Fiction · 1900
Over the Sliprails
Drovers, swagmen, small-town publicans, and the women left minding selections while their men tramp the roads for work: Henry Lawson's stories return to the same unglamorous Australian bush his earlier collections mapped, told in the same spare, understated voice, equally ready to find a story worth telling in a joke gone wrong or a marriage quietly failing.
Published in 1900, Over the Sliprails followed While the Billy Boils (1896) and On the Track (1900) as Lawson's third major story collection, drawn largely from the same years of contributions to the Sydney Bulletin that established him, alongside the poet Banjo Paterson, as one of the two defining voices of 1890s Australian bush writing.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Preface
- The Shanty-Keeper’s Wife
- A Gentleman Sharper and Steelman Sharper
- An Incident at Stiffner’s
- The Hero of Redclay
- The Darling River
- A Case for the Oracle
- A Daughter of Maoriland
- New Year’s Night
- Black Joe
- They Wait on the Wharf in Black
- Seeing the Last of You
- Two Boys at Grinder Brothers’
- I — The Selector’s Daughter
- II
- III
- IV
- Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems”
- The Master’s Mistake
- The Story of the Oracle
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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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