Barcroft Boake was born in
Sydney,
New South Wales in 1866. Boake received a superior
education for the time in various fields of study, which led him to the task of taking surveyors into the
Snowy River country. He then took a position as a boundary rider and
drover on a
cattle station turning his back on the city and fleeing into the
countryside. He believed
bush life to be “the only life worth living.” In 1888, a joke played on the
author nearly left him devoid of life as some friends hung him from a tree. He became obsessed with the experience and wrote two separate accounts of it. A family emergency drove him back to
Sydney in 1891, but unable to deal with the financial and personal pressures that awaited him there he
disappeared from home a year later. Eight days later he was found hanging by the neck from a
stockwhip.
His works include:
- An Allegory
- At the “J.C.”
- Bushman’s Love, A
- Demon Snow-Shoes, The
- Devlin’s Siding, At
- Digger’s Song, The
- Down the River
- Easter Rhyme, An
- Featherstonhaugh
- How Babs Malone Cut Down the Field
- How Polly Paid For Her Keep
- Jack Corrigan
- Jack’s Last Muster
- Jim’s Whip
- Jimmy Wood
- Josephus Riley
- Kitty McCrae
- Memory, A
- On the Boundary
- On the Range
- Our Visitor
- Skeeta
- Song, A
- ’Twixt the Wings of the Yard
- Where the Dead Men Lie
These will all be linked and updated as the poems are noded. ;)