Barcroft Boake

Barcroft Boake’s talent was recognised by A.G. Stephens, an Editor for the Bulletin, who wrote “had fortune favoured, this ill-starred idealist might have easily won recognition as one of the foremost poets of Australia.” A.G. Stephens and Boake’s father Barcroft Capel Boake wrote memoirs of the poet’s life and it is from these that most of the following information about the poet’s life is derived.

Barcroft Boake was a man characterised by restlessness and melancholy. Born in Sydney in 1866, his father was a professional photographer and his mother died of puerperal fever during childbirth when he was 13. Boake had eight younger siblings, five of whom survived infancy. The surviving child from Boake’s mother’s last pregnancy was referred to as an ‘idiot’ and died at the age of 14.

Boake was of medium and slight build, a good swimmer, boatsman, hard worker and avid explorer whether on foot, horseback, or boat. Whilst an active child, his preference was for sports he could do alone, rather than team sports such as football or cricket. When he was eight, Boake fell through a window resulting in permanent scarring from his eyelid to his scalp. It is possible that this may have resulted in some acquired brain injury.

Boake’s father was a prominent figure in his life and had published odes and ballads in local publications. As a child Boake would collaborate with his father, taking turns at writing rhyming lines. Boake’s father distrusted state schools and Boake was educated accordingly. He began his education at day school in Sydney before being sent to the French colony of New Caledonia at the age of 10 for 18 months. Here he learnt the French language. Upon returning to Australia, he spent two terms at Sydney Grammar School and five years at the private school of Edward Blackmore.

At 17, Boake was apprenticed as a draughtsman. In 1885, he passed government examination and became a temporary draughtsman. He detested office life and the hopeless inactivity of his fellow clerks.

At the age of 18, Boake inherited 200 pounds, equivalent to about $35,000 today – he lost half through gambling on horses, and lent half to his employer which he was never to see again. Revealing the losses to his father caused him a lot of stress and was a primary driver for him to leave Sydney.

In 1886, Boake worked as a field assistant in Adaminaby. On the 14th of July 1888 at Rocklands Station, Boake and a friend performed a mock-hanging as a prank. For Boake, this stunt proved near fatal. He wrote a regretful and graphic account of the incident to his father two days later; and had a more imaginative account of the incident published in The Bulletin posthumously almost four years later. Death commonly featured  in Boake’s writing.

He moved on to Trangie in 1888 where he worked as a stationhand. During the off-season, he was dissatisfied with the slow pace of station life, finding himself with too many spare hours each day. In 1889, he took up cattle droving in Queensland. Here he read the entire poetry collection of Adam Lindsay Gordon and romanticised the ‘back-blocker’ and ‘bushman’, wondering whether there would come a day when they would rise up against the wealthy, absentee station-owners and ‘so-called respectable dwellers in towns’. Barcroft wrote in letters ‘I am afraid after all the bushman is not a very fine animal; but at any rate, even in his most vicious moments, he is far above many of the so-called respectable dwellers in towns’ and ‘if only I could write it, there is a poem to be made out of the back-country. Some man will come yet who will be able to grasp the romance of Western Queensland… For there is a romance, though a grim one – a story of drought and flood, fever and famine, murder and suicide, courage and endurance … I wonder if a day will come when these men will rise up – when the wealthy man… shall see pass before him a band of men – all of whom died in his service, and whose unhallowed graves dot his run – the greater portion hollow, shrunken, burning with pangs of thirst’. It seems as though it was this struggle for recognition of the back-blockers that drove Boake to write.

His droving boss splurged his final check in a drinking spree and so he returned to surveying. From May 1890 until December 1891, Boake lived in Wagga Wagga where he returned to surveying and began sending verses to The Bulletin. Over the course of eighteen months, Boake had at least twenty-five poems printed in The Bulletin and at least two in The Sydney Mail. Banjo Patterson judged three of Barcroft’s poems – Where the Dead Men Lie, ‘Twixt the Wings of the Yard and At the ‘J.C’ as first class works. Henry Lawson included most of Where The Dead Men Lie in his own short story, ‘The Australian Cinematograph’ (1897).

In December 1891, Boake returned to Sydney to live with his father. His father was on the verge of bankruptcy; his grandmother, who had taken over the running of the house after his mother’s death, was now disabled and confined to her bed; and his eldest sister had returned to the family home after a failed marriage. Boake struggled to find work and sank into melancholy and brooding inactivity, perhaps further fueled by a letter from the country in which he found out a love interest was to be married. Boake struggled with his executive functioning, losing the capacity to make up his mind on anything. On the 10th of May, 1892 at the age of 26, he was found dead, hanging by the neck from a stockwhip from a tree – likely a suicide.

‘Where Dead Men Lie’ has been described as Boake’s signature poem, it is the title of his collection of verses published posthumously by Angus & Robertson in 1897.

Australian Dictionary of Biography describes Boake as ‘physically tough, emotionally sensitive, temperamentally unstable, financially inept, … and a predestined victim’ and rejects the image of Boake ‘reasonedly rejecting materialistic civilisation, finding God dead in Australia, and accordingly hanging himself’.

I would like to offer a third interpretation of Boake’s life, that of Boake as neurodivergent – the possibility of Boake as an AuDHDer. According to Bercovici (2024), AuDHDer is a colloquial term used to describe someone who possesses traits of being both Autistic and having ADHD. Up to 80% of Autistic people are AuDHDers (Stevens et. al, 2016; Rau et. al, 2020).

Boake’s poetry was celebrated for its exceptionally vivid sense-images rather than word-images, perhaps a tell-tale sign that he was keenly attuned to the sensory experience of being in the world as some Autistic people are. He sought a simple but active life, he couldn’t bear to sit still moving on from both his office job in Sydney and Rockdale Station when it became too quiet; and found himself happiest doing a hard day’s work in the outback. This desire to be ever active could correspond with ADHD traits. He was interested in social justice as many Autistic people are; the idea of the outback-dwellers rising up against the absentee landowners who dwelt in the towns and cities making money off those, like himself, doing the hard yards. He struggled throughout his life with social naivete being taken advantage of by his bosses. Upon his return to Sydney, he struggled with his executive functioning and decision-making abilities.

Surveyor W.A. Lipscombe, Boake’s employer, described him as “solitary, his disposition melancholy – even morose. He made few friends…” and a colleague described him as “one of the most reserved (even grumpy) individuals” he had ever met, “brooding continuously”.

Boake’s poetry frequently included musings on death and he almost died by hanging himself once before as a practical joke before being found dead hanging from a tree by his stockwhip. Contemporary Autistic people have an increased rate of suicidal ideation and are up to eight times more likely to die by suicide than non-Autistic people (Brown et. al, 2024).

If Boake had lived even a few more years, he would likely be remembered as one of Australia’s greatest bush poets.

Entry written by Louise Cooper.