WOODS, J.D.

A Narrative of the Visit of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh KG to South Australia

Adelaide, Chas. Platts and Co., 1868.

Octavo, [vi], 115 pages.

Original light blue papered boards recently respined with matching paper, retaining the original endpapers; extremities a little rubbed and bumped, with minimal wear; a very good copy (internally fine).

Ferguson 18782 ('Pink or blue boards', and calling for two frontispiece photographs, one of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, the other of the Governor, Sir Dominick Daly); Holden 128 (with the plates, but calling - we think erroneously - for pink or blue cloth boards). Holden states that 'Most of the sighted copies of this work have survived without the preliminary leaves and hence the photographs are usually not present'. Even cursory inspection shows that these plates were never present in this copy (for instance, there is no impression on the flyleaf or the title leaf of the outline of any mounted plate), so this may be part of a secondary or remainder issue (along with all those copies presumed defective by Holden). 'South Australia was the first colony in New Holland ever visited by a Prince of Great Britain'; he landed at Glenelg on 31 October.

'After three uneventful weeks in South Australia, the duke moved on to Melbourne where a shooting incident between Orange and Catholic factions and a riot due to inept handling of a free public banquet marred the generally enthusiastic atmosphere. He then visited Tasmania and arrived in Sydney on 21 January 1868. After a month of festivities he spent a week in Brisbane and returned to Sydney. Despite rumours of sectarian strife, he attended a picnic at Clontarf on 12 March where an Irishman, Henry James O'Farrell, succeeded in wounding him seriously. In a frenzy of outraged patriotism the New South Wales government sought unsuccessfully to uncover a conspiracy and, overruling the duke's eminently sensible proposal to refer the sentence on O'Farrell to the Queen, refused to recommend clemency. O'Farrell was hanged on 21 April and the duke who had recovered completely by 26 March left for England on 26 June' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').