Aging & Wisdom Quote by Henry Lawson

Lawson drops you straight into the bush ballad paradox: the speaker is most himself in conditions that should unsettle anyone. The line stacks “strange… new… old” like a man turning a worry-stone in his pocket, testing every label for the life he’s living and finding none that fit. That piling-on isn’t decorative; it mimics the way identity gets built in motion, by repetition, not revelation.

The real punch is the reversal at the center: “at home and at ease on a track that I know not.” Home isn’t a place, it’s a temperament. The unknown becomes a kind of native country, while the “road that I know” produces “restless and lost.” Lawson is sketching a psychology of the frontier worker, the drifter, the shearer, the outback hand: people made by displacement who mistrust the comforts that polite society promises. Familiarity reads as a trap, not a refuge. There’s a quiet indictment in that. If the “known road” is the settled, respectable path, it’s also the one that erases the speaker’s hard-won competencies and turns him into a misfit.

Context matters: Lawson wrote in an Australia still mythmaking itself through bush realism, where endurance and itinerancy were both necessity and national pose. The cadence of “deep… steep… high… low” maps a landscape, but it also maps class pressure and mood swings: elation, grind, descent. The subtext is not romantic freedom; it’s adaptation as fate. He’s not celebrating wandering so much as admitting he’s been trained by it, until stability feels like the truly unfamiliar terrain.