9 july 1892 henry lawson "borderland" (retitled "up the country")  i am back from up the country -- very sorry that i went -- seeking for the southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent; i have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track -- burnt a lot of fancy verses, and i'm glad that i am back. further out may be the pleasant scenes of which our poets boast, but i think the country's rather more inviting round the coast -- anyway, i'll stay at present at a boarding-house in town drinking beer and lemon-squashes, taking baths and cooling down. sunny plains! great scot! -- those burning wastes of barren soil and sand with their everlasting fences stretching out across the land! desolation where the crow is! desert! where the eagle flies, paddocks where the luny bullock starts and stares with reddened eyes; where, in clouds of dust enveloped, roasted bullock-drivers creep slowly past the sun-dried shepherd dragged behind his crawling sheep. stunted "peak" of granite gleaming, glaring! like a molten mass turned, from some infernal furnace, on a plain devoid of grass. miles and miles of thirsty gutters -- strings of muddy waterholes in the place of "shining rivers" (walled by cliffs and forest boles). "range!" of ridgs, gullies, ridges, barren! where the madden'd flies -- fiercer than the plagues of egypt -- swarm about your blighted eyes! bush! where there is no horizon! where the buried bushman sees nothing. nothing! but the maddening sameness of the stunted trees! lonely hut where drought's eternal -- suffocating atmosphere -- where the god forgottcn hatter dreams of city-life and beer.
Australia