Barcroft Boake Quotes

If I could only write it, there is a poem to be made out of the back-country. Some man will come yet who will be able to grasp the romance of Western Queensland ... For there is a romance, though a grim one—a story of drought and flood, fever and famine, murder and suicide, courage and endurance ... I wonder if a day will come when these men will rise up—when the wealthy man…shall see pass before him a band of men—all of whom died in his service, and whose unhallowed graves dot his run—the greater portion hollow, shrunken, burning with the pangs of thirst.

The pick of the mountain mob, bays, greys, or roans,
He proved in his death that the pace ’tis that kills;
And a sun-shrunken hide o’er a few whitened bones
Marks the last resting-place of the Lord of the Hills.

Out on the wastes of the Never Never — That's where the dead men lie!
There where the heat-waves dance forever — That's where the dead men lie!