Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake (26 March 1866 – 2 May 1892) was an Australian stockman and poet who wrote primarily within the bush poetry tradition.

Educated at private schools, including a brief period in New Caledonia, Boake left home at the age of 17 and was apprenticed as a surveyor's draughtsman.

Boake was first published in late 1890 and regularly appeared in The Bulletin prior to his death, with the posthumous publication of Where the Dead Men Lie, and Other Poems in 1897 bringing his work to a wider audience.

Contemporary reviewers of Boake found his work to be inconsistent, but identified elements of brilliance and lamented his early death.

[2] Boake's father established his own photography studio shortly after his son's birth, and the family settled at Lavender Bay on Sydney's North Shore.

In 1876, aged 10, he was sent to live in the French colony of New Caledonia for 18 months, boarding with his father's friend Allan Hughan who had been appointed government photographer in Nouméa.

[4] He returned to his family in 1878, with Assimul, a young Kanak boy who subsequently worked in Boake's father's studio for two years.

[11] Mullah experienced a drought over the Australian summer of 1888–89, and in a letter to his father Boake recalled his experience fighting a bush fire.

[13] By May 1889 Boake had left Mullah Station and headed north to Queensland to seek droving work, moving cattle across the Outback between pastoral leases or to processing facilities.

[18] Boake developed an interest in poetry through his father, who described himself as "fond of stringing rhymes" and had several ballads and odes appear in local publications.

[5] He read widely, with his influences including Australian writers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood.

[19] Boake's earliest surviving poem is a four-line verse dedicated to Matilda Kate Rout, a photographic colourist five years his senior with whom he became close in 1883.

[21] A number of Boake's poems concern death, with their subjects either dying or musing on the prospects of divine judgment and an afterlife.

In the 1960s, Semmler alleged in Australian Literary Studies that Stephens had removed entire passages of Boake's original works and substituted his own verse.

[26] Stephens also sold off some of Boake's papers – including manuscripts for published poems – as he experienced financial difficulties later in life, which are now considered lost.

[29] However, Cecil Hadgraft, the author of Boake's Australian Dictionary of Biography entry, observed that it was "at least arguable that he died when he had written his best poetry".