the cool night air. After that he'll have his smoke, and sit there thinkin' about me, perhaps, and old days, and what not, till all hours—till his wife comes and fetches him in. And here I lie—my God! why didn't they knock me on the head when I was born, like a lamb in a dry season, or a blind puppy—blind enough, God knows! They do so in some countries, if the books say true, and what a hell of misery that must save some people from!

Well, it's done now, and there's no get away. I may as well make the best of it. A sergeant of police was shot in our last scrimmage, and they must fit someone over that. It's only natural. He was rash, or Starlight would never have dropped him that day. Not if he'd been sober either. We'd been drinking all night at that Willow Tree shanty. Bad grog, too! When a man's half drunk he's fit for any devilment that comes before him. Drink! How do you think a chap that's taken to the bush—regularly turned out, I mean, with a price on his head, and a fire burning in his heart night and day—can stand his life if he don't drink? When he thinks of what he might have been, and what he is! Why, nearly every man he meets is paid to run him down, or trap him some way like a stray dog that's taken to sheep-killin’. He knows a score of men, and women too, that are only looking out for a chance to sell his blood on the quiet and pouch the money. Do you think that makes a chap mad and miserable, and tired of his life, or not? And if a drop of grog will take him right out of his wretched self for a bit why shouldn't he drink? People don't know what they are talking about. Why, he is that miserable that he wonders why he don't hang himself and save the Government all the trouble; and if a few nobblers make him feel as if he might have some good chances yet, and that it doesn't so much matter after all, why shouldn't he drink?

He does drink, of course; every miserable man, and a good many women as have something to fear or repent of, drink. The worst of it is that too much of it brings on the “horrors,” and then the devil, instead of giving you a jog now and then, sends one of his imps to grin in your face and pull your heart-strings all day and all night long. By George, I'm getting clever—too clever altogether, I think. If I could forget for one moment, in the middle of all the nonsense, that I was to die on Thursday three weeks! die on Thursday three weeks! die on Thursday! That's the way the time runs in my ears like a chime of bells. But it's all mere bosh I've been reading these long six months I've been chained up here—after I was committed for trial. When I came out of the hospital after curing me of that wound—for I was hit bad by that black tracker—they gave me some books to read for fear I'd go mad and cheat the hangman. I was always fond of reading, and many a night I've read to poor old mother and Aileen before I left the old place. I was that weak and low, after I took the turn, and I felt glad to get a book to take me away from sitting, staring, and blinking at nothing by the hour together. It was all very well then; I was too weak to think much. But when I began to get well again I kept always coming across something in the book that made me groan or cry out, as if someone had stuck a knife in me. A dark chap did once—through the ribs—it didn't feel so bad, a little sharpish at first; why didn't he aim a bit higher? He never was no good, even at that. As I was saying, there'd be something about a horse, or the country, or the spring weather—it's just coming in now, and the Indian corn's shooting after the rain, and I'll never see it; or they'd put in a bit about the cows walking through the river in the hot summer afternoons; or they'd go describing about a girl, until I began to think of sister Aileen again; then I'd run my head against the wall, or do something like a madman, and they'd stop the books for a week; and I'd be as miserable as a bandicoot, worse and worse a lot, with all the devil's tricks and bad thoughts in my head, and nothing to put them away.

I must either kill myself, or get something to fill up my time till the day—yes, the day comes. I've always been a middling writer, tho' I can't say much for the grammar, and spelling, and that, but I'll put it all down, from the beginning to the end, and maybe it'll save some other unfortunate young chap from pulling back like a colt when he's first roped, setting himself against everything in the way of proper breaking, making a fool of himself generally, and choking himself down, as I've done.