Barcroft Boake could have become one of Australia's leading bush poets. However, at the age of 26, he hanged himself with his own stock whip.

Boake was born in 1866 and grew up at Milson's Point in Sydney. He was taught for five years by a private tutor and then worked in the office of a private surveyor. The training he received there enabled him to obtain a position in the New South Wales Government Survey Office. Boake worked with surveyors in the Monaro, had a short period as a stockman, worked with surveyors in the Riverina before returning to Sydney in 1891. It was a time of depression in Sydney. Boake could not find work. His father's photographic business was failing. Boake suicided in 1892.

Hugh Capel's life of Boake has a long title: "Where the Dead Men Lie: The Story of Barcroaft Boake Bush Poet of the Monaro." ("Where the Dead Men Lie" is the title of Boake's best known poem).

Sources of information on Boake's brief life are few so Capel has taken the facts of Boake's life and embellished them with fictional accounts of "how it could have happened." Capel is a long time resident of the Monaro and has some experience of surveying through time he has spent on building sites.

A major part of the book deals with Boake's life in the Monaro and Capel creates a convincing picture of that region in the late 1880s. He takes events that later became subjects for Boake's poems and describes them as events in Boake's life. Capel has inserted in the text original letters that Boake wrote to his family in Sydney. However, most of the narrative concerns Boake's romantic association with the daughters of a prominent pastoralist on the then "Rosedale" station. (I marvel at the co-incidence that this same station later became "Bolaro": the station where another Australian writer, Patrick White, worked as a jackaroo).

The time Boake spent on the Monaro was the happiest of his life. Sadly for surveyors, the only aspect of this period he did not enjoy was the surveying. The one exception being a night Boake spent "musing under the stars while I waited for one gentleman named Achenar to come to his East elongation."

"Barcroft felt unsettled. He didn't like surveying. It was boring. He didn't want to end up doing it for the rest of his life."

He preferred droving. "There is a charm about this life always in the saddle only those can appreciate who have lived it."

But "Survey fieldwork involved a lot of waiting. There was plenty of time to play around with the words in his head..."

Included in this book are 40 pages of Boake's poems.

Boake favoured the style of Adam Lindsay Gordon. His poems were published in the Bulletin and both Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson acknowledged Boake's ability.

ISA member, David Chudleigh, in an article in an Australian Surveyor of 1969, used a Boake verse when describing some graves he saw in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia.

Out on the wastes of the 'Never Never',
That's where the dead men lie,
Where the heat-waves dance forever,
That's where the dead men lie;
That's where the Earth's lov'd sons are keeping
endless tryst - not the west wind sweeping
feverish pinions, can wake their sleeping -
Out where the dead men lie!

There's a web site <www.boake.net>

R.J.Wenholz
Canberra