Rolf
Boldrewood was a bestselling Australian novelist who modelled his fiction on his literary hero Sir Walter Scott.
Boldrewood wrote many stories about Australian life that often drew upon his experiences as a police magistrate in New South Wales, but the popularity of this bushranger romance overshadowed all of his other works.
He tried to go beyond the so-called realistic romance of his countrymen Ralph
Boldrewood and Marcus Clarke and rejected what he called Anglo-Australian romance, of the kind directed at a predominantly English audience.
For years after it stood in the back yard with cracked panels, a monument of domestic miscalculation', Rolf
Boldrewood, Old Melbourne memories, Melbourne, 1884, p.
Geoffrey Hamlin is now considered to have commenced the celebration of the Australian pastoral romance, a theme and celebration continued later by Rolf
Boldrewood.
Scott, Ngamihi, or, The Maon Chiefs Daughter." A Tale of the War in New Zealand (1895); Hume Nisbet, The Rebel Chief: A Romance of New Zealand (1896); Rolf
Boldrewood, 'War to the Knife', or, Tangata Maori (1899).
What distinguished La Trobe was that he was, in the words of Rolf
Boldrewood, 'a humane and highly cultured person'.
He was named after Rolf
Boldrewood, an Australian writer, whom his mother admired.