Unconventional Reminiscences

William Charles Scully was Irish-born and largely self-educated. As his "Unconventional Reminiscences" describes, at fourteen he set off for South Africa's diamond fields to find his fortune and during the 1870s lived as a digger panning for gold. For the rest of the nineteenth century he worked as a magistrate in remote areas of Namaqualand and the Transkei, which he introduced to the world's literary map.