On the Track

On the goldfields, children were warned to flee from the “bad girl”—yet grown men crept through the dark just to hear her sing.

In Henry Lawson’s 1900 collection, Australian goldfields and bush camps come alive in bark huts, tents and crowded inn kitchens. Songs pass from one rough voice to another, carrying old homes and private sorrows into the night. In the opening tale, a child watches the woman everyone fears and cannot understand why respectable men linger outside her hut—or why her songs make them ache. Lawson’s sketches follow diggers, swagmen and other hard-pressed lives, finding rough humor and tenderness amid the grit. What do these songs reveal that the camp’s rules keep hidden?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.