Half Crown Bob And Tales Of The Riverine

These stories originally appeared in The Sydney Bulletin

'Half Crown Boband Tales of the Riverine' is a collection of short stories written by an Australian author named William Astley. Featured titles that can be found inside 'In Pugga Milly Reach', 'The Idyl of Melool Wood-Pile', and 'The Last of the Wombat Barge'.

William Astley (1855-1911), was an Australian short story writer who wrote under the pseudonym Price Warung. Astley was an excellent journalist and short story writer. He had made a study of early Australian history and took great care with his stories. There is a degree of starkness about his work, but his tales are full of human nature and human pity. He was connected with the Echuca Riverine Herald and other Victorian journals, the Launceston Daily Telegraph, the Tumut Independent and the Bathurst Free Press. He was secretary of the Bathurst Federal League, which did useful work for federation. He had regular correspondence with Sir Henry Parkes, Edmund Barton and George Black.

This is a collection of historical stories mainly concerned with the social abuses of early Australia's convict system, such as the 'Secret Society of the Ring,' set in the penal colony of Norfolk Island. Though Price Warung draws on documentary fact and social realism, his stories are filled with imaginative truth and "symbolic veracity."

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Grisly corpses, ghostly women and psychotic station-owners populate an unforgiving landscape that is the stuff of nightmares. These compelling stories are the dark underside to the usual story of colonial progress, promise and nation-building, and reveal the gothic imagination that lies at the heart of Australian fiction. This anthology collects the best examples of colonial Australian gothic short stories by authors such as Marcus Clarke, Hume Nisbet, Henry Lawson and Katherine Susannah Prichard, among others.