dumbfoundry

"Buried under a mullock heap, in the shrub-and-dust expanse of the Western Australian goldfields, lies all that remains of the town of Day Dawn.

"It once boasted seven hotels, wide handsome avenues, shops, schools and a prosperous citizenry of several thousand people. A century later, zebra finches flit around the magnificent stone ruins of the Day Dawn Mining Office and the gold mine, a huge hole at its doorstep, is silent. Like the town, poetry and prose that once poured onto the pages of 60 newspapers on the goldfields have disappeared in the mists of time, after the goldrush of the 1890s subsided. [...]

"You have this critical mass of very fine writers who were all being published in at least 60 newspapers in the goldfields alone.

"The most popular was the Kalgoorlie Sun, which hired journalists who were also poets. They also bought poems from freelancers like the Boulder Bard, who wrote highly satirical poems."

Others wrote under colourful nicknames, too: including "Dryblower" Murphy, "Bluebush" and "Crosscut" Wilson, who produced thousands of poems each.

Yet by the 1940s and 50s, the poetry had fallen out of fashion. "People scoffed at a lot of the poetry and it was overlooked in literary circles," says Strickland. "It's only in recent years that academics have been rediscovering it. But I can honestly say there isn't a single poem we've selected where the lyrics are poor."

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