The Outback Train

This painting comes from my many trips on the old trains out west, and the dilapidated and unloved stations and assorted buildings left on the the lonely platforms.
Henry Lawson wrote his memory to the back "O" Bourke in 1894 and I've used some excerpts from it.

"Draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train. Then you’ll have the bush all along the New South Wales Western line from Bathurst on.

The railway towns consist of a public house and a general store, with a square tank and a schoolhouse on piles in the nearer distance. The tank stands at the end of the school and is not many times smaller than the building itself. It is safe to call the pub ‘The Railway Hotel,’ and the store ‘The Railway Stores,’ with an ‘s.’ The Railway Stores seem to exist only in the shadow of the pub, and it is impossible to conceive either as being independent of the other. There is sometimes a small, oblong weatherboard building — unpainted, and generally leaning in one of the eight possible directions, and perhaps with a twist in another — which, from its half-obliterated sign, seems to have started as a rival to the Railway Stores; but the shutters are up and the place empty.

The only town I saw that differed much from the above consisted of a box-bark humpy with a clay chimney, and a woman standing at the door throwing out the wash-up water.

By way of variety, the artist might make a watercolour-sketch of a fettler’s tent on the line, with a billy hanging over the fire in front, and three fettlers standing round filling their pipes.

We crossed the Macquarie — a narrow, muddy gutter with a dog swimming across, and three goats interested.

Along about Byrock we saw the first shearers. They dress like the unemployed, but differ from that body in their looks of independence. They sat on trucks and wool-bales and the fence, watching the train, and hailed Bill, and Jim, and Tom, and asked how those individuals were getting on.

Somebody said to me, ‘Yer wanter go out back, young man, if yer wanter see the country. Yer wanter get away from the line.’ I don’t wanter; I’ve been there.

At 5.30 we saw a long line of camels moving out across the sunset and somebody said, ‘Here’s Bourke.’

This painting comes beautifully framed in a Tasmanian oak shadowbox frame and is ready to hang in your home.