Many of the biographical particulars of William Astley—author, swindler, and impresario of the Federal People’s Convention of 1896—are obscure. Some basic inaccuracies—including his year of birth, 1855—were for years erroneously stated by profile writers. They also commonly repeated the assertion that, at the age of twenty-one, Astley was editor of the Richmond Guardian; a not impossible attainment, but something unlikely and unproved, and which may be set aside as one of his fictions. The earliest occasion Astley demonstrably steps into the public eye is in 1880 as a self-described Sunday school teacher in Launceston seeking “contributions” from the public for…