More than two hundred pages of introductory and supporting material accompany the six hundred pages of text, including fascinating biographical material about the writer Thomas Alexander Browne. We discover that the family changed the surname from Brown to Browne in 1864, and that he adopted the pen name ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ in 1874, a choice that reminds us of Sir Walter Scott’s influence on Australian colonial writing. Boldrewood was able to profit from the demand for serial magazine fictions with Australian settings when newspapers and magazines took advantage of developments in publishing technologies that enabled them to expand their circulations in the late nineteenth century. Robbery Under Arms first appeared in the Sydney Mail from 1 July 1882 to 11 August 1883. The novel went through a number of other serial and then later book versions, including serialisation in the Echo in Sydney in 1884 and the three-volume Remington edition in London, in 1888. Eggert and Webby have established that the first London edition is actually based on the Echo version, which omits two whole sections of the Sydney Mail original. Two Macmillan editions appeared in 1889 and 1898: the latter is the version most readers have been familiar with. From the figures given, it seems that more than half a million copies were printed until 1937, with (roughly) another 160,000 copies in various editions appearing since 1947. Few other Australian novels have sold in such numbers or in so many markets, colonial or otherwise.

The Academy Edition is the first to restore the original serial text in full. The editors comment at length on the impact of the many minor alterations that Boldrewood and his various Australian and British editors made to the original text, changes which have had the effect of weakening the vernacular force of the first-person narrator Dick Marston’s voice. This version strongly reinforces the perception that the major achievement of the novel can be found in its ‘ventriloquising’ of the racy and predominantly masculine world of bush living. It is hard to imagine too many contemporary novelists writing an opening paragraph with a simile describing a bicep swelling ‘like a cricket ball’. There is a comprehensive glossary of Australianisms, dialect words, colloquialisms and other curiosities. While Robbery Under Arms must be, on this evidence, the richest colonial literary source for ‘Australian’ working-class slang, it is interesting to note how many other sources Boldrewood drew on: Hindi/Anglo-Indian, various indigenous languages, American and Scots English.

Eggert and Webby provide us with a useful and comprehensive summary of the critical reception to the novel that says a good deal about shifts in critical tastes and fashions since the 1880s. Noting the controversies raised by Boldrewood’s choice of bushranging as a subject, especially given its publication so close to the arrest and trial of Ned Kelly, early reviews, as in the 1889 Saturday Review, described the ‘offensive familiarity’ of Boldrewood’s adoption of a first-person criminal narrator. But there were other, more lasting opinions; as early as 1891, reviewers (for example, in the Australasian Critic) were beginning to notice that ‘the heroes of our best novels are convicts and bushrangers’. Boldrewood deals with the ethical dilemma in representing the point of view of a criminal in a very traditional way. Reminding us of picaresque novels from the Spanish tradition, Robbery Under Arms begins and ends with a clear awareness of Dick Marston’s rejection of his delinquent past, his acceptance of the dignity and worth of work, and his turning away from life on the road. In the novel, George Storefield represents the yeoman ideal that inspired the colonial dream, the alternative to the bushranger: early on, Dick laments ‘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’. So many of our great Australian texts from the nineteenth century are about working, even when about unemployment – ‘unemployed at last’. Reading Robbery Under Arms will remind us how infrequently contemporary Australian fictions represent the significance of working lives.

While radical nationalist readings of the novel that celebrated the bushranger figure and his rejection of both authority and domesticity may have been accepted by many (mostly male?) readers for just about a century, Eggert and Webby suggest that after a couple of decades in which the novel’s importance was dismissed, since the 1980s there has been a reassessment of the significance of Robbery Under Arms as a romance, best read ‘within the broader context of late-century Empire fiction’ and from postcolonial perspectives. Such recent readings have confirmed its status as a classic of Australian literature.

The editors provide a fascinating summary of the many stage and screen versions of Robbery Under Arms, surely the most tangible evidence of the story’s enduring cultural value and appeal. I saw the 1957 Rank Organisation film, with Peter Finch as Captain Starlight, in an outdoor cinema at Pinnaroo in the South Australian Mallee, the first time I had seen the Flinders Ranges on the big screen. It is well described as ‘a very odd beast indeed: a film with Australian scenery, American genre conventions and English moral values’. The 1985 remake was less memorable, even with the same Flinders Ranges setting. I remember audiences in Adelaide responding derisively on seeing permapine fence posts in a period piece.

This publication has coincided with articles in Australian national newspapers describing a perceived decline in the teaching of the national literature, in part prompted by Professor Webby’s retirement from the University of Sydney. This edition may prove to be rather too long for some contemporary student readers, given Webby’s comment on students battling to complete longer novels, a remark delivered with a ‘rueful chuckle’, as described in the Weekend Review (2–3 December 2006). It is also too expensive to be set as a text in undergraduate courses in our universities, which does raise some general questions about the market for such editions. Given that so much Australian fiction and poetry is now out of print, we can only hope that this elegant and beautifully produced version of Robbery Under Arms is not the last of the Academy Editions.