Australian Bards And Bush Reviewers

While you use your best endeavour to immortalise in verse
The gambling and the drink which are your country's greatest curse,
While you glorify the bully and take the spieler's part,
You're a clever southern writer, scarce inferior to Bret Harte.

If you sing of waving grasses when the plains are dry as bricks,
And discover shining rivers where there's only mud and sticks;
If you picture `mighty forests' where the mulga spoils the view,
You're superior to Kendall, and ahead of Gordon too.

If you swear there's not a country like the land that gave you birth,
And its sons are just the noblest and most glorious chaps on earth;
If in every girl a Venus your poetic eye discerns,
You are gracefully referred to as the `young Australian Burns'.

But if you should find that bushmen, spite of all the poets say,
Are just common brother-sinners, and you're quite as good as they,
You're a drunkard, and a liar, and a cynic, and a sneak,
Your grammar's simply awful and your intellect is weak.

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with Banjo Paterson, he is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's 'greatest short story writer'. His works frequently document the lives and struggles of rural and outback Australians. Lawson's own life was marked by hardship and struggles including impaired hearing and financial difficulties, which influenced his realist depictions of Australian life. Some of his notable works include 'While the Billy Boils' and 'In the Days When the World was Wide.'

Henry Lawson

Foreign Lands

Henry Lawson, Simple Poetry

The Battling Days

Henry Lawson, Simple Poetry

The Water Lily

Henry Lawson, Simple Poetry

The Star Of Australasia

Henry Lawson, Simple Poetry

English

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The Bard Of Furthest Out

He longed to be a Back-Blocks Bard,
And fame he wished to win,
He wrote at night and studied hard
(He read The Bulletin);
He sent in stuff unceasingly,
But couldnt get it through;
And so, at last, he came to me
To see what I could do.

The poets light was in his eye,
He aimed to be a man;
He bought a bluey and a fly,
A brand new billy-can.
I showed him how to roll his swag
And sling it with the best;
I gave him my old water-bag,
And pointed to the west.

Now you can take the train as far
As Blazes if you like,
The wealthy go by motor-car
(Some travellers go by bike);
They race it through without a rest,
And find it very tame,
But if you tramp it to the west
Youll get there just the same.

(No matt...

Henry Lawson

The Last Review

Turn the light down, nurse, and leave me, while I hold my last review,
For the Bush is slipping from me, and the town is going too:
Draw the blinds, the streets are lighted, and I hear the tramp of feet,
And Im weary, very weary, of the Faces in the Street.

In the dens of Grind and Heartbreak, in the streets of Never-Rest,
I have lost the scent and colour and the music of the West:
And I would recall old faces with the memories they bring,
Where are Bill and Jim and Mary and the Songs They used to Sing?

They are coming! They are coming! they are passing through the room
With the smell of gum leaves burning, and the scent of Wattle bloom!
And behind them in the timber, after dust and heat and toil,
Others sit beside the camp fire yarning while the billies boil.

...

Henry Lawson

Borderland

Opening salvo in "The Bush Controversy".



I am back from up the country, very sorry that I went,
Seeking for the Southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent;
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track,
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I'm glad that I am back.
Further out may be the pleasant scenes of which our poets boast,
But I think the country's rather more inviting round the coast,
Anyway, I'll stay at present at a boarding-house in town
Drinking beer and lemon-squashes, taking baths and cooling down.

Sunny plains! Great Scot!, those burning wastes of barren soil and sand
With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!
Desolation where the crow is! Desert! where the eagle flies,
Paddocks where the luny bullock starts and ...

Henry Lawson

Heed Not!

Heed not the cock-sure tourist,
Seeing with English eyes;
Stroked at the banquet table
Still, with the old stock lies,
Pet of a social circle,
Guest in a garden fair,
Free of the first-class carriage,
He learns no Australia there.

Heed not the Southern humbugs
By the first saloons who come,
From his work in the wide, hot scrub-lands
The Australian goes not home.
Give them the toadies knighthood,
Fit for the souls theyve got;
Fear not to shame Australia
For Australia knows them not.

Heed not the Sydney dailies,
Naught for the land they do;
Heed not the Melbourne street crowd,
For they know no more than you!
Pent in the coastal cities,
Still on the old-world track,
They know naught of Australia,
Of the heart of ...

Henry Lawson

A Word From The Bards

It is New Years Day and I rise to state that here on the Sydney side
The Bards have commenced to fill out of late and theyre showing their binjies with pride
Theyre patting their binjies with pride, old man, and I want you to understand,
That a binjied bard is a bard indeed when he sings in the Southern Land,
Old chaps,
When he sings in the Southern Land.

For the Southern Land is the Poets Home, and over the worlds wide roam,
There was never till now a binjied bard that lived in a poets home, old man;
For the poets home was a hell on earth, and I want you to understand,
That it isnt exactly a paradise down here in the Southern Land,
Old chap,
Down here in the Southern Land.

The Beer and the Bailiff were gone last night and the temple doorstep clean,
And...

Henry Lawson

In Answer To "Banjo," And Otherwise. (The City Bushman)

Part of "The Bush Controversy".


It was pleasant up the country, Mr. Banjo, where you went,
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent.,
And you curse the trains and 'busses and the turmoil and the "push,"
Tho' you know the "squalid city" needn't keep you from the bush;
But we lately heard you singing of the "plains where shade is not,"
And you mentioned it was dusty, "all is dry and all is hot."

True, the bush "hath moods and changes," and the bushman hath 'em, too,
For he's not a poet's dummy, he's a man, the same as you;
But his back is growing rounder - slaving for the "absentee",
And his toiling wife is thinner than a country wife should be,
For he noticed that the faces of the folks we chanerd to meet
Should have made a greater contras...

Henry Lawson