In the old days, the balladists and poets recorded fire, flood and drought. Fire was dramatic, swift and very dangerous. In Henry Lawson's 'The Fire at Ross's Farm', the blaze 'leapt across the flowing streams/ And raced o'er pastures broad/ It climbed the trees and lit the boughs/ And through the scrubs it roared. / The bees fell stifled in the smoke/ Or perished in their hives,/ And with the stock the kangaroos/ Went flying for their lives.'
A flood might be deceptively slower but, gradually, you would sense the edge of menace, the point where welcome rain was turning to grave threat, when, for example, as Henry Kendall put it, quietly 'ruthless waters [spread] From our cornfields to the sea'; or when, as in John O'Brien's 'Said Hanrahan', comic, gloomy pessimism turns relief into serious doubt: 'It pelted, pelted all day long, a-singing at its work,/ Till every heart took up the song way out to Back-o'-Bourke./ And every creek a banker ran, and dams filled overtop./ "We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, "If this rain doesn't stop." '
The intense and prolonged experience of drought, however, seems to grip the imagination, and its images to persist more intensely even, than bushfire or flood. Such was the case for Lawson who was haunted for years by his encounter with the then worst drought in living memory when he 'humped his bluey' around Bourke and Hungerford in 1892.
Writing to his aunt Emma Brooks in January of that year he described '... this God-forgotten town ... You can have no idea of the horrors of the country out here. Men tramp and beg and live like dogs.'
His contemporary, Barcroft Boake, saw the horrors even more clearly: 'Where brown Summer and Death have mated/ That's where the dead men lie!/Loving with fiery lust unsated/That's where the dead men lie!/Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely/Under the saltbush sparkling brightly/Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly/That's where the dead men lie!'
In On the Wool Track, C. E. W. Bean likewise reveals the graphic and unforgettable intensity with which a vast outback drought could impress itself on the sensitive observer. 'The grass had long since disappeared; the face of the country was shifting red and grey sand, blowing about wherever the wind carried it. The fences were covered; dead sheep and fallen trees had become sand-hills. Millions of trees were killed; birds had been dropping dead