Kitty McCrae - A Galloping Rhyme

Here is a horse, and here is a man who will ride away with the only thing that matters. But the Australian bush has no mercy on young lovers, and the outback keeps its secrets well. Barcroft Boake's masterpiece is a galloping ballad of elopement, abandonment, and a death so lonely it echoes across more than a century of Australian literature. Kitty McCrae runs off with her man through the wattles and the red dust, believing in love and the open country. She gets neither. Left to perish in the scrub, her ghost now rides the wind on the Hawkesbury River hills where Boake himself would wander. This is bush poetry at its rawest: romantic, fatalistic, and absolutely unafraid to let tragedy speak its name. Boake wrote this at twenty-three, published it in The Bulletin, and killed himself three years later. Some poems are born from the darkness. This one rides out of it still.