Cirrus@Austlit

'Robbery Under Arms by the pseudonymous Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Browne in his life as a police magistrate) is—together with Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life—one of the two most famous, and distinguished, of nineteenth-century Australian novels. Clarke dealt luridly with the convict era; Boldrewood with bushrangers. Each book was in part an argument that Australian history afforded material rich enough for romance fiction. Each first appeared as a lengthy serial, Robbery Under Arms in the Sydney Mail between 1 July 1882 and 11 August 1883. Since then it has been sold and read in the hundreds of thousands of copies in abridged editions. With its appearance as a volume in the series The Academy Editions of Australian Literature, the text is much fuller.' (Introduction)