While the Billy Boils

A grey-bearded stranger slips shillings into a child’s dirty hand, then calls the boy’s father “Tom”—as if the years on the goldfields had never passed.

In Henry Lawson’s 1896 stories, the Australian bush is a place of dusty selections, old mining ground and fireside yarns, where hardship sits close beside laughter. A child watches his father and an old mate wander among abandoned shafts, still turning over the question of where the gold might be—and, when they speak of the Eureka Stockade, sees their faces change. Across the collection, Lawson listens to drovers, settlers and wanderers whose jokes and memories can’t quite hide what the country has cost them. What do these old mates remember that they cannot bring themselves to say?

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.