Fiction · 1896
In the Days When the World Was Wide, and Other Verses
Forty-nine poems of the Australian bush and the city both — drought, drovers, a shearer's funeral, the poverty of Sydney's back streets — several of them Lawson's own side of a public "duel" of verse conducted with Banjo Paterson in the pages of the Sydney Bulletin over what the bush was really like: harder, lonelier and less romantic than the balladists made it sound, in Lawson's own telling.
Lawson wrote most of these poems for the Bulletin through the late 1880s and early 1890s, including "Up the Country" and "The City Bushman," his replies to Paterson in the paper's 1892 debate. Angus & Robertson published the collection in Sydney in February 1896.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of the revised 1900 edition (this text follows its 1913 printing), which added two poems not in the 1896 first edition, "The Sliprails and the Spur" and "Past Carin'": the preface and all forty-nine poems.
Contents
- Note
- Preface
- To an Old Mate
- In the Days When the World was Wide
- Faces in the Street
- The Roaring Days
- The Drover’s Sweetheart
- Out Back
- The Free-Selector’s Daughter
- Andy’s Gone with Cattle
- Jack Dunn of Nevertire
- Trooper Campbell
- The Sliprails and the Spur
- Past Carin’
- The Glass on the Bar
- The Shanty on the Rise
- The Vagabond
- Sweeney
- Middleton’s Rouseabout
- The Ballad of the Drover
- Taking His Chance
- When the ‘Army’ Prays for Watty
- The Wreck of the ‘Derry Castle’
- Ben Duggan
- The Star of Australasia
- The Great Grey Plain
- The Song of Old Joe Swallow
- Corny Bill
- Cherry-Tree Inn
- Up the Country
- Knocked Up
- The Blue Mountains
- The City Bushman
- Eurunderee
- Mount Bukaroo
- The Fire at Ross’s Farm
- The Teams
- Cameron’s Heart
- The Shame of Going Back
- Since Then
- Peter Anderson and Co
- When the Children Come Home
- Dan, the Wreck
- A Prouder Man Than You
- The Song and the Sigh
- The Cambaroora Star
- After All
- Marshall’s Mate
- The Poets of the Tomb
- Australian Bards and Bush Reviewers
- The Ghost
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1867–1922 · Victorian
Henry Lawson (1867–1922) was born near Grenfell, New South Wales, on the goldfields, and left school at fourteen; largely deaf from childhood, he struggled with poverty, alcoholism and depression for most of his adult life. Alongside Banjo Paterson, he is one of the two defining voices of 1890s Australian “bush” literature, publishing mostly in the Sydney Bulletin. His short-story collection While the Billy Boils (1896), including “The Drover’s Wife,” established a starker, less romantic vision of the outback than Paterson’s own. He was the first Australian writer given a state funeral.
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