Publication History
The novel Robbery Under Arms started life as a newspaper serial, appearing in issues of weekly paper, "The Sydney Mail", between 1 July 1882 and 11 August 1883. The first published edition of the work appeared in London in 1888 in 3 volumes from Remington publishers. The second edition, in one volume in 1889 reduced the original text from 269,000 words to approximately 231,000. This is the current, generally accepted, version of the work. It was published in London, New York, and in Leipzig (Germany) as part of a Collection of British and American Authors series from publisher Tauchnitz. Various, and numerous, other editions followed, including the Five Mile Press edition from 2005 that I am reading.
Film/TV and Other Adaptations
According to the Internet Movie DataBase, Robbery Under Arms was first filmed in 1907, which was followed by a version in 1920; both these films were black and white silents.
In 1957, the film was remade with Peter Finch in the role of Captain Starlight, Ronald Lewis as Dick Marston, David McCallum as Jim Marston and Jill Ireland as Jean Morrison. The film was directed by Jack Lee from a script by Alexander Baron. Sam Neill played Starlight in the 1985 television adaptation, at 141 minutes the longest of all versions to date. Michael Jenkins, Graeme Koetsveld and Tony Morphett wrote the script, which was directed by Donald Crombie and Ken Hannam. It also featured Steven Vidler, Christopher Cummins and Liz Newman.
You can see the poster for the film here. I'm not sure why the TV adaptation had a movie poster; maybe there was a theatrical release at a later time.
