‘Bail up!’. A romance of bushrangers and blacks.

London : Chatto & Windus, 1890. Octavo, pictorial cloth (canted, spine faded), patterned endpapers (hinges a little cracked), bookseller’s label to front pastedown, frontispiece illustration by the author, pp. viii; 319; [blank]; 32 (publisher’s catalogue, dated January 1891), ex-library from the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, with wet stamp to verso of title page and cancel overstamp, dated 1963, faint library stamp to upper edge of text block (also cancelled), a good copy.

A fictional work set in Brisbane, Queensland with a dramatic cast of bush rangers, indigenous Australians and opium smoking Chinese characters.

Nisbet was a prolific author who published no fewer than 40 novels between 1888 and 1905. He was a great traveller, and closely associated with Australia: in the mid 1860s, as a young man, he made his first visit to the Antipodes, where he spent seven years in Melbourne, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands, painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work. Much of his later fiction writing is based on his experiences during this period. Nisbet managed to pursue an artistic career as well as a literary one: in the mid 1870s in Edinburgh he worked as a scene-painter; in 1878-85 he taught freehand drawing at the Watt Institution and School of Arts; and he also exhibited oil and watercolour paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. His large-scale oil painting The Flying Dutchman is one of his best known artworks. Nisbet would again visit Australia (and New Guinea) in 1886, and Australia for a third time in 1895.