The Squatter's Dream

The Squatter’s Dream (1875) is a novel by Rolf Boldrewood, the pseudonym of Australian novelist Thomas Browne. A squatter himself for nearly twenty-five years, he came to know the ways of life on the outskirts of civilization, which allowed him to lead a peaceful, uncomplicated, and inexpensive existence. Originally serialized in Australian weekly magazines, Browne’s work as Rolf Bolfrewood is an incomparable record of colonial Australia, where outlaws and speculators lived side by side on land stolen from the continent’s Aboriginal peoples. “The climate in which his abode was situated was temperate, from latitude and proximity to the coast. It was cold in the winter, but many a ton of she-oak and box had burned away in the great stone chimney, before which Jack used to toast himself in the cold nights, after a long day’s riding after cattle.” Jack Redgrave leads the kind of existence most men would dream of: a comfortable home, plenty of food, a beautiful property, and enough books to keep him curious about the world beyond the wilderness. Despite this, he begins to grow dissatisfied, dreaming of ways to increase his wealth and forgetting the reasons that first drew him to the squatting lifestyle. This edition of Rolf Boldrewood’s The Squatter’s Dream is a classic work of Australian literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Rolf Boldrewood was the pseudonym of Australian novelist Thomas Alexander Browne (1826-1915). Born in London, he settled with his family in Sydney in 1831 after his father, a shipmaster, delivered a group of convicts to Hobart, Tasmania. Educated at W. T. Cape’s school and Sydney College, Browne spent holidays with his friend John George Nathaniel Gibbes on Point Piper. At seventeen, he settled on land near Port Fairy to lead a life of squatting. This lasted until 1868, as consecutive bad seasons forced him to resettle in Sydney after twenty-five years away. Around this time, he began contributing articles on rural life to weekly Australian magazines, publishing his serialized novel The Squatter’s Dream in 1875. Using his pseudonym, he found success with bushranger novel Robbery Under Arms (1888), a story of survival and adventure set in the harsh Australian wilderness. While pursuing his literary interests, Browne held several government positions, including police magistrate, gold commissioner, and justice of the peace. After nearly three decades in Gulgong, Dubbo, Armidale, and Albury, he retired to Melbourne, where he spent the last twenty years of his life.