Works

Now, Yankee inventors can beat a retreat,
And German professors may take a back seat,
For their colours we're going to lower:
They've invented a wonderful plough in the West,...

I only woke this morning
To find the world is fair,
I'm going on for forty,
With scarcely one grey hair;

I'm going on for forty,
Where man's strong life begins,...

It is well when you've lived in clover,
To mourn for the days gone by,
Would I live the same life over
Could I live again? Not I!
But, knowing the false from the real,
I would strive to ascend:...

A blanket low and leaden,
Though rent across the west,
Whose darkness seems to deaden
The brightest and the best;
A sunset white and staring
On cloud-wrecks far away,...

There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not,
On the desolate flats where gaunt appletrees rot.
Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze
From his dark lonely gullies of stringy-bark trees,...

'Tis glorious morning everywhere
Save where the alleys lie,
I see the fleecy steam jets bid
'Good morning' to the sky.
The gullies of the waratah
Are near, with fall and pool,...

She's milking in the rain and dark,
As did her mother in the past.
The wretched shed of poles and bark,
Rent by the wind, is leaking fast.
She sees the 'home-roof' black and low,...

I wish I'd never gone to board
In that house where I met
The touring lady from abroad,
Who mocks my nightmares yet.
I wish, I wish that she had saved
Her news of what she'd seen,...

'Twas in the felon's dock he stood, his eyes were black and blue;
His voice with grief was broken, and his nose was broken, too;
He muttered, as that broken nose he wiped upon his cap,...

From Australia.

Oh, tell me, God of Battles! Oh, say what is to come!
The King is in his trenches, the millionaire at home;
The Kaiser with his toiling troops, the Czar is at the front....

The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from the bush and town;
My spirit revives in the morning breeze, though it died when the sun went down;...

'Tis a yarn I heard of a new-chum 'trap'
On the edge of the Never-Never,
Where the dead men lie and the black men lie,
And the bushman lies for ever.
'Twas the custom still with the local blacks...

We learnt the creed at Hungerford,
We learnt the creed at Bourke;
We learnt it in the good times
And learnt it out of work.
We learnt it by the harbour-side
And on the billabong:...

'Tis a wonderful time when these hours begin,
These long 'small hours' of night,
When grass is crisp, and the air is thin,
And the stars come close and bright.
The moon hangs caught in a silvery veil,...

Lo! the Boar's tail is salted, and the Kangaroo's exalted,
And his right eye is extinguished by a man-o'-warsman's cap;
He is flying round the fences where the Southern Sea commences,...

So you've seen at last what we have seen so long through scalding tears:
You have found what we, the People, we have known for twenty years:
And Australia's hymn is swelling till the furthest fence-wires hum,...

I mind the days when ladies fair
Helped on my overcoat,
And tucked the silken handkerchief
About my precious throat;
They used to see the poet's soul
In every song I wrote.
...

Our Andy's gone to battle now
'Gainst Drought, the red marauder;
Our Andy's gone with cattle now
Across the Queensland border.

He's left us in dejection now;
Our hearts with him are roving....

With pannikins all rusty,
And billy burnt and black,
And clothes all torn and dusty,
That scarcely hide his back;
With sun-cracked saddle-leather,
And knotted greenhide rein,...

A tall, slight, English gentleman,
With an eyeglass to his eye;
He mostly says 'Good-Bai' to you,
When he means to say 'Good-bye';
He shakes hands like a ladies' man,
For all the world to see,...