Henry Lawson

“ I could never brood comfortably and nurse a baby at the same time. It was a ghostly moonlight night. There’s no timber in the world so ghostly as the Australian Bush in moonlight—or just about daybreak. The all-shaped patches of moonlight falling between ragged, twisted boughs; the ghostly blue-white bark of the ‘white-box’ trees; a dead naked white ring-barked tree, or dead white stump starting out here and there, and the ragged patches of shade and light on the road that made anything, from the shape of a spotted bullock to a naked corpse laid out stark. ”

“ At the fame your muse may offer let your lip in scorn be curled,
'Self and Pelf', my friend, remember, that's the motto of the world.
"Shun the fields of love, where lightly, to a low and mocking tune,
Strong and useful lives are ruined, and the broken hearts are strewn.
Not a farthing is the value of the honest love you hold;
Call it lust, and make it serve you! Set your heart on nought but gold.
At the bliss of purer passions let your lip in scorn be curled —
'Self and Pelf', my friend, shall ever be the motto of the world." ”

“ Things always look brighter in the morning—more so in the Australian Bush, I should think, than in most other places. It is when the sun goes down on the dark bed of the lonely Bush, and the sunset flashes like a sea of fire and then fades, and then glows out again, like a bank of coals, and then burns away to ashes—it is then that old things come home to one. And strange, new-old things too, that haunt and depress you terribly, and that you can’t understand. I often think how, at sunset, the past must come home to new-chum blacksheep, sent out to Australia and drifted into the Bush. ”

“ Cassius does not know that Brutus has to-day received news of the death, in Rome, of his good and true wife Portia, who, during a fit of insanity, brought on by her grief and anxiety for Brutus, and in the absence of her attendant, has poisoned herself—or “swallowed fire,” as Shakespeare has it.
Brutus (to Lucius, his servant) : Lucius, a bowl of wine!
Cassius: I did not think you could have been so angry.
Brutus: O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs.
Cassius: Of your philosophy you make no use,
If you give place to accidental evils.
Brutus: No man bears sorrow better:—Portia is dead. ”

“ I've been a fool, I know, but I've paid for it; and now there's nothing for it but to tramp, tramp, tramp for your tucker, and keep tramping till you get old and careless and dirty, and older, and more careless and dirtier, and you get used to the dust and sand, and heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, just as a bullock does, and lose ambition and hope, and get contented with this animal life, like a dog, and till your swag seems part of yourself, and you'd be lost and uneasy and light-shouldered without it, and you don't care a damn if you'll ever get work again, or live like a Christian ”

“ We in part atone for the ghoulish strife, and the crimes of the peace we boast, And the better part of a people's life in the storm comes uppermost. The self-same spirit that drives the man to the depths of drink and crime Will do the deeds in the heroes' van that live till the end of time. The living death in the lonely bush, the greed of the selfish town, And even the creed of the outlawed push is chivalry — upside down. 'Twill be while ever our blood is hot, while ever the world goes wrong, The nations rise in a war, to rot in a peace that lasts too long. ”

“ It is the instinct that irresistibly impels a thirsty, parched man, out on the burning sands, to pour the last drop of water down the throat of a dying mate, where none save the sun or moon or stars may see. And the sun, moon and stars do not write to the newspapers. To give a weaker "partner" the last sup of coffee, or bite of boiled beans and bacon, on the snow wastes of Alaska, when the rim of the sun only touches the rim of the south at noon. To give up the only vacant place in the boats at sea, and die that perhaps most dreaded of all deaths the deaths—by drowning in mid-ocean. ”

“ The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land—of the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of self-reliance, and never-give-in, and help-your-mate. The grave of many of the world’s tragedies and comedies—royal and otherwise. The land where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the Gulf, or never be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the mounted police, or never found and never buried—what does it matter? ”

“ You must remember that he is a tired man after a long, strenuous day such as none of us ever know. The fate of Rome and his—a much smaller matter—are hanging on the balance, and tomorrow will decide; but he is so mind-dulled and shoulder-weary under the tremendous burden of great things and of many griefs that he is almost apathetic; and over all is the cloud of a loss that he has not yet had time to realize. He is self-hypnotized, so to speak, and his mind mercifully dulled for the moment on the Sea of Fatalism.
Enter GHOST of CAESAR Brutus: How ill this taper burns! ”

“ By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed, By railroad, coach, and track— By lonely graves of our brave dead, Up-Country and Out-Back: To where ‘neath glorious clustered stars The dreamy plains expand— My home lies wide a thousand miles In the Never-Never Land. It lies beyond the farming belt, Wide wastes of scrub and plain, A blazing desert in the drought, A lake-land after rain; To the sky-line sweeps the waving grass, Or whirls the scorching sand— A phantom land, a mystic land! ”

“ The railway contractor’s foreman and inspector of sub-contractors was a practical man and a bushman, but he had been a timber-getter himself; his sympathies were bushy, and he was on winking terms with Dave Regan. Besides, extended time was expiring, and the contractors were in a hurry to complete the line. But the Government inspector was a reserved man who poked round on his independent own and appeared in lonely spots at unexpected times —with apparently no definite object in life—like a grey kangaroo bothered by a new wire fence, but unsuspicious of the presence of humans. ”

“ These are the sort of long, cruel moments when a man sits or stands very tight and quiet and calm-looking, with his whole past life going whirling through his brain, year after year, and over and over again. Just as the digger seemed about to speak to them he met the brimming eyes of his little girl turned up to his face. He looked at her for a moment, and then turned suddenly and went below as if pretending to go down for his things. I noticed that Mitchell—who hadn’t seemed to be noticing anything in particular—followed him down. ”

“ For time means tucker, and tramp you must, where the scrubs and plains are wide, With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak to guide; All day long in the dust and heat — when summer is on the track — With stinted stomachs and blistered feet, they carry their swags Out Back. He tramped away from the shanty there, when the days were long and hot, With never a soul to know or care if he died on the track or not. The poor of the city have friends in woe, no matter how much they lack, But only God and the swagmen know how a poor man fares Out Back. ”

“ You can whistle and sing by the camp fire, and make poetry, and breathe fresh air, and watch the everlasting stars that keep the mateless traveller from going mad as he lies in his lonely camp on the plains. Your privacy is even more perfect than if you had a suite of rooms at the Australia; you are at the mercy of no policeman; there's no one to watch you but God―and He won't move you on. God watches the 'dossers-out,' too, in the city, but He doesn't keep them from being moved on or run in. ”

“ It was a dreary, hopeless track. There was no horizon, nothing but the rough ashen trunks of the gnarled and stunted trees in all directions, little or no undergrowth, and the ground, save for the coarse, brownish tufts of dead grass, as bare as the road, for it was a dry season: there had been no rain for months, and I wondered what I should do with the cattle if there wasn’t more grass on the creek.
In this sort of country a stranger might travel for miles without seeming to have moved, for all the difference there is in the scenery. ”

“ Guide thou the sword.
Caesar, thou art revenged,
Even with the sword that kill’d thee.
Good-bye, Cassius, old chap! Titinius and Messala, coming too late, find Cassius dead; and Titinius, being left alone while Messala takes the news to Brutus, kills himself with Cassius’s sword. Titinius, farewell! Come Brutus and those that are left.
Brutus: Where, where, Messala, doth his body lie?
Messala: Lo, yonder, and Titinius mourning it.
Brutus: Titinius’ face is upward.
Cato: He is slain.
Grim mates in a grim day in a grim hour. Then the cry of Brutus:
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! ”

“ We are professional shearers; and the Australian shearers are about the most independent and intelligent class of men in the world. We’ve got more genius in one of our little fingers than there is in the whole of that wagonette-load of diddle-daddle and fiddle-faddle and giggles. Their intellects are on a level with the rotten dramas they travel with, and their lives about as false. They are slaves to the public, and their home is the pub-parlour, with sickly, senseless Johnnies to shout suppers and drink for them and lend their men money. ”

“ Earlier in the quarrel, where Brutus asks why, after striking down the foremost man in all the world for supporting land agents and others, should they do the same thing and contaminate their fingers with base bribes?
I’d rather be a dog and bay the moon, Than such a Roman.
Cassius says:
Brutus, bait not me I’ll not endure it: you forget yourself, To hedge me in; I am a soldier, I, Older in practice, abler than yourself To make conditions. Brutus: Go to, you are not, Cassius. Cassius: I am. Brutus: I say you are not. ”

“ Grin! if you've a mate to grin for, grin and jest and don't look blue; For it can't go on for ever, and — 'I'll rise some day,' says you. When you've tramped the Sydney pavements till you've counted all the flags, And your flapping boot-soles trip you, and your clothes are mostly rags, When you're called a city loafer, shunned, abused, moved on, despised — Fifty hungry beggars after every job that's advertised — Don't be beaten! Hold your head up! To your wretched self be true; Set your pride to fight your hunger! Be a MAN in all you do! ”

“ I’d been puzzling for the last half-hour to think where I’d met or heard of Jack Drew; now it flashed on me that I’d been told that Jack Drew was the Lachlan’s real name.
I lay awake thinking a long time, and wished Mitchell had kept his yarn for daytime. I felt—well, I felt as if the Lachlan’s story should have been played in the biggest theatre in the world, by the greatest actors, with music for the intervals and situations—deep, strong music, such as thrills and lifts a man from his boot soles. ”

“ The train left Bourke, and then there began the long, long agony of scrub and wire fence, with here and there a natural clearing, which seemed even more dismal than the funereal “timber” itself. The only thing which might seem in keeping with one of these soddened flats would be the ghost of a funeral—a city funeral with plain hearse and string of cabs—going very slowly across from the scrub on one side to the scrub on the other. Sky like a wet, grey blanket; plains like dead seas, save for the tufts of coarse grass sticking up out of the water ”

“ While the men who made Australia live on damper, junk and tea —
But the quiet voices whisper, 'Wait a while!'
For the sons of all Australia, they were born to conquer fate —
And, where charity and friendship are sincere,
Where a sinner is a brother and a stranger is a mate,
There the future of a nation's written clear.
Aye, the cities claim the triumphs of a land they do not know,
But all empty is the day they celebrate!
For the men who made Australia federated long ago,
And the men to rule Australia — they can wait. ”

“ Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street —
Flowing in, flowing in,
To the beat of hurried feet —
Ah! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.
The human river dwindles when 'tis past the hour of eight,
Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;
But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat
The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street —
Grinding body, grinding soul,
Yielding scarce enough to eat —
Oh! I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street. ”

“ Brutus: Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala: With meditating that she must die once I have the patience to endure it now.
Poor Messala comes to the scratch again rather lamely with a little weak flattery: “Even so great men great losses should endure;” and Cassius says, rather mixedly—it might have been the wine—that he has as much strength in bearing trouble as Brutus has, and yet he couldn’t bear it so.
I have as much of this in art as you, But yet my nature could not bear it so. Brutus: Well, to our work alive. What do you think Of marching on Philippi presently? ”

“ The light of passion in dreamy eyes, and a page of truth well read, The glorious thrill in a heart grown cold of the spirit I thought was dead, A song that goes to a comrade's heart, and a tear of pride let fall — And my soul is strong! and the world to me is a grand world after all! Let our enemies go by their old dull tracks, and theirs be the fault or shame (The man is bitter against the world who has only himself to blame) ; Let the darkest side of the past be dark, and only the good recall; For I must believe that the world, my dear, is a kind world after all. ”

“ There is a thing that they forget, so let it here be writ, That some are made of common mud, and some are made of GRIT; Some try to help the world along while others fret and fume And wish that they were slumbering in the silence of the tomb. 'Twixt mother's arms and coffin-gear a man has work to do! And if he does his very best he mostly worries through, And while there is a wrong to right, and while the world goes round, An honest man alive is worth a million underground. And yet, as long as sheoaks sigh and wattle-blossoms bloom, The world shall hear the drivel of the poets of the tomb. ”