Henry Goes Bush

This is a new book. Condition: Brand New.

The price of genius is one hell of a hangover.

In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.

History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.

Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.

It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.

'like nothing you've read before' - MICHAEL WINKLER

'a genre-defying wonder of a novel' - RYAN O'NEILL

'surreal, singular, and deeply moving' - RHETT DAVIS

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Paperback / softback
ISBN13: 9781761770142
Published: April 2026

Number of pages: 336
Width: 155 mm
Height: 230 mm
Depth: 26 mm

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia