Introduction to Tom Hurstbourne Or A Squatter's Life (Critical Essay‪)‬

My first reaction on reading Tom Hurstbourne or A Squatter's Life was surprise. When I first met them, the novel's editors, Gerard Benjamin and Gloria Grant had been very forthcoming about how they came by the manuscript--an intriguing saga in itself. However (and I hope they don't mind me saying this), I remember that they were deliberately a bit cagey about what the book was like as a work of fiction. What little they did say led me to expect something like a pioneering saga, with a straightforward life-narrative, probably beginning with the hero's childhood in the Old Country, then moving quickly to the Australian outback where the hero would undergo a series of challenges, hardships and adventures, suffering a bit along the way but emerging more or less triumphant at the end, sometimes with a wife, children and extensive landholdings. Quite a few Australian novels of this kind were published in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even more in the early decades of the twentieth--books like Miles Franklin's All That Swagger, Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles, Brian Penton's Landtakers, Roy Connolly's Southern Saga, Jeanie Gunn's We of the Never Never, and many others by lesser known authors. These are worthy and interesting novels in their various ways, but in fact Tom Hurstbourne--despite its subtitle, A Squatter's Life--isn't very much like any of them. Forty or 50 pages in, it starts to resemble them for a while. Further on, it begins to resemble various other kinds of fiction as well--the bushranger romance, for example, once the character Jack Mason makes his appearance. Elizabeth Webby has remarked on the fact that Tom Hurstbourne precedes by some decades the bushranger romances of Rolf Boldrewood and Rosa Praed: like them, John Clavering Wood uses events from the lives of particular bushrangers--in his case, Ben Hall and Frank Gardiner--to flesh out the narrative, and like them he invests the bushranger figure with considerable glamour and charisma. But it also comes to resemble another common nineteenth century genre as well--that of the gothic melodrama, complete with Italian villains, a persecuted maiden, Fanny, and her loyal but powerless brother, the falsely imprisoned George. The novels of Anne Radcliffe and Wilkie Collins make their presence felt here, and Collins and Dickens provided some elements of the detective story. Some characters seem to have their existence in two fictional genres at the same time: for example, the main villain of the piece, James Wilson, is simultaneously a cold, avaricious and unprincipled lawyer--a version of Tulkinghorn in Bleak House--and a tormented Italian avenger, Giacomo Savonaroli, enslaved by the destructive resentment of a ruthless and passionate mother.