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.”
