![harry dale drover illus](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/harry-dale-drover-illus-1.png)
Driving Out the Drover
When a newspaper columnist once suggested a popular contest for the best book ever written, I felt tempted to nominate the Fifth Book of the Victorian Reader series.
The Second World War was raging far to the north, but my fondest memory—and I am not alone—of Sandringham East State School in Melbourne’s southern sand belt in the 1940s is of the Reader and especially, the many ballads of Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and others of the Bulletin era around 1890. “Across the stony ridges, across the rolling plain, / Young Harry Dale the drover comes riding home again …” And “The Fire at Ross’s Farm”, “Clancy of the Overflow”, and Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stock Rider” (“Hold hard Ned and lift me down once more …”)
This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
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