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A rare adventure novel based on the true story of notorious Australian bushranger Black Douglas, active in the early 1850’s between Melbourne and Bendigo. Hundreds of diggers made their way up this road daily. One traveller, recorded ‘sixteen poor fellows fastened to a log’ by that ‘notorious robber Black Douglas’ … Black Douglas’s headquarters were three miles from the Alma goldfield near Maryborough, and his gang’s method was to rob the diggers’ empty tents during the day and the shops at night. Black Douglas and his gang were captured when the diggers, fed up with the thieving, surrounded their tents and burnt them to the ground. Douglas was empowered only after he was wounded. he was carted to Maryborough with an escort of more than 200 miners …”. The author records in the preface that she received the information from a German who was in Australia at the time and had in turn received it from an eyewitness. This German can only have been Friedrich Gerstäcker.