xty years, but his
literary materials have been drawn only from the first half of this
period. No other purely Australian novelist has succeeded in making a
considerable reputation without feeling the necessity of fleeing to the
more congenial atmosphere of literary London.

It is true that even he had to find acceptance at home through the
circuitous route of the press and the libraries of Great Britain, but he
was able to wait for his long-delayed popularity, and when it came and
found him in advanced age, he had no inclination to leave the land of
his adoption. Probably if literature had been to him more of a
profession and less of a taste and pastime, he would long ago have felt
inclined to turn his back upon the indifference with which the colonies
usually treat their own products in authorship until English approval
has imparted new virtues to them.

Most of the other writers who have contributed to the portrayal of a
certain few aspects of Antipodean life have gone to London or elsewhere.
Many years absent from Australia, they know little of its later
developments. Boldrewood has spent a long and eventful life there. Of
the southern half of the continent he must possess a specially intimate
knowledge. Melbourne he has known in all the stages of its growth from a
canvas-built hamlet to the finest city in the Southern Hemisphere. When
he saw it first, the great golden wealth of the country lay unsuspected,
and Ballarat and Bendigo were not.

Though English by birth, he is wholly Australian in training and
experience. In 1830, being then four years old, he was taken by his
parents to Sydney, and there educated. Early in youth he became one of
the pioneer squatters of Western Victoria, sharing with a few others the
danger of dispossessing the aboriginals, and soon acquiring considerable
wealth. But some years later, going back to New South Wales, and
venturing to establish himself there on a larger scale as a sheep-owner,
he was involved in a disastrous drought and lost nearly everything.

In _The Squatters Dream_, which is understood to be partly
autobiographical, he has minutely recorded the varying fortunes of
pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitterness of failure never
caused him to forget the happiness of his young enthusiasm, or to speak
ill of a pursuit so much identified with the prosperity of the country.
He refers to it as 'that freest of all free lives, that pleasantest of
all pleasant profession