Barcroft Boake is remembered as one of the lesser lights in the school of Bush poets publishing in the Sydney Bulletin in the late nineteenth century. Two facts are probably known to most people who have heard of him: that he wrote a gloomy but impressive and memorable poem, much anthologised, called ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, and that he hanged himself with his stock-whip when young. (Some, mindful of Keats, might guess he was twenty-six when he died, and they would be right.)

Such considerations are of real interest in a case like Boake’s, whose wider reputation was largely posthumous. He died in May 1892, ‘in the first flush of success’, as Bill Refshauge puts it in this edition of Boake’s work. Thirty-four of his poems had appeared, all but three in the Bulletin, and all between the end of 1890 and the middle of 1892. In the years immediately following his death, A.G. Stephens took charge of the young poet’s reputation, though the two had never met. Determined to publish a commemorative edition of his complete poems, Stephens befriended his father (another Barcroft), acquiring from him much of his son’s correspondence, several notebooks and other materials. He even persuaded the elder Boake, a professional photographer with some literary ability, to write a memoir of his son’s life. (This and the letters can be found on the website of Hugh Capel, a Boake descendant, and are not included in the present edition.) Stephens’s edition, a handsome and expensive volume, appeared in 1897 under the title Where the Dead Men Lie. It sold surprisingly well, and in 1913 Stephens published a second edition, incorporating a handful of additional poems that had since come to light.