Anthony Trollope's Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) is one of the most distinctive books in his vast output — a short, swift Christmas tale set not in English snow but under the blazing midsummer sun of the Queensland bush. It grew directly from Trollope's own voyage to Australia to visit his emigrant son's sheep station, and out of the 'heat and bad neighbours' his son had faced there.

Harry Heathcote is four-and-twenty, proud, hot-tempered, and master of Gangoil, a great sheep run deep in the bush, where he lives with his young wife Mary, their small sons, and Mary's sister Kate Daly. Honest and fiercely independent, Harry has made enemies of his imperious manner — chief among them the disreputable Brownbie family and a pair of dismissed hands. As the worst of the summer heat dries the grass to tinder and Christmas approaches, Harry knows that a single deliberately-set fire could ruin him; and that is exactly what his enemies intend.

The crisis comes on Christmas Eve. Patrolling his vast boundaries night after night, Harry cannot hold the run alone — and it is his offended neighbour, the free-selector Medlicot, with whom he has long quarrelled, who chooses at the decisive moment to stand with him. Together they fight the fire across the parched bush and face down the Brownbies, and the long feud dissolves into reconciliation, a Christmas dinner under the southern sun, and the quiet completion of Kate Daly's love story. A vivid colonial tale of fire, feud, and fellowship, it contains in its long fight against the flames some of the most exciting action Trollope ever wrote.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1874 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.