During his time with the British Post Office, he also invented the red post office letterbox.
In 1871, Trollope visited his younger son Frederick who was a grazier near Grenfell in NSW.
Unlike most foreign visitors, Trollope spent more than a year in Australia visiting all the colonial capitals.
He travelled by steamship and stagecoach to many out-of-the-way places, including Port Arthur and its cemetery island.
*** Coo-ee: Scandal, murder and immorality###
Charles Dickens and Trollope’s mother Fanny had written critically about America after their visits there.
It was Dickens who first christened Washington DC "the swamp" and "the home of despicable trickery at elections".
As a consequence, although Australians welcomed Trollope, they worried about what Trollope, another fashionable author, might say about the Australian colonies.
When his book Australia and New Zealand came out in 1873, they found that they were right to be concerned.
*** Coo-ee: Victorian Peerages ###
Serialised in the newspaper Australasian during the next 18 months, the book found things to laud.
Trollop particularly praised the relative absence of class consciousness in Australia and the amenities in the cities of Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney and Perth.
However, Trollope described Adelaide’s River Torrens as "a muddy little stream".
Ballarat and Bendigo, only then moving to deep vein mining from alluvial gold mining of earlier years, were also criticised for their uncouth ways.
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Australians, always sensitive about the way that they are perceived by foreigners, were angered by his comments about Australians in general and Melbourne in particular.
*** Coo-ee: Calculating land values ###
Twice, Trollope mentions in his book that he found Australia and Melbourne, just then entering its "marvellous" stage, to be populated by blowhards and braggarts who boasted that Australian wine, meat, living standards, housing etc, to be the world’s best.
Trollope managed to write Lady Anna, a novel, on the voyage out.
Later on his return, he would write a science fiction novel called The Fixed Period.
The novel is set in Britannula or little Britain, a former British colony near New Zealand.
Its economy was based on sheep grazing.
The parliament in this, a country without class consciousness, enacts a law by which every citizen is removed to the college in the town of Necropolis at 67 to prepare for death.
*** Coo-ee: An appointment in Samaria ###
Each is then put to death, exactly a year later.
Curiously, Trollope died aged 67.
When Trollope returned to Australia in 1875 to assist his son in closing down his sheep station, he found that the welcome that he had previously received had cooled.
Accusations in his book still rankled.
When Trollope died in 1882, Australian newspapers referred only to his accusations.
They denied this author of 47 novels and 14 non-fiction books his due as a polished and amusing writer.
When Trollope’s autobiography was published after his death, his writing methods set out in that book also dimmed his literary reputation for 70 years.
He was seen somehow as an unthinking automaton.
Today his reputation is again deservedly high.
- John Barry, Coo-ee
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