RELATED: Part 1: Ivy Waters and Slim Dusty

And then there was Sam Chapman - "The Henry Lawson of the Macleay" they called him. Although less known, he wrote far more verse than Lawson, probably because he lived much longer.

Although he spent most of his life close to the soil, Sam didn't find wealth from rich pastures. You wouldn't say he was 'well read' - his education spanned only a few short years of a long life. Keen as he was on sport, he was too slightly built to make an impression with the local football team.

Even at the pink of his condition when he went away to the Great War in 1916, he was a bit undersized for battle. But he made it and returned home, reasonably sound in wind and limb, to take up where he left off, working in the bush.

In the passing parade of people who made up the population of the Upper Macleay in the first couple of decades of this century, Sam would have gone unnoticed, never to find a niche in history, if it wasn't for the fact that he held a very rare gift close to his breast, of being able to use his pen to tell his story of life about him, in rhyme, to draw sonnets from a blackened country, tinkling stanzas from muddy torrents and to find everlasting beauty in the bush that treated him so harshly.

And when the bush has shrunken to mere clumps of trees and the curlews and the koalas have gone into oblivion and the man we once knew as the true-blue Australian has been lost in-antiquity; maybe Sam's poetry will be immortalised by those who hunger for a life that was. Sam wasn't born on the Nulla. He first saw the light of day in a little hut on the Kempsey of Stoney Creek - about 25 kilometres up-river from Kempsey.

His school was at Parabell, a small settlement across the river from Willawarrin. Two large families living there provided enough numbers to warrant a part-time schoolteacher. After leaving school, Sam helped his father on his dairy farm for a few years, earning a few bob on the side husking corn. When his father died, the farm was sold up, but by then he was already fending for himself as a bush worker. It was hard yakka all the way for a little fellow.

Then came the war. When he returned home, he went back to bush work until he received news that he had won a soldier settlement block at Nulla Nulla.

After clearing the country and stocking the property, Sam was all set to make a fortune, but this was not to be. A drought, then a couple of floods, plus the loss of his herd through disease, wiped, him out, so it was back to bush work once again, with but a few shillings left to jingle in his pocket.

After Nature had given-him such a kick in the pants it was a wonder that Sam had any kind words to say about the bush, but say them he did through his poetry with not one verse smacking of rancour.

For more than sixty years, until he was 80 years of age, Sam kept this up, jotting down verses on just about every subject under the sun.

The last poem he wrote "The Annexe" was about the nursing staff of the Kempsey Hospital. He wrote as an expression of gratitude for the way they looked after him.

He died a few months later when a patient in Lourdes Nursing Home, Port Macquarie. Some of his poetry has been preserved for the generations to come in the Kempsey Museum.

First published in Macleay Argus, North Coast Magazine section, week commencing June 19, 1983.

Sourced by Phil Lee, Macleay River Historical Society, kind permission given by Dr Jane Harte, executrix of the late Bernie Harte's estate.