Barcroft Boake (poet)

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake (26 March 1866 – 2 May 1892) was an Australian stockman and poet who wrote primarily within the bush poetry tradition. He was active for only a few years before his suicide at the age of 26.

Quotes

• 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!
  • "Where the Dead Men Lie", st. 1, in The Bulletin (19 December 1891)

• 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.
  • "On the Range", st. 11, in Where the Dead Men Lie, and Other Poems (1897)

• 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.
  • Quoted in Cecil Hadgraft, "Boake, Barcroft Henry (1866–1892)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3 (Melbourne University Press, 1969)