THE LITERATURE OF THE STATION 293 



and the blacks, and who cites from them several passages 

 in his History of Australia. Late in the eighties they 

 were edited by Dr. T. i\ Bride, then Principal Librarian 

 of the Public Library in Melbourne, and a large portion 

 of them was then printed. Not until 1898, for some 

 unnamed reason (probably the impoverishment of the 

 Colony), were the}' passed through the press, and for 

 the last dozen years they have still been unregarded. 

 Yet they are rich in authentic materials for the pastoral 

 history of Victoria. Simple, sincere, and manifestly 

 veracious, they are transcripts from real life, most of 

 it but a few years old. If they are not, in the proper 

 sense, literature, they are in one sense better than 

 literature. They show the pastoral life in its 

 reahty. 



It would be unfair not to include the hosts of articles 

 in the Australian journals that have thrown light on 

 every aspect of station life in Australia and New Zealand. 

 Not a few of these deserve to be reprinted and published. 

 Those especially by the late Ernest Favenc, the explorer, 

 who perhaps knew the face of Australia more intimately 

 than any man of his generation, might form the substance 

 of many a chapter of colonial history. The physio- 

 graphy of Australia, on which the pastoral life of the 

 country depended and which governed it, the successive 

 waves of settlement, the overlander, the bullock-driver — 

 these and many more such topics have been the themes 

 of numerous articles contributed by him to the Sydney 

 journals. 



Most of the poems written by the greatest of Aus- 

 tralian poets, Adam Lindsey Gordon, may be described 

 as station-poems, because they ^^ere composed on the 

 author's own station at MouiH Gambier, in South 

 Australia, on the confines of Victoria. The best of 

 them, especially, the gem of the collection, and perhaps 

 the only classical poem that Australia has produced, 

 vividly describes some of the more picturesque scenes 

 of station-Hfe by one who has lived it as stockman and 

 squatter, whose rhythm is that of the bush. The very 



