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This is a story of gold mines, opium dens, clubmanship, exploration, vilification in the colonial press-and family heritage. It is the story, then, of Anthony Trollope's 1873 travel memoir Australia and New Zealand and its repercussions.
The First Celebrity is my fourth book, an effort that I concede is modest when compared with Trollope's own output, but at least I can claim to having made fifteen trips to Europe, from Australia, in the past twenty years; so I have something in common with the great man-whose peripatetic inclination won him the soubriquet of "The Tireless Traveler." It would take some considerable staying power in his time to make the journey to Australasia twice; in the first odyssey, he was away from home for more than eighteen months.
By 1871, he had retired from the post office, put his beautiful house at Waltham Cross on the market, abandoned his parliamentary ambitions, and resigned as editor of the miscellany Saints Pauls. While he might have been just past his peak earning power in terms of publishers' advances, Trollope was still at the height of his powers as a novelist. With The Way We Live Now, The Prime Minister, and Mr. Scarborough's Family still to appear, he maintained his mastery until his death in 1882. Before sailing for Australia, he lodged The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux for subsequent publication. Family reunion had, to a considerable degree, inspired the journey: his younger son, Frederic James Anthony Trollope, had some years earlier left England to seek his fortune in Australia. To help Frederic achieve that aim, Anthony financed the acquisition of a sheep farm (known colloquially in Australia as a sheep "station") in New South Wales.
Anthony Trollope and his wife, Rose, sailed on the SS Great Britain, a passenger liner designed by Brunel. The Great Britain, in an extraordinary seagoing life of more than forty years, made thirty-two voyages to Australia, as well as sailing to New York and San Francisco and serving as a troopship during the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. The Trollopes were among 391 passengers, taking with them their cook, Isabella Archer. The reasons for her presence are not explained in Trollope's Australian memoir; possibly the plain fare at the sheep station had...