60 Classic Australian Poems for Children (14 page)

Though poor and in trouble I wander alone,

With a rebel cockade in my hat;

Though friends may desert me, and kindred disown,

My country will never do that!

You may sing of the Shamrock, the Thistle, and Rose,

Or the three in a bunch if you will;

But I know of a country that gathered all those,

And I love the great land where the Waratah grows,

And the Wattle-bough blooms on the hill.

Australia! Australia! so fair to behold—

While the blue sky is arching above;

The stranger should never have need to be told,

That the Wattle-bloom means that her heart is of gold,

And the Waratah red blood of love.

Australia! Australia! most beautiful name,

Most kindly and bountiful land;

I would die every death that might save her from shame,

If a black cloud should rise on the strand;

But whatever the quarrel, whoever her foes,

Let them come! Let them come when they will!

Though the struggle be grim, 'tis Australia that knows,

That her children shall fight while the Waratah grows,

And the Wattle blooms out on the hill.

When I was King, and other verses
, 1905

Through forest boles the stormwind rolls,

Vext of the sea-driv'n rain;

And, up in the clift, through many a rift,

The voices of torrents complain.

The sad marsh-fowl and the lonely owl

Are heard in the fog-wreaths grey,

When the warrigal wakes, and listens, and takes

To the woods that shelter the prey.

In the gully-deeps the blind creek sleeps,

And the silver, showery, moon

Glides over the hills, and floats, and fills,

And dreams in the dark lagoon;

While halting hard by the station yard,

Aghast at the hut-flame nigh,

The Warrigal yells—and the flats and fells

Are loud with his dismal cry.

On the topmost peak of mountains bleak

The south wind sobs, and strays

Through moaning pine, and turpentine,

And the rippling runnel ways;

And strong streams flow, and great mists go,

Where the Warrigal starts to hear

The watch-dog's bark break sharp in the dark,

And flees like a phantom of Fear!

This poem is often found starting with the lines
The Warrigal's lair
but in another edition Kendall begins with the current second verse!

The swift rains beat, and the thunders fleet

On the wings of the fiery gale,

And down in the glen of pool and fen,

The wild gums whistle and wail,

As over the plains and past the chains

Of waterholes glimmering deep,

The Warrigal flies from the Shepherd's cries,

And the clamour of dogs and sheep.

The Warrigal's lair is pent in bare

Black rocks at the gorge's mouth:

It is set in ways where Summer strays

With the sprites of flame and drouth;

But when the heights are touched with lights

Of hoarfrost, sleet, and shine,

His bed is made of the dead grass-blade

And the leaves of the windy pine.

He roves through the lands of sultry sands,

He hunts in the iron range,

Untamed as surge of the far sea verge,

And fierce and fickle and strange.

The white man's track and the haunts of the black

He shuns, and shudders to see;

For his joy he tastes in lonely wastes

Where his mates are torrent and tree.

Leaves from Australian Forests
, 1869

Out on the wastes of the ‘Never, Never,'

That's where the dead men lie!

There where the heat-waves dance for ever,

That's where the dead men lie;

That's where the earth's lov'd sons are keeping

Endless tryst—not the west wind sweeping

Feverish pinions can wake their sleeping—

Out where the dead men lie.

Where brown Summer and Death have mated—

That's where the dead men lie,

Loving with fiery lust unsated,

That's where the dead men lie;

Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely,

Under the saltbush sparkling brightly,

Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly,

That's where the dead men lie.

Deep in the yellow, flowing river,

That's where the dead men lie,

Under its banks where the shadows quiver,

That's where the dead men lie;

Where the platypus twists and doubles,

Leaving a train of tiny bubbles;

Rid at last of their earthly troubles,

That's where the dead men lie!

East and backward pale faces turning,

That's how the dead men lie,

Gaunt arms stretched with a voiceless yearning,

That's how the dead men lie.

Oft in the fragrant hush of nooning

Hearing again their mother's crooning,

Wrapt for aye in a dreamful swooning,

That's how the dead men lie.

Naught but the hand of night can free them;

That's when the dead men fly;

Only the frightened cattle see them—

See the dead men go by;

Cloven hoofs beating out one measure,

Bidding the stockmen know no leisure,

That's where the dead men take their pleasure,

That's when the dead men fly.

Ask too, the never-sleeping drover,

He sees the dead pass by,

Hearing them call to their friends—the plover,

Hearing the dead men cry.

Seeing their faces stealing, stealing,

Hearing their laughter, pealing, pealing,

Watching their grey forms wheeling, wheeling

Round where the cattle lie.

Strangled by thirst and fierce privation,

That's how the dead men die!

Out on ‘Moneygrub's' farthest station,

That's how the dead men die!

Hardfaced greybeards, youngsters callow,

Some mounds cared for, others fallow,

Some deep down, yet others shallow,

Some having but the sky.

‘Moneygrub,' as he sips his claret,

Looks with complacent eye

Down at his watch-chain, eighteen-carat,

There, in his club, hard by;

Recks not that every link is stamped with

Names of the men whose limbs are cramped with

Too long lying in grave mould, camped with

Death where the dead men lie.

The Bulletin
(Christmas edition), 1891

The title for this poem in the original manuscript is ‘Where the Dead Lie'. It was first printed in
The Bulletin
on 19 December, 1891 as ‘Where the Dead Men Lie'. Boake himself was dead five months later.

The horses were ready, the rails were down,

But the riders lingered still,—

One had a parting word to say,

And one had his pipe to fill.

Then they mounted, one with a granted prayer,

And one with a grief unguessed.

‘We are going,' they said, as they rode away—

‘Where the pelican builds her nest!'

They had told us of pastures wide and green,

To be sought past the sunset's glow;

Of rifts in the ranges by opal lit;

And gold 'neath the river's flow.

And thirst and hunger were banished words

When they spoke of that unknown West;

No drought they dreaded, no flood they feared,

Where the pelican builds her nest!

The creek at the ford was but fetlock deep

When we watched them crossing there;

The rains have replenished it twice since then,

And thrice has the rock lain bare.

But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled,

And never from blue hill's breast

Come back—by the sun and the sands devoured—

Where the pelican builds her nest!

The Bulletin
, 1881

‘Where the Pelican Builds' is Hannay Foott's most famous poem and comes from the collection
Where the Pelican Builds
, published in 1885. This poem is about the legendary paradise in the centre of Australia where they thought there was an inland sea … where the pelican builds her nest.

They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill,

The houses in the busy streets where life is never still,

The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best:

For love they faced the wilderness—the Women of the West.

The roar, and rush, and fever of the city died away,

And the old-time joys and faces—they were gone for many a day;

In their place the lurching coach-wheel, or the creaking bullock chains,

O'er the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plains.

In the slab-built, zinc-roofed homestead of some lately-taken run,

In the tent beside the bankment of a railway just begun,

In the huts on new selections—in the camps of man's unrest,

On the frontiers of the Nation, live the Women of the West.

The red sun robs their beauty and, in weariness and pain,

The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again;

And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say—

The nearest woman's face may be a hundred miles away.

The wide Bush holds the secrets of their longing and desires,

When the white stars in reverence light their holy altar-fires,

And silence, like the touch of God, sinks deep into the breast—

Perchance He hears and understands the Women of the West.

For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet plies his arts—

They only hear the beating of their gallant, loving hearts.

But they have sung with silent lives the song all songs above—

The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love.

Well have we held our fathers' creed. No call has passed us by.

We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die.

And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o'er all the rest,

The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.

The Brisbane Courier
, 1901