Anthony Trollope and the Australian Meat Trade
Sheep become quite a fascination to me as a subject of conversation.
—Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand
In 1871 and 1872 the novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope visited Australia. He recorded his observations of the colony in a sequence of letters, and wrote every day for the work that would become the two-volume travelogue Australia and New Zealand (1873), which he followed up during his second visit with a series of letters to the Liverpool Mercury. This body of Australian work, to the modern reader, offers fascinating and at times devastating insights into the settler community’s impact on antipodean ecology. In particular, Trollope noted the effects of importing European plants and animals, sometimes as an advocate for acclimatisation and at others as an opponent. As he comments:
[T]he pastures of Australia are unlimited, and if the trade were fully established, the Australian flocks and herds would be multiplied for the supply of the markets across the water … European animals have not only been acclimatized in the colonies with the greatest ease, but have proved themselves to be much more quickly procreative there than in the countries from which they or their ancestors lately came. (A & NZ, I, 277)
Trollope was intrigued by the apparently plentiful supply of meat in Australia, devoting a chapter of his travelogue to the subject, and including an appendix relating to its pricing and export. He interviewed those involved in the butchering and preservation of meat, and he was quite fascinated by the diet of working people in the settler community. He was certainly not alone in this respect; the philanthropist and emigration advocate Caroline Chisholm entitled an 1847 pamphlet of what she called ‘voluntary information from the people of New South Wales’, Comfort for the Poor, Meat Three Times a Day, emphasising the dietary attractions of the Australian colonies and in the process participating in what the literary critic Coral Lansbury identified as an arcadian myth-making process, which represented Australia as a lush, verdant land of plenty.
One of Chisholm’s correspondents, Terrence O’B— of Limerick, who arrived in New South Wales in 1841, remarks, ‘meat! how much do we eat? now, that’s a bothersome question,—howsomever, we eat four quarters of beef in six weeks, cannot get a quarter to last a fortnight, the weight may be one hundred and fifty pounds’ (7); while another migrant-turned-farmer, John K— of Dublin (many of Chisholm’s respondents were Irish people, fleeing the Great Famine), emphasised the apparent abundance of food in general, but meat in particular, commenting, ‘I can kill my own cattle here.’ The satirical journal Punch upheld this viewpoint, running a number of pro-emigration cartoons, including Here and There: Or Emigration, a Remedy (1848) and The Needlewoman at Home and Abroad (1850). This material may predate Trollope’s trip by 20 years, but the author had seen the effects of malnutrition on the poor at home, and particularly in Ireland in the 1840s, and this informed his approach to Australia as a destination for migrants.
When writing of the availability of meat in the Australian colonies, Trollope’s tone conveys wonder and admiration. The journalist Richard Twopeny shared these feelings, writing in Town Life in Australia in 1883, ‘Of course meat is the staple of Australian life. A working-man whose whole family did not eat meat three times a day would indeed be a phenomenon. High and low, rich and poor, all eat meat to an incredible extent, even in the hottest weather’ (63–4). Twopeny goes on to scorn local recipes and techniques for preparing meat, regarding its boiling, frying or hashing as somewhat vulgar. However, he points to a pervasive belief in the extremely regular consumption of meat in the Antipodes.
A notable bon viveur, Trollope wrote vividly about the many dishes he was offered during his travels, paying especial attention to the quality of the meat he was served. He was fascinated by the role that colonial meat might play in feeding the poor, not just in Australia but also back at home in Britain, where it did not have a significant place in the working-class diet. Holding a keen interest in colonial farming, Trollope saw possibilities for the export of cheap food to the mother country, and pursued this concern in many discussions and interviews during his time in Australia.
He rightly understood that meat was a luxury for the British poor. In their study of the food intake of working people in the mid-Victorian period, Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham note that much of the meat consumed by the British poor was offal and that joints of meat were a rarity, perhaps being consumed only three or four times a year. At home and in the colonies, members of the farming community had greater access to meat than those who worked in factories, but even then diets were variable: in Macclesfield in the middle of the century 23 per cent of silk workers reported never having tasted meat, while in Coventry, according to the historian Anthony S. Wohl, 17 per cent of labourers hadn’t ever eaten it. This reality was reflected in a number of mid-Victorian novels. Elizabeth Gaskell’s working-class characters exist on a subsistence diet that mostly involves bread and tea, while Dickens’ Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol look forward to an annual taste of a tiny goose, whose aroma seems more nourishing than its meagre flesh.
Trollope was, to begin with at least, somewhat sceptical about some of the claims made regarding Australian meat. In his oft-quoted expostulation about ‘blowing’, or boasting, he declares:
You are told constantly that colonial meat and colonial wine, colonial fruit and colonial flour, colonial horses and colonial sport, are better than any meat, wine, fruit, flour, horses, or sport to be found elsewhere … Now if I was sending a young man to the Australian colonies, the last word of advice I should give him would be against this practice. ‘Don’t blow,’—I should say to him. (A & NZ, I, 387)
Trollope’s critique of ‘blowing’ caused him great difficulty when he returned to Australia in 1875 and found people unsympathetic to his caricature of them. Nevertheless, that he was able to move beyond this initial doubt to a position of admiration tells us something about the quality of meat with which he was presented, although he of course moved and dined in very privileged circles, as a feted celebrity author.
Trollope had a personal interest in farming, since his son Frederic had moved to Australia in 1863 and had, with a great deal of assistance from his father, purchased a small sheep station, known as Mortray, near Grenfell in New South Wales, which held 10 000 sheep. Trollope was very close to both of his sons, and he was proud of Fred’s strong work ethic. As he wrote in his autobiography:
I went to Australia chiefly in order that I might see my son among his sheep. I did see him among his sheep and remained with him for four or five very happy weeks. He was not making money, nor has he made money since. I grieve to say that several thousands of pounds, which I have squeezed out of the pockets of perhaps too liberal publishers, have been lost on the venture. But I rejoice to say that this has been in no way due to any fault of his. I never knew a man work with more persistent honesty at his trade than he has done. (Autobiography, 215)
Susannah Fullerton suggests that Trollope had ‘a financial interest, as well as an emotional one’ (41) in visiting Fred’s smallholding, and this might explain why the novelist developed such a strong interest in the meat trade. However, Trollope was not driven only by self-interest: he seems to have been genuinely committed to the idea that Australia might provide for the suffering poor back at home. As he moved around the country, this idea took root in his mind, and he returned to it again and again as a solution that might alleviate suffering for Britain’s poorest. In a way, he substitutes the movement of meat across the world for the movement of people, given that the ‘pauper’ class would never be considered eligible for co-paying assisted emigration schemes, which rewarded those with transferable skills who were able to save money to pay at least half their outward passage.
Trollope writes with great compassion of the living conditions of the British agrarian class, commenting:
The labourer here at home has certainly a hard time … The farmer’s labourer, the carter, ploughman, or hedger and ditcher, with 11s. a week, and a wife and four children, must often wonder at the inequality of things … He has as yet been able to defend his labour by no trades’ union, to influence the farmer by no fear of a strike in the parish, and has been powerless to demand more than sufficient bread to keep body and soul together. (A & NZ, I, 165)
He continues to delineate the generous provision of meat to the Queensland labourer, noting that, ‘Fourteen pounds of meat, eight pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of tea are allotted to him weekly. This in England would cost, at the lowest price, something over 12 s. a week,—more than a labourer can earn altogether,—and this the labourer in Queensland enjoys as a matter of course before he comes to the question of wages’ (A & NZ, I, 166). In pointing out the disparity between wages and living conditions in Britain and Australia, Trollope subscribes to the pro-migration rhetoric of the likes of Caroline Chisholm. Yet he also goes on to register that an unvarying diet of meat three times a day could swiftly become monotonous, citing the example of a working man from Rockhampton who complained to him, ‘If you knew what it was … to have to eat mutton three times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, you would not come here and tell us to be contented with our condition (A & NZ, I, 167). Trollope responds to the man that if he were to relinquish one meal a day, ‘he would lessen his sorrow by at least a third’. Furthermore, that he frames this anecdote with references to Irishmen who have come ‘from the unchanging perpetuity of potatoes to a plethora of meat’ conveys the novelist’s astonishment at the rapidity with which settlers seemed able to forget the poverty they had left behind.
Trollope’s response to the Great Famine was notoriously conservative, yet he was, as he wrote in the Examiner in 1849 and 1850, horrified by the ‘desolation’, ‘destruction’ and ‘pestilence’, which he witnessed firsthand while travelling as part of his work for the post office. In invoking Ireland in his discussion of surplus meat, he consciously sets up a powerful and emotion-laden contrast between diet in the old world and the new. Yet the man who travelled to Australia with his cook in a first-class cabin is ultimately sympathetic to the need for a varied food intake, when he remarks, ‘I would wish therefore that the would-be emigrating English labourer should understand that when he gets his meat in plenty it will not be to him a blessing so unalloyed as he now thinks it’ (A & NZ, I, 167).
Of course, not everybody wanted a diet made up of meat and yet more meat. Nigel Starck reminds us that ‘Inside the homestead, Trollope was sustained by meals that relied heavily on the ready supply of mutton, relieved by what vegetables the nocturnally foraging possums would allow to be harvested, a copious brewing of tea, tobacco on the veranda’ (50). Fullerton, who interprets Trollope’s commentary in a more critical manner, suggests that Trollope’s wife Rose was perpetually busy, ‘trying to vary the monotonous station diet of mutton and tea’ (47), which—along with her assertion that the writer was bored—is somewhat at odds with Trollope’s own remark that ‘of all the places I was ever in, this place seemed the fittest for contemplation’.
Taking his travel writing assignment very seriously, Trollope’s approach to Australia involved recording everything he possibly could in painstaking detail. There are some problems with this approach: the travelogue unfolds in real time, meaning that there is conflict between Trollope’s opinions at the beginning of the piece and those at the end. This inconsistency is particularly noticeable in relation to the author’s views on race, which are execrable to begin with, but moderate slightly as his visit draws to a close. Critics of the day were less than sympathetic to Trollope’s decision to publish the manuscript without making changes, with a particularly prickly reviewer from the Spectator remarking that ‘he utterly shrank from the task of revising it’. While some readers find Australia and New Zealand packed to the point that it groans with detail, one of its great strengths is the attention Trollope paid to meeting and interviewing ordinary people.
Trollope’s anthropological approach to Australia involved many discussions with labouring men and women, particularly those who worked on the land, but also those who were involved with the meat and export trades. Before travelling to Australia he had tasted some Australian preserved meat and had been distinctly unimpressed with the result, noting that it was both tasteless and overcooked, ‘ugly … unappetising … dry or greasy’ (A & NZ, I, 278). While this canned meat was cheaply available, Trollope reports of a ‘prejudice’ on the part of the English poor against Australian meat, commenting, ‘I have heard them say that if they can’t have English meat, they will do without Australian meat’ (A & NZ, I, 277). However, he recognised that technological improvements were changing the face of the meat industry and became fascinated by the work of preserving companies and the possibilities associated with refrigerated export.
The author records several dinners with men associated with the meat business, most notably Thomas Mort, a philanthropist, dairy farmer, miner, sugar-cane grower and the proprietor of ‘Mort’s Meats’, a preserving works at Darling Harbour in Sydney. Mort had been interested in refrigerated techniques for shipping meat since the 1850s and he bankrolled a number of experiments. In 1861 he registered an ice-making patent and opened a freezing works, the first in the world. In 1868 Mort attempted to ship frozen meat to London and, as Trollope notes, he tried again in 1873.
The first successful shipment of antipodean frozen meat did not take place until 1879, when it sailed from Sydney, aboard the steamship the Strathleven, which docked in London 59 days later, with a perfectly preserved cargo. Mort, who also owned an abattoir, was keen to ship internationally, partly to offset his concerns relating to the falling price of wool (an anxiety for which Trollope would have had great sympathy) and partly because of a belief in making affordable, nutritious food available to as many people as possible, hoping to be able to sell it in England for six pence a pound (meat then cost between eight pence and a shilling per pound, depending upon the animal and the cut).
Trollope was impressed by Mort and his meat, commenting ‘I ate at Mr. Mort’s house a portion of a leg of mutton, —which had been frozen I know not for how long,—as to which it would have been impossible for anyone to know that it had been treated otherwise than in the ordinary way’ (A & NZ, I, 279). Trollope shared Mort’s vision of an international meat trade and, in particular, he was drawn to the possibility that the joints and cuts might make their way across the globe without being salted or compacted into tins. He remarked, ‘Should this be done, the meat will reach England, not cooked, nor cut into junks,—but in the shape of joints, as we at home are accustomed to buy them in the butchers’ shops’ (A & NZ, I, 279). For Trollope, the shape of the meat was a signifier of its freshness and it was important to him that it was recognisable as the body part of an animal, rather than something misshapen and excessively processed.
Today we often try to disguise the animal origins of our food by slicing and shrink-wrapping it, perhaps in a bid to deny the exploitative conditions in which it has all too often been raised and slaughtered. In Trollope’s world, however, all meat would have been free range and while I don’t wish to suggest that farm animals of the 1870s lived idyllic lives before they ended up on people’s plates, the conditions in which they were reared were largely preferable to those of today’s large-scale industrialised operations. Certainly, while Trollope didn’t think twice about eating meat, he was very concerned with animal welfare at sheep stations and insists in a discussion of shearing techniques that the animals must be treated with kindness. This attitude is partly dictated by the care with which one might treat any valuable commodity, but when Trollope writes of sheep washing (which he opposes) it is with real compassion. A squatter, he suggests, should be able to ‘catch a sheep and handle him almost as a nurse does a baby’, while the ‘fury of the water’ in which the animals are dowsed should be avoided at all costs. What is strange about this remarkably tender sequence of observations is that the section then ends abruptly with a report on kangaroo hunting in the Darling Downs, and no suggestion that these native animals might be entitled to similar care.
• • •
Settler farmers experienced many difficulties in attempting to transfer their European agricultural knowledge to Australia, with hot summers and droughts posing particular challenges. It’s fair to say that Frederic Trollope fell into this category of farmer, and Trollope senior’s second trip to Australia was primarily for the purpose of arranging the sale of the sheep station, while assisting Fred in winding up his affairs and securing new employment. Trollope lost a total of £4600 in the Mortray venture, partly because wool prices had dropped and partly because Fred lost many sheep to drought. Understanding the pressures of colonial farming on the pastoralist, Trollope wrote, ‘the year of favourable circumstances … may put him at ease for life—and a year’s drought may beggar him’ (A & NZ, I, 300).
Many literary accounts by nineteenth-century settlers show animals dying of hunger and thirst during sweltering heat, largely because farmers underestimated the climatic differences in the Southern Hemisphere, with Louisa Atkinson’s Tressa’s Resolve (1872) offering a particularly harrowing example. The wholesale land clearance that accompanied settler life exacerbated the climate’s aridity and today it is accepted that the destruction of native vegetation since European settlement is responsible for rising temperatures and an increased number of bushfires across the country. The Victorians were for the most part not aware of the damage they were inflicting on the land and regarded themselves as tamers of an unruly landscape who were bringing order by clearing misshapen trees and scrubland in favour of neat green fields and sheep.
This plentiful supply of meat, then, came at an ecological cost, which Trollope records, even though he cannot always be aware of the long-term consequences of what he was witnessing. He was highly critical of those involved in ringbarking trees to clear the land for grazing, capturing the haunting deadness of the ringbarked landscape in his travelogue, but also in his 1874 novella of squatter life, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. While on one level he registers the damage caused by this practice in an almost post-apocalyptic depiction of rows upon rows of dead trees, Trollope isn’t always able to connect the effects of farming with their causes, and at times he is bewildered both by the weather and by his son’s failure to prosper. This is not to suggest that he was completely oblivious.
In a chapter entitled ‘Land’, Trollope discussed crop rotation in South Australia, and the need to allow the land a chance to recover when it is used for growing. He also complained—in anticipation of today’s discussions surrounding ‘feral’ animals such as camels or cats—that ‘horses have bred so freely, that in many places they roam wild through the bush, and are a scourge to the squatters, whose grass they eat and whose fences they destroy’, while also noting the damage done by escaped oxen (277). In a nineteenth-century context, however, this destruction manifests as a short-term nuisance rather than damage with long-term repercussions. Pastoralism, for Trollope, is a positive development for the Australian terrain and elsewhere in the travelogue he declares of Australia, ‘she is a grazing country’, in the process aligning himself with those who consider green fields of sheep to be ‘natural’, while highlighting his utilitarian approach to the land.
Philip Armstrong, in his brilliant study of sheep, outlines the impact of non-native species on the colonial environment, noting that:
Overgrazing and trampling by millions of hard hooves—which the Australian ecosystem had not encountered before—swiftly killed off ground cover and compacted the soils, resulting in less rain and a reduced ability to absorb moisture, along with increased instability and liability to erosion on slopes. (97)
Michael Symons, a historian of food in Australia, asserts that ‘Grazing success turned us into a nation of meat-eaters’ (28), which of course led to more and more grazing and hence greater clearances of trees, and deeper ecological damage. Finally, Alfred Crosby emphasises both the speed and the extent of the colonists’ environmental impact when he notes, ‘Because these animals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speed with which they can alter environments, even continental environments, are superior to those for any machine we have thus far devised’ (173). Trollope, however, was invested in the idea that the British had ‘improved’ Australia by putting its land to work, commenting that advancing science had carried out and acclimatised ‘not only men and women, but beasts, birds, and fishes, fruit and vegetables, rich grasses and European trees, with a rapidity and profusion of which our grandfathers never dreamed, and which even our fathers hardly ventured to anticipate’ (A & NZ, I, 3).
Trollope was a great advocate of acclimatisation, which he regarded as a sign of European vigour and entitlement to the Australian land. This alignment might explain why he approaches the bush with almost willed oblivion when it comes to native animals, fully subscribing to the notion of terra nullius and extending it to the animal kingdom. On a journey through Western Australia he comments:
The bush in Australia is singularly destitute of life. One hears much of the snakes, because the snakes are especially deadly; but one sees them seldom, and no precaution in regard to them is taken. Of all the animals, the opposum is the commonest. He may be easily taken, as his habits are known, but he never shows himself. (A & NZ, II, 127)
This is one of a number of instances in which Trollope blends contempt and pity for local animals, although elsewhere he rather inconsistently praises the possum for its adaptability and willingness to adjust its diet to accommodate invasive vegetation. Yet he refuses to be impressed by the strangeness of the wildlife he encounters, constantly projecting a languor onto it, which suggests that it deserves to become extinct and to make way for what he regards as more robust farm animals.
For Trollope, native animals are not useful—meaning that they cannot be farmed, killed and eaten—since they are not to the taste of the settlers or potential overseas markets. This is not to suggest that nobody ate indigenous animals: on the contrary, a number of settler cookbooks appeared, including a sequence by Mina Rawson (who is considered to be the first female author of cookery books in Australia) featuring such recipes as baked bandicoot and wallaby soup. Interest in eating indigenous wildlife also seems to have varied according to region, with Tasmanians, according to Symons, being more ready to consume unfamiliar meats (63). Trollope tasted wallaby stew, writing regretfully that it ‘to my taste is not nice to eat, even when stewed to the utmost with wine and spices’ (A & NZ, I, 116) and he mostly thought of local fauna as pests to be culled or hunted, as in the case of the kangaroo.
In approaching Australian wildlife, Trollope seems to have taken his cue from the journal of Captain Cook, who noted on 23 August 1770, ‘The Land naturally produces hardly anything fit for man to eat and the Natives know nothing of Cultivation.’ Writing at the beginning of his travelogue, Trollope commented:
New Zealand … contained no animal life and no native fruit useful to man when we first reached its shore. It is now so wonderfully prolific in life and vegetation imported from Europe that the visitor sees there groves of wild peach-trees and herds of wild horses. Australia was nearly equally destitute. Nevertheless, Australian capitalists are already engaged in the task of sending from Australia European meats to our home markets, and are thus relieving the wants of those at home who are too destitute to improve their fortunes by migrating to happier lands. (A & NZ, I, 3)
He also remarked that prior to colonisation ‘there were no animals giving meat’ in Australia, doggedly insisting that the country was ripe for clearance on all levels. Although there are places in Australia and New Zealand where Trollope is able to show compassion for Indigenous peoples he, like so many Victorians, regards them as a race who would simply ‘melt away’ over time. Generally for Trollope in Australia, however, the overcoming of native animals became conflated with the subduing of Indigenous peoples, whom he describes as ‘in their best form … submissive and irresponsible as children,—in their worst form they are savage and irresponsible as beasts of prey’ (85).
From the outset the British presence in Australia constituted what Alfred Crosby terms an act of ‘ecological imperialism’, and the First Fleet approached the place with the assumption that imported animals would be a necessity for settler life. As Michael Symons notes, ‘The First Fleet decks were crowded with pens of sheep, hogs, goats, kids, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, pigeons, dogs and cats. More livestock was taken on at the Cape, and one list includes one bull, one bull-calf, seven cows, one stallion, three mares and three colts, 44 sheep, four goats, 28 boars and breeding sows’ (15). Some of these animals would have been slaughtered en route for food (Trollope’s own ship served turkey, pork and lamb on the voyage out to Australia), while a number died from the effects of being at sea.
Philip Armstrong, among others, has argued that British farming is steeped in a long history of displacing people in order to make room for livestock (89). Pointing to the pre-industrial removal of the peasantry from the land that accompanied enclosure, he notes that the pioneers of pasture farming drove strip farmers from the land in order to open up huge pastures on which large flocks could graze efficiently. Karl Marx encapsulated the process rather wryly in Das Kapital when he observed, ‘the labourers are first driven from the land, and then come the sheep. Land grabbing on a great scale … is the first step in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture on a great scale’ (470). This process played out again in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand, sometimes at the hands of those who had been driven to the colonies by clearances like those in the Scottish highlands, but who saw no parallels between their own plight and that of Indigenous Australians.
Meat in nineteenth-century Australia was a signifier of prosperity, and one that has become entangled with ideas of national identity to this day—think of all those advertising campaigns associating roast lamb on a Sunday with being Australian. For Trollope, as for many settlers and visitors, the Australian colony constituted a vast repository for the deserving poor, who might emigrate to seek a more prosperous life in the Antipodes. But it was also perceived as a type of vast farm that, as technologies improved in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, secured better, healthier lifestyles for the poorest members of the British workforce. Some animals were hunted to extinction or endangerment in order to provide this food, while others (given the status of ‘livestock’) were introduced in their place to climates that were strange and uncomfortable for their breed. What we see here is hardly a surprise: our appetite for cheap meat caused ecological damage in the nineteenth century just as it does today.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Trollope saw Australia as a place to settle permanently, and he was contemptuous of those who sought to make swift fortunes then return to England. He certainly did not regard the colony as a place to be plundered and then abandoned, but rather he felt secure in the belief that Australia was being improved and even modernised by the settler community. There were, however, limits to his vision and to his compassion, which were based on ideas of vigour and entitlement that do not stand up to scrutiny from this historical distance. Some species were worthy of care, while others were treated with contempt, just as some people’s rights were privileged over those of others, and some creatures were eaten while others were not. Today we are dealing with the effects of a land management policy that enabled, as Trollope suggested, ‘the roadmakers to eat meat three times a day’, and in looking to its origins we may perhaps learn things about the reversal of its effects, as well as its causes. •
Grace Moore is a senior lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Melbourne. She is finishing a book on literary bushfires and is working on a new project on Trollope and ecology. She is a vegetarian.
References
Philip Armstrong, Sheep, Reaktion Books, London, 2016.
Caroline Chisholm, Comfort for the Poor! Meat Three Times a Day!! Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales, Collected in that Colony by Mrs. Chisholm in 1845–46, John Ollivier, London, 1847.
Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham, ‘How the mid-Victorians Worked, Ate, and Died’, <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/>, 20 March 2009.
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2004 [1986].
Keith Thomas Henry Farrer, To Feed a Nation: A History of Australian Food Science and Technology, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 2005.
Susannah Fullerton, Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia 1836–1939, Picador, Sydney, 2009.
Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: the Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1970.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: The Process of Capitalist Production, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2007.
Grace Moore, ‘So Wild and Beautiful a World around Him: Anthony Trollope and Antipodean Ecology’, in Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse and Mark Turner (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, Routledge, London and New York, 2016.
Grace Moore, ‘“Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles”: Anthony Trollope and the Australian Acclimatization Debate’, in L.W. Mazzeno and R. Morrison (eds), Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, Palgrave, 2017.
Nigel Starck, The First Celebrity: Anthony Trollope’s Australasian Odyssey, Writes of Passage, Tusmore, South Australia, 2014.
Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomical History of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1982.
Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (two vols), introd. Peter Edwards, Trollope Society, London, 2002 [1873].
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Trollope Society, London, 1999 [1883].
Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, Elliot Stock, London, 1883.
Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.