"Cattle and Cane" is a song by the Australian alternative rock band The Go-Betweens, released as the first single from their second album Before Hollywood.

[4] Vocalist and bass guitarist Grant McLennan wrote the lyrics for his mother as an autobiographical description of his return home to a Queensland farm when a boy.

[6][7] The single and album both failed to appear on the relevant Australian Kent Music Report Top 50 charts.

[8] In May 2001, "Cattle and Cane" was selected by Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) as one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time.

[4] The B-side on the Stunn recordings was "Man O'Sand to Girl O'Sea" with newly joined bass guitarist Robert Vickers on board, which freed McLennan for lead guitar work.

[16]The Canberra Times noted, "The three verses by McLennan cover three phases of his life to date in a series of images – the primary schoolboy scrambling through cane fields, the adolescent in boarding school losing his late father's watch in the showers, the young man at university discovering a bigger brighter world – and then the fourth phase of his life: Robert Forster, playing himself.

McLennan had already acknowledged the importance of Morrison's drum part on the song: "It had a great rhythm which I don't think any drummer in the world could've played except her.

[1][2] The single and album both failed to appear on the relevant Australian Kent Music Report Top 50 charts.

In AllMusic's review of Before Hollywood, Ned Raggett described the single: Arguably the band's absolute highlight of its earliest years and one of the early-'80s' utter classics, the combination of McLennan's nostalgia-laden but not soppy lyric, his flat-out lovely singing and overdubbed backing vocals, and the catchy, beautifully elegant acoustic/electric arrangement is simply to die for.

[7] Fellow Australian musician Paul Kelly recalled hearing the song for the first time while driving in Melbourne:My skin started tingling, and I had to pull over ... [it] had an odd, jerky time signature which acted as a little trip-switch into another world – weird and heavenly and deeply familiar all at once ...

"[25] In May 2001 "Cattle and Cane" was selected by Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) as one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time.

[9] "Cattle and Cane" was covered by British indie rock group The Wedding Present as a B-side to their 1992 single "Blue Eyes" and by Jimmy Little on his ARIA award winning 1999 album, The Messenger.