Fiction · 1900
On the Track
Drovers walking cattle across country too dry to support them, swagmen tramping between stations for work that may not exist, mates who owe each other their lives and say so as little as possible — Henry Lawson's sketches and short stories set down the Australian outback without the romance that bush literature usually gave it, in the same starkly observed, quietly compassionate voice that made his name.
Published in 1900, On the Track followed his celebrated first collection, While the Billy Boils (1896), and belongs to the same body of work — much of it first printed in the Sydney Bulletin — that established Lawson, alongside the poet Banjo Paterson, as one of the two defining voices of 1890s Australian bush writing.
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Contents
- Note
- Preface
- The Songs They used to Sing
- A Vision of Sandy Blight
- Andy Page’s Rival
- The Iron-Bark Chip
- “Middleton’s Peter”
- The Mystery of Dave Regan
- Mitchell on Matrimony
- Mitchell on Women
- No Place for a Woman
- Mitchell’s Jobs
- Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster
- Bush Cats
- Meeting Old Mates
- Two Larrikins
- Mr. Smellingscheck
- “A Rough Shed”
- Payable Gold
- An Oversight of Steelman’s
- How Steelman told his Story
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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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