WF Refshauge

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.)