Whether in portraiture or in caricature, the world of the great Australian poet and short story writer, Henry Lawson, is filled with people to make you laugh and cry and experience every other emotion in between, and no more so than in this definitive collection of the Australian bard’s most enduring short stories. From The Bush Undertaker to The Driver’s Wife, the reader will live the adventure of late nineteenth century Australia and, at the same time, come to understand the ways of modern Australia. The humor and the pathos are both universal and timeless. The greatest hero and villain of these collected short stories remain and always will remain Henry Lawson’s Australia, a place of squatters, speilers, stragglers, swaggies, selectors, and a land of plenty of fortune and misfortune to go around.

Henry Lawson (1867 –1922) was an Australian writer and bush poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer."