Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens' Australia: Selected Essays from Household Words 1850-1859 : Book Three: Frontier Stories

Charles Dickens is little celebrated as a journalist, yet his career spanned nearly 40 years. Starting as a court reporter, parliamentary newspaper columnist and theatre critic, he developed an instinct for injustice, humbug and charade. For 20 years he edited his own weekly journal, Household Words, later known as All the Year Round, publishing articles and stories designed to be interesting, entertaining and educational.

Dickens had a keen interest in Australia and fortuitously began publishing the periodical at a transitional moment, just before the heady days of the 1850s gold rush set the world ablaze. The discovery of gold drove a period of mass immigration and expansion into the hinterlands, and caused radical economic and social changes in an emerging nation. Of the nearly 3,000 articles published in Household Words, some 100 related to Australia and have been collected in this anthology.

Dickens saw Australia as offering opportunities for England's poor and downtrodden to make a new start and a brighter future for themselves; this optimism is reflected in many of the articles. The stories have been grouped into five volumes: Convict Stories, Immigration, Frontier Stories, Mining and Gold and Maritime Conditions. This volume contains stories of the triumphs and failures associated with opening up new country in the Australian bush.

There are descriptions of cattle drives and bullock wagons, and poignant stories of lost settlers and children - so often found through the uncanny abilities of Aboriginal trackers. There are tales of floods and fire, encounters with bushrangers and Aborigines, interspersed with vignettes of everyday life.