Country Australia Genre Short story collection Media type Print Originally published 1901 | Language English Publication date 1901 Pages 514 pp | |
Similar Robbery Under Arms, The squatter's dream, The ghost camp, War to the knife, A Modern Buccaneer |
In Bad Company and Other Stories (1901) is a collection of short stories and prose essays by Australian author Rolf Boldrewood. It was released in hardback by Macmillan in 1901 as number 423 in Macmillan's Colonial Library Series.
Contents
The collection contains thirty-five stories, which are mostly published here for the first time, and six non-fiction essays, some of which are autobiographical.
Contents
Critical reception
A reviewer in The Advertiser (Adelaide) was impressed with the whole collection. "No one who finds a charm in the romantic episodes of early bush life can fail to be delighted with Mr. Rolf Boldrewood's latest work, In Bad Company, and Other Stories (Macmillan). Bushranging, squatting, droving, gold mining, and countless other phases of colonial existence furnish themes for the facile pen of the author of Robbery Under Arms, and, indeed, no subject connected with Australian life seems to come amiss to him."
In The West Australian the reviewer noted: "Boldrewood is eminently an entertaining causeur, and his short tales, interspersed with exquisite bits of nature, are his greatest charm. Even where he turns to more ambitious work he cannot abandon this method, and in the midst of a sentence he stops to make a most irrelevant explanation in brackets as to the scientific name of the native cat. On things Australian he is such an undoubted authority that it is no exaggeration to say that from his books, and from this book in particular, one may learn more about Australian life than from most of the so-called Australian novels put together."