[BURKE & WILLS] Bush flowers from Australia. By a daughter of the Soil.

London : James Nisbet, 1867. First edition. Small quarto, original green cloth with gilt title and decoration (front and rear boards marked, rebacked, endpapers replaced), nineteenth century owner’s inscription, hand-coloured frontispiece, pp viii, 152 (occasional foxing and few ink marks).

A collection of poems and short essays by Susan Nugent Wood (1836-1880), who lived much of her adult life in Sandhurst (Bendigo) on the Victorian goldfields and later on the Otago goldfields in New Zealand. In the essay The last page of a tale that is told, the author eulogises the exploits of Burke and Wills, noting her close friendship with ‘the gallant leader of the party, Robert O’Hara Burke’. The poem The Return of the wanderers commemorates the infamous wreck of the Admella on the treacherous limestone coast near the South Australian border with Victoria in 1859.