Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.

This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardorn.

Today, a story called The Bush Fire by

Henry Lawson. Henry Lawson captured the soul of the Australian bush in this story, published in

the Romance of the Swag in 1907. Lawson explores one of the defining conflicts of colonial Australia, the bitter

fugues between squatters, large landholders, and selectors, small farmers, competing for

survival on an unforgiving frontier. These weren't mere property disputes. They were

battles for identity, independence, and the very meaning of what

it meant to be Australian. Pay close attention to how Lawson balances action and character,

how he builds tension through the inexorable advance of the fire, and how he explores the

price of holding grudges. This is Australian literature at its finest, honest, rugged, and deeply human.

Chapter 1. Squatter and Selecter

Wall was a squatter and a hard man. There had been long years of drought and loss, and then came the rabbit pest.

The rabbit swarmed like flies over his run, and cropped the ground bare where even the poor

grass might have saved thousands of sheep. And the rabbits cost the squatter hundreds of pounds in

rabbit-proof fences, trappers' wages, etc., just to keep them down.

Then came arrangements with the bank, and then Wall's wife died.

Wall started to brood over other days, and the days that had gone between, and developed a

temper which drove his children from home one by one, till only Mary was left.

She managed the lonely home with the help of a half-cast.

Then in good seasons, came the selectors.

Men remembered Wall as a grand boss and a good fellow, but that was in the days before rabbits and banks and syndicates

...