At the climax of Anthony Trollope's 1873 novella, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, the eponymous hero and his employees fight a raging bushfire deliberately set by his nearest neighbours and other enemies, including some disgruntled former employees and ruffians, the sons of a former convict. ‘The whole horizon’, writes Trollope, is ‘lurid with a dark red light’ and the air, which is ‘sultry enough from its own properties, [is] made almost unbearable by the added heat of the fires’, which the men are attempting to extinguish by lighting small areas and beating down the flames ‘with branches of gum-tree loaded with leaves’. By ‘sweeping these along the burning ground, the low flames would be scattered and expelled’, leaving a scorched-over patch that will stop the encroaching conflagration. At this climactic moment, Harry receives help from an unexpected source – Giles Medlicot, a ‘free-selector’ recently arrived from England whom, up until this point, Harry has considered an enemy. The two gentlemen become allies during the fire and the succeeding fight between their men and the decidedly ungentlemanly Brownbie clan responsible for the fire.

One of Trollope's nine Christmas stories, Harry Heathcote is set in the bush of mid-nineteenth-century Queensland and based on his visit to his son, an Australian ‘squatter’. In many ways Harry Heathcoteis much like an American western with its ranchers and farmers vying for control of the frontier.