called upon to say what is the most interesting series of objects in almost any country, I should, without hesitation reply – the spots where the dead are interred.

In his January 1858 ‘Australian Sketch’ for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, the Scottish-Australian writer and politician Thomas McCombie opens by advocating the graveyard as a site of national interest. He proposes an alternative grand tour of gravesites, suggesting that the Roman catacombs and Westminster Abbey's Poets’ Corner are preferable attractions to the British Museum and the Vatican. He uses this argument to introduce his own account of a newer set of national memorials: the bush graves of settler colonial Australia. McCombie's enthusiastic extolling of these ‘most interesting … objects’ is part of a wider cultural trend of his time where the burial sites of the dead became places of increasing cultural significance. From the eighteenth century, the grave site had taken on new importance as a place of real and literary pilgrimage across the anglophone world. McCombie's sketch also participates in an already well-established bush-grave-themed subgenre of Australian writing and art, describing the burials of colonists in the Australian bush. Both trends are indicative of a wider association between national culture and the commemoration of a collective ‘national dead’ in the nineteenth-century imagination.

However, McCombie cites a specifically Scottish precedent for his sketch. Early in his essay, McCombie makes a connection between the origins of his own interest in the grave site and the Edinburghpublished literature of the early nineteenth century. In particular, he sets up the rural graveyard scenes of Walter Scott and Caroline Bowles Southey, and the medical tales of Samuel Warren, as possible antecedents to his own bush grave sketch.