"Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Journey |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Henry
Add to List
