Barcroft Boake (poet)

"Out on the wastes of the Never Never — Thats where the dead men lie! There where the heat-waves dance forever — Thats where the dead men lie!"

"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."

"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."