Anthony and Rose had not seen him for two years, and with Fred’s impending marriage to Susannah Farrand, spinster of the parish, the time appeared ripe for family reunion.

Trollope’s prodigious energy ensured that the expedition was an adventurous one. In the year and two days that he spent in the Australian colonies, he descended into mines, rode his horse into the loneliness of the bush, covered vast distances by stage coach and coastal steamer, toured the Adelaide GPO just before it opened (he had been a senior official of the British postal service), and “roughed it” on the track from Albany to Perth.

It was a remarkable physical achievement for a bulky London clubman in his late 50s who relished generous serves of food and drink. But he lost the cook.

Anthony and Rose had joined Frederic at the sheep station towards the end of October 1871. There, the cook “found a husband for herself [probably a squatter friend of Frederic’s] when she had been about a month in the bush”. Trollope writes that, initially, she appeared to be her husband’s social inferior, but her comeliness, “excellent temper”, and wide range of domestic arts enabled her to become “quite the lady”. He finds the episode socially significant, in terms of female emancipation: “No woman of that kind ought, as regards herself, to stay in England if she can take herself or get herself taken to the colonies.”

When his memoir was published in 1873, as Australia and New Zealand, it offered a warm appraisal of the colonies, encouraging the migration path. It is a long book, and largely a positive one; the author plainly was impressed by Australian society. Trollope particularly liked Adelaide, saying that “no city in Australia gives one more fixedly the idea that Australian colonisation has been a success”.

However, he worries (presciently) about the water supply, finds the name “South Australia” misleading, and argues that a planned rail link with Darwin would be financial folly.

In two short passages, he also accuses Australians at large of being braggarts: “You are told constantly that colonial meat and colonial wine, colonial fruit and colonial flour, colonial horses and colonial sport, are better than any meat, wine, fruit, flour, horses, or sport to be found elsewhere”. Melbourne, Trollope says, is the home of the loudest such “blowing”.

This accusation brought him castigation in the colonial press. The papers were still writing about it when he made a second voyage in 1875, this time to wind up Frederic’s pastoral venture, which had been defeated by the drought.

Nevertheless, Australia has retained its connection with the author whose work has inspired my research. A family baronetcy eventually settled on Frederic’s third son (Freddy) and from him to the fourth son (Gordon).

There is a Sir Anthony Trollope living in Sydney to this day. The journey of discovery proceeds. Just last week, I found a set of photographs that Trollope had commissioned from a Melbourne studio for his Antipodean visiting cards.

In this sort of scholarly endeavour, one travels in time, touching the social mores of another age.

Dr Nigel Starck is senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Australia, and an ardent Trollopian. All quoted passages are drawn from Australia and New Zealand (reproduced by The Trollope Society, London, 2002).

Postscri pt (Dec 2):

Your publication of Me and my Trollope (IW, Nov 21) has inspired a marvellous discovery. In that article, I lamented Anthony Trollope’s failure to name the cook who accompanied him and his wife on their voyage of 1871 – and who stayed here after finding herself a husband "when she had been about a month in the bush?.

An English reader of the Independent Weekly Online (Dorothy Turner of Herne Bay, Kent) subsequently contacted me. She had unearthed a list of the Trollope’s domestic staff from the 1871 census. I then checked those names against the passenger manifest of the SS Great Britain on its voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne. One name was common to both: Isabella Archer, age 33.

Together, we are now in the process of identifying Isabella’s husband and researching their life, and the lives of their progeny (if any), in the colonies.

Trollope lost his cook. But, thanks to the Independent Weekly, she has now been found.

– Nigel Starck