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Cover of While the Billy Boils

While the Billy Boils

Henry Lawson (1867–1922)

Short stories · first published 1896 · Sydney: Angus & Robertson

Lawson's most celebrated prose collection: sketches and stories of shearers, swagmen, selectors and bush towns, including "The Drover's Wife".

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About 82,642 words · roughly 5.8 hours of reading (medium) · 19 sections online

Why this is free

In Australia

Henry Lawson (author) died in 1922. Australian copyright then lasted 50 years after the author's death, so it ended on 31 December 1972. The 2005 extension to 70 years did not revive copyright that had already expired.

Angus & Robertson (publisher) (preface (publisher's note)): Corporate/anonymous 1896 note; term ran from publication and has long expired.

In the United States

First published in 1896. In the United States, works published before 1 January 1931 are in the public domain.

Our text

From the Standard Ebooks edition, which is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. We re-packaged the text without its cover art or images. Thank you to its volunteer producers.

Our sectioning, cover and EPUB packaging are dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0).

Rights record

rights.json, checked 2026-10-19. Death dates: Henry Lawson (Wikidata, catalogue). First publication: reference.

Contents

  1. Preface to the First Edition
  2. An Old Mate of Your Father’s
  3. Settling on the Land
  4. Enter Mitchell
  5. Stiffner and Jim
  6. When the Sun Went Down
  7. The Man Who Forgot
  8. Hungerford
  9. A Camp-Fire Yarn
  10. His Country-After All
  11. A Day on a Selection
  12. That There Dog o’ Mine
  13. Going Blind
  14. Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock
  15. Stragglers
  16. The Union Buries Its Dead
  17. On the Edge of a Plain
  18. In a Dry Season
  19. He’d Come Back
  20. Another of Mitchell’s Plans for the Future
  21. Steelman
  22. Drifted Back
  23. Remailed
  24. Mitchell Doesn’t Believe in the Sack
  25. Shooting the Moon
  26. His Father’s Mate
  27. An Echo from the Old Bark School
  28. The Shearing of the Cook’s Dog
  29. “Dossing Out” and “Camping”
  30. Across the Straits
  31. The Drover’s Wife
  32. Steelman’s Pupil
  33. An Unfinished Love Story
  34. Board and Residence
  35. His Colonial Oath
  36. “Some Day”
  37. A Visit of Condolence
  38. In a Wet Season
  39. “Rats”
  40. Mitchell: A Character Sketch
  41. The Bush Undertaker
  42. Our Pipes
  43. Coming Across⁠—A Study in the Steerage
  44. The Story of Malachi
  45. Two Dogs and a Fence
  46. Jones’s Alley
  47. “Brummy Usen”
  48. Bogg of Geebung
  49. She Wouldn’t Speak
  50. The Geological Spieler
  51. Macquarie’s Mate
  52. Baldy Thompson
  53. For Auld Lang Syne

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