Hay and Hell and Booligal

Hay and Hell and Booligal is an 1896 poem by the Australian bush poet A. B. 'Banjo' Paterson who wrote the poem while working as a solicitor with the firm of Street & Paterson in Sydney. It was first published in The Bulletin on 25 April 1896. The poem was later included in Paterson's collection Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses, first published in 1902.

The phrase "Hay and Hell and Booligal" and its more common variant "Hay, Hell and Booligal" is used figuratively in the Australian vernacular "to designate a place of the greatest imaginable discomfort".  The phrase was popularised by Paterson's poem, but the expression pre-dates his work.

Hay is a town in south-western New South Wales on the Murrumbidgee River.  Booligal is a town on the Lachlan River, 76 kilometres (47 miles) north of Hay by road.  The road connecting the two townships (nowadays a section of the Cobb Highway) crosses a flat expanse of country known as the One Tree Plain.  In the earlier expression "Hay, Hell and Booligal", and also Paterson's adaptation of the phrase, "Hell" corresponds to the One Tree Plain, on the stock route between Hay and Booligal.