On its original publication in Australia The Brisbane Courier noted "One may always bid welcome to the rattling poems of "Banjo" Paterson, for they have in them an irresistible swing, they are singularly grippy in descriptiveness, and they are racy of the soil. The verses in the volume now to hand are racy of more than one soil, however; they give us racing, droving, and bush incidents of Australia, and they rattle out also pen and ink pictures of South Africa, and of grim war."[1]
