The Sick Stockrider is a poem by Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon.

"The Evening Journal" (Adelaide) called the poem "...the best piece Mr. Gordon ever wrote..."[2] after its publication in Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.

The Oxford History of Australian Literature stated that "The ballad of the dying stockman, with its creed of mateship, its laconic acceptance in true bush style of whatever life and death may offer, led Marcus Clarke to assert that in Gordon's work lay the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.

"[3] In his commentary on the poem in 60 Classic Australian Poems editor Geoff Page noted that "there is no sense yet of the washed-out, hyper-heated, intensely Australian landscape created by the impressionist painters Streeton and Roberts in the 1890s".

He also states that it's as if the poem "created the template which later and perhaps more sophisticated balladists like 'Banjo' Paterson and Henry Lawson could utilise.