Works

It was over at Coolgardie that a mining speculator,
Who was going down the township just to make a bit o' chink,
Went off to hire a camel from a camel propagator,...

Now the stock have started dying, for the Lord has sent a drought;
But we're sick of prayers and Providence, we're going to do without;
With the derricks up above us and the solid earth below,...

As the nations sat together, grimly waiting,
The fierce and ancient nations battle-scarred,
Grown grey in their lusting and their hating,
Ever armed and ever ready keeping guard,...

'Tis strange that in a land so strong
So strong and bold in mighty youth,
We have no poet's voice of truth
To sing for us a wondrous song.

Our chiefest singer yet has sung...

[The subjoined is one of the 'Songs of the Squatters,' written by the Hon. Robert Lowe (afterwards Viscount Sherbrooke), while resident in New South Wales.]

The Commissioner bet me a pony'I won;...

We have sung the song of the droving days,
Of the march of the travelling sheep,
How by silent stages and lonely ways
Thin, white battalions creep.
But the man who now by the land would thrive...

We often hear men boast about the land which gave them birth,
And each one thinks his native land the fairest spot on earth;
In beauty, riches, power, no land can his surpass;...

Grey dawn on the sand-hills, the night wind has drifted
All night from the rollers a scent of the sea;
With the dawn the grey fog his battalions has lifted,
At the call of the morning they scatter and flee.
...

Said the soldier to the Surgeon, "I've got noises in me head
And a kind o' filled up feeling after every time I'm fed;
I can sleep all night on picket, but I can't sleep in my bed".
And the Surgeon said,...

Of course they say if this Bobadil starts
He'll settle 'em all in a flash:
For the pace he can go will be breaking their hearts,
And he ends with the "Bobadil dash"....

Oh! the circus swooped down
On the Narrabri town,
For the Narrabri populace moneyed are;
And the showman he smiled
At the folk he beguiled
To come all the distance from Gunnedah.
...

A Tale of the Territory


The run of Billabong-go-dry
Is just beyond Lime Burner's Gap;
Its waterhole and tank supply
Is excellent, upon the map.
But lacking nature's liquid drench,...

'Twas in the days of front attack;
This glorious truth we'd yet to learn it,
That every "front" has got a back.
And French was just the man to turn it.

A wounded soldier on the ground...

He came from "further out",
That land of fear and drought
And dust and gravel.
He got a touch of sun,
And rested at the run
Until his cure was done,
And he could travel.
...

Him goin' to ride for us! Him, with the pants and the eyeglass and all.
Amateur! don't he just look it, it's twenty to one on a fall.
Boss must be gone off his head to be sending out steeplechase crack...

An angel stood beside the bed
Where lay the living and the dead.

He gave the mother, her who died,
A kiss that Christ the Crucified

Had sent to greet the weary soul...

The big white English swan, escaped from captivity, found himself swimming in an Australian waterhole fringed with giant gum trees. In one of the lower forks of a gum tree sat a placid ound-eyed elderly gentleman apparently thi...

Oh the airman's game is a showman's game, for we all of us watch him go
With his roaring soaring aeroplane and his bombs for the blokes below,
Over the railways and over the dumps, over the Hun and the Turk,...

The sun peers o'er you wooded ridge and thro' the forest dense,
Its golden edge o'er the mountain ledge looks down on the stockyard fence,
Looks down, looks down, looks down on the stockyard fence;...

Of all the docks upon the blue
There was no dockyard, old or new,
To touch the dock at Cockatoo.

Of all the ministerial clan
There was no nicer, worthier man
Than Admiral O'Sullivan.
...