JOHN CLAVERING WOOD’S novel Tom Hurstbourne or A Squatter’s Life came into sharp focus on 19 November 2011, when an abridged version of its fellow literary work Fern Vale or The Queensland Squatter was published by Boolarong Press.
Fern Vale (1862) and Tom Hurstbourne (1865) are Queensland’s first and second novels respectively.
Historian Rod Fisher’s assessment of Tom Hurstbourne in the leadup to its publication in 2010 inspired him to look more closely at the novel’s predecessor, namely Colin Munro’s three-volume opus which was published in London in 1862. The result is Rod’s very fine abridged and notated one-volume version of Fern Vale.
While droving in Tambo in the 1870s (pictured ca 1888), novelist J. C. Wood was supplying a regular column to The Queenslander, using the pen-name Major Veritas.
Addressing the launch was Professor Pat Buckridge from Griffith University who wrote the literary forewords for both books. In comparing the novels, he wrote:
IT WOULD BE hard to imagine two more dissimilar treatments of similar subject matter, namely pastoral pioneering in southern Queensland prior to Separation in 1859.
Where Hurstbourne surrounds its pioneering theme with large chunks of melodrama, romance and comedy, generating a fast-paced, suspenseful narrative, with many surprising twists and turns, Fern Vale proceeds at a stately and deliberate pace, keeping the focus firmly on the central action, that of the Ferguson’s family migration from New England to the Darling Downs.
Copies of both books may be ordered online from Boolarong Press
