Over the Sliprails


Over the Sliprails is a collection of short stories by Australian poet and author Henry Lawson. It was released in hardback by Angus and Robertson in 1900, and features some of the author's lesser known stories.
The collection contains sixteen stories which are mostly reprinted from a variety of newspaper sources, with several published here for the first time. The story "The Hero of Redclay" was originally intended to be a novel but was shortened by the author and published here as a short story.

Contents

A reviewer in The Worker, on the original publication, disagreed with a lot of views about Lawson at that time: "It is and has been said that Henry has worked his claim out, dug up all his potatoes, knocked down his cheque, burnt out his candle, lost his marbles, spent his remittance, or, in plain English, exhausted his stock of Australian pictures and experiences. After reading several of the short stories in this volume published by Angus and Robertson in paper covers at a shilling — the present writer is not so much inclined to agree with those who prognosticate an early drying-up of the Lawsonian fountain."
In The Sunday Times the reviewer was not so impressed: " As with previous volumes, it is made up of collected stories and sketches that have appeared in local publications, and the result in the present instance is
not happy...the volume is made up of short sketches, all cleverly told, but with hardly an exception the incident not worth the telling ; and this defect is much more noticeable now they are all brought together."