The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Adventures of a Mounted Trooper in the Australian Constabulary (1902)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Adventures of a Mounted Trooper was written by “William Burrows.” “William Burrows” is a pseudonym; the real author of Adventures is not known. Considering the content of and detail in Adventures of a Mounted Trooper, however, it may be supposed that the author was either a native white Australian or a settler there, despite the novel having been published in London rather than somewhere in Australia.

Adventures of a Mounted Trooper tells the story of William Burrows, a young Englishman, who, bored with England, travels to Australia following a gold strike there. He has some initial luck but is then swindled out of his grub stake and so is forced to look for work. He ends up joining the mounted police in 1852 and begins fighting crime. Most of Adventures of a Mounted Trooper is concerned with Burrows’ adventures outside of the force, however; he is only with the police for a relatively short time. He is involved in a couple of cases and then leaves the force to mine for gold in Australia. Later he travels to China, where he encounters opium-smoking Chinese pirates.

While with the mounted police Burrows is involved in a murder case among the native Australians, which gives him the opportunity to describe at length native culture and how murder is committed among the natives. As a detective Burrows barely deserves the name. His “investigations” are simple and involve no deduction, and the crimes he faces are hardly mysteries. Burrows follows the obvious clues and catches the obvious suspects, who inevitably turn out to have been the men and women who committed the crimes.

Adventures of a Mounted Trooper is arguably the first work of Australian crime fiction. Novels about crime in Australia by Australian natives or by men or women who had lived in Australia for some period of time preceded Adventures of a Mounted Trooper, but it was the first Australian novel to center the committing of crime/discovery of crime/solving of crime triumvirate in fiction and to privilege the viewpoint of the crime-solver. Adventures of a Mounted Trooper would prove to be comparatively successful and locally influential, and parts of the novel were plagiarized by James Skipp Borlase in The Night Fossickers and Other Australian Tales of Peril and Adventure.¹ 

Adventures of a Mounted Trooper is in part a travelogue of Australia, with a great deal of information about the natives and flora and fauna that would have been exciting and new to non-Australians in 1859. It is also a casebook crime thriller about Burrows’ adventures among the Australians and the Chinese in Australia and Hong Kong. Burrows and his fellow policemen fight against conspiring and violent miners, against bushrangers, forgers, murderers, and opium smoking Chinese mutineers. The specifically Australian elements of the stories were innovations; previous novels with criminal elements by Australian authors had divided their settings between England and Australia and had not featured realistic Australian characters and settings.

William Burrows is not much of a detective—he is a policeman, but he does no real solving of mysteries—and The Adventures of a Mounted Trooper is by modern standards a failure as a detective or mystery novel. Nonetheless, it is worth noting as Australia’s first work of settler crime fiction, and is interesting for its look at early Australian culture and as the source for Borlase's later mystery fiction.

Recommended Edition 

Print: William Burrows, Adventures of a Mounted Trooper in the Australian Constabulary. Nashville, TN: Rarebooksclub.com, 2012.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008642176/