While The Billy BoilsSearchThe voices in the collection
Meet the poets.
Explore 33 writers represented in the collection, from defining bush-ballad voices to lesser-known poets recovered from books, newspapers and recitation anthologies.
1864–1941A. B. Paterson173 poems · Ride, rivalry and the comic velocity of the bush ballad.1833–1870Adam Lindsay Gordon1 poem · Horsemanship, station life, memory, risk and endurance.1866–1892Barcroft Boake30 poems · The Never Never rendered with beauty, danger and unease.1866–1953Bernard O'Dowd2 poems · Nationhood, democracy, landscape and social ideals.1864–1902Breaker Morant5 poems · Horses, cattle, droving and station memory.1864–1944C. H. Souter3 poems · Compressed comic monologues and bush predicaments.1876–1938C. J. Dennis1 poem · Vernacular comedy, work, roads and Australian character.1813–1868Charles Harpur3 poems · Forest stillness, landscape and colonial reflection.1831–1878Charles Thatcher17 poems · Topical colonial song, street satire and goldfields observation.Dates unknownCurlew1 poem · A source-faithful pseudonymous record with identity uncertainty preserved.1869–1952E. J. Brady4 poems · Maritime work, wool and the energy of the waterfront.1865–1931Edward Dyson41 poems · Mining work, goldfields communities and the comedy and danger of colonial life.1866–1939Edwin Greenslade Murphy (“Dryblower”)52 poems · Goldfields memory, social satire, war, work and Western Australian life.1845–1908Ernest Favenc1 poem · Inland travel, bush hardship and colonial landscape.1865–1932Francis Kenna1 poem · Racing talk, vernacular comedy and political observation.1863–1909G. Essex Evans5 poems · National feeling, bush character and comic narrative.1846–1921G. H. Gibson18 poems · Comic observation, social satire and the rough theatre of colonial life.1839–1882Henry Kendall11 poems · Forests, rivers, rain, memory and the music of place.1867–1922Henry Lawson438 poems · Work, separation and the sharp edge beneath remembrance.1872–1942J. S. Neilson2 poems · Lyric intensity, family, loss and visionary landscape.1861–1945Jack Moses2 poems · Roads, weather and spoken-word bush humour.1835–1902James Brunton Stephens4 poems · Bush comedy, drought, work and colonial social observation.1851–1910James Lister Cuthbertson2 poems · Landscape, native flora and the changing colours of the bush.1867–1904Jennings Carmichael7 poems · Bush roads, native flowers, memory and the changing rural landscape.1851–1904John Farrell1 poem · War, conscience, labour and democratic conviction.1878–1952John O’Brien45 poems · Faith, family and Irish-Australian life around the bush hearth.1869–1948Marie E. J. Pitt54 poems · Landscape, labour, social conscience and lyric imagination.1846–1918Mary Hannay Foott2 poems · Drought, landscape and the imagined future of Australia.1843–1897Philip Durham Lorimer6 poems · Landscape, remembrance and philosophical reflection.1868–1941Randolph Bedford1 poem · Mining-country observation, memory and public life.1845–1911Thomas Edward Spencer39 poems · Bush humour, work, sport and social and political satire.1862–1928Thomas William Heney2 poems · Station work, solitude, weather and endurance.1862–1909W. T. Goodge10 poems · Station humour, vernacular character and comic bush narrative.