east coast Australian expression "back o' Bourke" (from the poem by Scottish-Australian poet and bush balladeer Will H. Ogilvie. The Tourist Information Centre is located on the Mitchell Highway at The Back 'O Bourke Exhibition Centre. In 1892 a young writer Henry Lawson was sent to Bourke by the Bulletin editor J. F. Archibald to get a taste of outback life and to try to curb his heavy drinking. In Lawson's own words "I got £5 and a railway ticket from the Bulletin and went to Bourke. Painted, picked up in a shearing shed and swagged it for six months". The experience was to have a profound effect on the 25-year-old and his encounter with the harsh realities of bush life inspired much of his subsequent work. Lawson would later write "if you know Bourke you know Australia". In 1992 eight poems, written under a pseudonym and published in the Western Herald, were discovered in the Bourke library archives and confirmed to be Lawson's work. Bush poets Harry 'Breaker' Morant (1864–1902) and Will H. Ogilvie (1869–1963) also spent time in the Bourke region and based much of their work on the experience. Eye surgeon Fred Hollows was buried in Bourke after his death in 1993. Fred Hollows had worked at Enngonia and around the Bourke area in the early 1970s and had asked to be buried there. The Telegraph Hotel, established in 1888 beside the Darling River, has been restored and now operates as the Riverside Motel. Crime In 2008, persistently high levels of criminal offending in Bourke led to a ban of the takeaway sales of beer in glass bottles, fortified wine larger than 750 mL and cask wine larger than two litres with only 3.5% or less alcohol non-glass bottles being sold midday. In 2013, a US-style justice reinvestment program called Maranguka was put in place to combat offending. By 2017, there had been a 38% reduction in significant juvenile charges in Bourke. However, by 2022 crime in Bourke had again increased which the founder of Maranguka attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2022, ABC Radio's national current affairs program The World Today detailed numerous allegations of local health workers being routinely abused, threatened and attacked by patients at Bourke Hospital. Such incidents led the University of Sydney to suspend student nurse placements in Bourke. A lead organiser with the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives' Association