In the kitchen at night they would take turns to read the poems of Banjo Paterson and C. J. Dennis out loud, thrilling to the ride of "The Man from Snowy River," or laughing with "The Sentimental Bloke" and his Doreen, or wiping away surreptitious tears shed for John O'Hara's "Laughing Mary."

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan years ago; He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of the Overflow."

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected (and I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar); 'It was his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

"Clancy of the Overflow" was everyone's favorite, "the Banjo" their favorite poet. Hoppity-go-kick doggerel, perhaps, but the poems had never been intended for the eyes of sophisticated savants; they were for the people, of the people, and more Australians of that day could recite them off by heart than knew the standard schoolroom pieces by Tennyson and Wordsworth, for their brand of hoppity-go-kick doggerel was written with England as inspiration. Crowds of daffodils and fields of asphodel meant nothing to the Clearys, living in a climate where neither could exist. The Clearys understood the bush poets better than most, for the Overflow was their backyard, the traveling sheep a reality on the TSR'S. There was an official Traveling Stock Route or TSR winding its way near the Barwon River, free crown land for the transference of living merchandise from one end of the eastern half of the continent to the other. In the old days drovers and their hungry, grass-ruining mobs of stock had not been welcome, and the bullockies a hated breed as they inched their mammoth teams of from twenty to eighty oxen through the middle of the squatters" best grazing.