Old Colonials Tapa dura - 1974

Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974. 284 pages. With an introduction by G.A. Wilkes. B/w portrait of the author and many b/w text illustrations. The dustwrapper has slight shelfwear.. Facsimile Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Near Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Sydney: Sydney University Press 1974 Facsimile Edition First Thus 12mo xxiv, 284pp, 1974 Very Fine original tea green cloth, in VF DW. New intro by G.A. Wilkes. Jacket art by the author. Old Colonials (1882) by A.J. Boyd ('Old Chum') is a rural counterpart to R.E.N. Twopenny's Town Life in Australia (1883). It presents a gellery of over a score of bush types from The Drover, The Stockman, and the Cockatoo Farmer, to The Larrikin and The Loafer, besides a study of such bush institutions as The Grog Shanty, and The Gold Escort. These sketches were first published in The Queenslander in 1875-76, and give a documentary account, more than a decade before Henry Lawson, of the outback Australia that in Lawson's hands was to acquire the status of a national myth. Old Colonials also offers the social historian a spectrum of bush occupations of this period to be found nowhere else. Scarce.