On the Track (short story collection)

(Redirected from On the Track (collection)) Book by Henry Lawson

On the Track
1923 edition
Author	Henry Lawson
Language	English
Genre	Short story collection
Publisher	Angus and Robertson
Publication date	1900
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	157pp
Preceded by	Verses, Popular and Humorous
Followed by	Over the Sliprails

On the Track (1900) is a collection of short stories by Australian poet and author Henry Lawson. It was released in hardback by Angus and Robertson in 1900, and features one of the author's better known stories in "Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster", as well as a number of lesser known works.

The collection contains nineteen stories which are mostly reprinted from a variety of newspaper and magazine sources, with several published here for the first time.

"The Songs They Used To Sing"
"A Vision of Sandy Blight"
"Andy Page's Rival"
"The Iron-Bark Chip"
"Middleton's Peter"
"The Mystery of Dave Regan"
"Mitchell on Matrimony"
"Mitchell on Women"
"No Place for a Woman"
"Mitchell's Jobs"
"Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster"
"Bush Cats"
"Meeting Old Mates"
"Two Larrikins"
"Mr Smellingscheck"
"A Rough Shed"
"Payable Gold"
"An Oversight of Steelman's"
"How Steelman Told His Story"

Critical reception

A reviewer in The Freeman's Journal (Sydney) noted that the collection is "a very representative collection of Henry Lawson's inimitable bush sketches. Many of these have appeared from time to time in various Australian journals, including the Freeman, but the collection will not suffer in popular estimation on that account, for it makes up a very interesting volume of Lawson at his best."

In The Evening News (Sydney) the reviewer was not so impressed: "The stories are written with all Lawson's well-known descriptive power, and one regrets that the author does not occasionally give us some different phase of bush life to the sordid side that, he is so fond of. The unlovely swaggie is not even picturesque, and he is decidedly wearisome. Lawson might, now and then strike a higher note and relieve us from the ever-haunting presence of Bill and Jim with their swags and 'nosebags.' It seems strange that one who can so well appreciate the poetry of the bush in verse persistently ignores it in prose."

Notes

This publication was followed by another short story collection, Over the Sliprails, also in 1900. Later that same year the two collections were combined into one volume titled On the Track, and Over the Sliprails.

References

v t e Works by Henry Lawson
Poems	Flag of the Southern Cross (1887) A Song of the Republic (1887) Faces in the Street (1888) Andy's Gone with Cattle (1888) The Roaring Days (1889) The Teams (1889) The Fire at Ross's Farm (1890) Middleton's Rouseabout (1890) The Song of Old Joe Swallow (1890) Freedom on the Wallaby (1891) Up the Country (1892) The City Bushman (1892) The Poets of the Tomb (1892) When Your Pants Begin to Go (1892) Saint Peter (1893) The Never-Never Country (1901) Scots of the Riverina (1917)
Poetry collections	In the Days When the World was Wide and Other Verses (1896) Verses, Popular and Humorous (1900) When I Was King and Other Verses (1905) For Australia and Other Poems (1913)
Short stories	His Father's Mate (1888) The Drover's Wife (1892) The Bush Undertaker (1892) On the Edge of a Plain (1893) The Union Buries Its Dead (1893) Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster (1898) The Loaded Dog (1901) A Double Buggy at Lahey's Creek (1901) A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father (1902)
Short story collections	While the Billy Boils (1896) On the Track (1900) Over the Sliprails (1900) Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901)
Prose	Crime in the Bush (1899)
Adaptations	While the Billy Boils (1921) Lawson (1943) Three in One (1957) The Drover's Wife (2021)

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