Writing in the first person, the narrator Dick Marston tells the story of his life and loves and his association with the notorious bushranger Captain Starlight, a renegade from a noble English family.

Dick's first active involvement in crime, comes where the brothers choose to go cattle duffing (stealing), even though an offer of solid, honest work had been made with neighbour and friend, George Storefield.

Dick meets Kate Morrison again, but her tumultuous nature leads her, in an angry mood, to alert the police to their presence, and they narrowly escape capture and return to the safety of Terrible Hollow.

Seeing no alternative to crime, the gang joins forces with a soon- to- be rival Dan Moran and his friends to stage a major hold up of the armed, escorted stagecoach leaving the goldfields.

Marston and Starlight intervene, forcing Moran and his men to leave, thus preventing further harm to the women present and the home being burnt down at the end of the night.

Throughout the book, there have been chance meetings with Dick's childhood friend and neighbour, George Storefield who, in contrast with the Marston boys, works hard, keeps within the law and thrives financially.

George offers the brothers safe haven and cattle mustering work, which would allow Dick, Starlight and Jim safer travel to Townsville in Queensland, from where they plan to leave to San Francisco.

The themes of honour and loyalty are repeated throughout the story, which eventually leads to Dick's redemption from hanging and, having served his time in gaol, a presumed peaceful, safe and legal life.

As a ripping yarn, originally told in periodical installments, the story mostly centres around the lovable villains, who are adventurers and thieves but nevertheless with high moral standards and, in some ways, trapped by circumstances of their own making.

"[3] English author Thomas Wood called the novel "a classic, which for life and dash and zip and colour — all of a period — has no match in all Australian letters.

[5] In her literary study, Australian Classics, Jane Gleeson-White noted that the book's use of the "colonial vernacular" bared comparison with Mark Twain's in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "As with Twain's novel, it is the brilliant vitality and intimacy of Dick's narrative voice, as well as the wild adventures he has with his brother Jim, Starlight and the women they love, that make Robbery Under Arms such lively reading.

"[6] In his December 1888 Preface to the New Edition, Browne wrote: "...though presented in the guise of fiction, this chronicle of the Marston family must not be set down by the reader as wholly fanciful or exaggerated.

At nearby Koroit, 'Henry Handel Richardson' aka Ethel Florence Lindesay, spent some of her childhood, and used the town to describe unfavourable places in her novels.