Other editions of book A Final Reckoning: A Tale of Bush-Life In Australia

Unedited, unabridged, original format editions with original colored cover art, these Henty books reproduce the original in careful detail. The hero, a young English lad, after rather a stormy boyhood, emigrates to Australia and gets employment as an officer in the mounted police. A few years of active work on the frontier, where he has many a brush with both natives and bush-rangers, gain him promotion to a captaincy, and he eventually settles down to the peaceful life of a squatter.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

In this tale I have left the battlefields of history, and have written a story of adventure in Australia, in the early days when the bush rangers and the natives constituted a real and formidable danger to the settlers. I have done this, not with the intention of extending your knowledge, or even of pointing a moral, although the story is not without one; but simply for a change—a change both for you and myself, but frankly, more for myself than for you. You know the old story of the boy who bothered his brains with Euclid, until he came to dream regularly that he was an equilateral triangle enclosed in a circle. Well, I feel that unless I break away sometimes from history, I shall be haunted day and night by visions of men in armour, and soldiers of all ages and times. If, when I am away on a holiday I come across the ruins of a castle, I find myself at once wondering how it could best have been attacked, and defended. If I stroll down to the Thames, I begin to plan schemes of crossing it in the face of an enemy; and if matters go on, who can say but that I may find myself, some day, arrested on the charge of surreptitiously entering the Tower of London, or effecting an escalade of the keep of Windsor Castle! To avoid such a misfortune—which would entail a total cessation of my stories, for a term of years—I have turned to a new subject, which I can only hope that you will find as interesting, if not as instructive, as the other books which I have written.

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When young Reuben Whitneyis falsely accused of a crime, he barely escapes being convicted and imprisoned. Realizing that his reputation has been damaged, he resolves to travel to the new British colony in Australia and start anew life. Along the way to Australia Reuben learns about sailing and has an adventure in South Africa. Once in Australia Reuben joins the police force and is sent to patrol the Australian Outback. There he encounters natives and bush rangers—outlaws—who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Will Reuben survive? Will he find out who framed him and clear his name? These and other questions will be answered in G.A. Henty’s A Final Reckoning. Set in eighteenth-century England, South Africa, and Australia, this book includes more than thirty geographical, historical, and explanatory footnotes to aid the modern reader.