Naught to Thirty-three

Australia in the late nineteenth century was a land of opportunity and challenge. The cities were expanding, mineral wealth was being discovered and a new sense of nationalism was flowering. Randolph Bedford was a man who loved his country: 'my own land—that had no written history, and no tradition', as he called it. Born in Sydney on 28 July 1868, he writes of his childhood there with affection, wit and liveliness that he also employs to describe his later callings of mining prospector and...