Edward

We were challenged by The Dingoes , they're the pride of Squatter's Gap,
To a friendly game of football on the flat by Devil's Trap.
And we went along on horses, sworn to triumph in the game,
For the honour of Gyp's Diggings, and the glory of the same.

And we took the challenge with us. It was beautiful to see,
With its lovely curly letters, at its pretty filigree.
It was very gently worded, and it made us all feel good,
For it breathed the sweetest sentiments of peace and brotherhood.

We had Chang, and Trucker Hogan, and the man who licked The Plug,
Also Heggarty, and Hoolahan, and Peter Scott, the pug;
And we wore our knuckle-dusters, and we took a keg on tap
To our friendly game of football with The Dingoes at The Gap.

All the fellows came to meet us, and we ...

There's a fresh track down the paddock
Through the lightwoods to the creek,
And I notice Billy Craddock
And Maloney do not speak,
And The Snag is slyly bitter
When he’s criticising Bill,
And there’s quite a foreign glitter
On the fellows at the mill.

Sid M‘Mahon’s turned out a dandy
With a masher coat and tie,
And the engine-driver, Sandy,
Curls his whiskers on the sly:
All the boys wear paper collars
And their tombstone shirts of nights,
So it’s ten to one in dollars
There’s a new girl up at White’s.

She’s a charmer from the river,
But she steeps the lads in gloom,
With her blue eyes all a-quiver
And her hair like wattle-bloom;
Though she’s pretty and beguiling,
And so lit up, like, with fun
That the flowers turn to h...

‘No, you can’t count me in, boys; I’m off it,
I’m jack of them practical jokes;
They give neither pleasure nor profit,
And the fellers that plays them are mokes.
I’ve got sense, though I once was a duffer,
And I fooled up my share, I allow,
But since conscience has made me to suffer,
She’s pegging away at me now.

You notice I’ve aged rather early,
And the wrinkles are deep on my face?
That’s sorrer,I’m sixty-nine, barely.
Jes’ camp, and I’ll tell you my case.
It was here on The Springs, we had hit it,
And we working the lead on this spot,
And we were, to my shame I admit it,
A rather unprincipled lot.

‘We were drunk all the day on the Sundays,
No wickeder habit exists;
And our exercise mostly on Mondays
Was feats of endurance with fi...

There’s a wind up that licks like a flame,
And the sun is a porthole of hell.
Now evanish prim notions of shame,
And the craving to look rather well,
In pyjamas you’re never a swell,
And you’ve chosen some roomily made.
Oh! for ices these pangs to dispel,
It’s one hundred and nine in the shade!

We have limped in from tennis.That game !,
I’d as soon with the damned where they dwell
Stoke a furnace and bathe in the same!
There’s no drink human craving to quell,
Not thin chablis nor sweet muscatel.
Never more shall we see, I’m afraid,
The cool shallows, the pale asphodel.
It’s one hundred and nine in the shade.

You recline an invertebrate frame
In the moisture your atoms expel,
‘Gainst the fates very feebly declaim,
All too limp to rise...

Up a dark and fetid alley, where the offal and the slime
Of a brave and blusterous city met its misery and crime,
In a hovel reeking pestilence, and noisome as the grave,
Dwelt Ah Ling, the Chinese joiner, and the sweater’s willing slave.

Squatting down amongst the shavings, with his chisel and his plane,
Through the long, hot days of striving, dead to pleasure and to pain,
Like a creature barely human, very yellow, gaunt, and grim,
Ah Ling laboured on, for pleasure spread no lures that tempted him.

And the curious people, watching through the rotten wall at night,
Saw his death’s face weirdly outlined in the candle’s feeble light;
Saw him still intent upon his work, ill-omened and unclean,
Planing, sawing, nailing, hewing—just a skin and bone machine.

Neither k...

The first one with conviction penned:
“This conflict in seven weeks will end.”

Another, later in the war,
Gave Germany just one month more.

Since then I’ve read predictions free,
They dribble in unceasingly.

All wrong. And still the critics say
When it will finish to the day.

Hughes should get cash in mighty sacks
From his proposed War Prophets Tax.

I heard this day, as I may no more,
The world's heart throb at my workshop door.
The sun was keen, and the day was still;
The township drowsed in, a haze of heat.
A stir far off on the sleepy hill,
The measured beat of their buoyant feet,
And the lilt and thrum
Of a little drum,
The song they sang in a cadence low,
The piping note of a piccolo.

The township woke, and the doors flew wide;
The women trotted their boys beside.
Across the bridge on a single heel
The soldiers came in a golden glow,
With throb of song and the chink of steel,
The gallant crow of the piccolo.
Good and brown they were,
And their arms swung bare.
Their fine young faces revived in me
A boyhood's vision of chivalry.

The lean, hard regiment tramping down,

Australia, my native land,
A stirring whisper in your ear,
'Tis time for you to understand
Your rating now is A1, dear.
You've done some rousing things of late.
That lift you from the simple state
In which you chose to vegetate.

The persons so superior,
Whose patronage no more endures,
Now have to fire a salvo for
The glory that is fairly yours.
At length you need no sort of crutch,
You stand alone, you're voted “much”,
Get busy and behave as such.

No man from Oskosh, or from Hull,
Or any other chosen place
Can rise with a distended skull,
And cast aspersions in your face.
You're given all the world to know
Your proper standing as a foe,
And hats are off, and rightly so.

You furnished heroes for the fray,
Your st...

From her home beyond the river in the parting of the hills,
Where the wattles fleecy blossom surged and scattered in the breeze,
And the tender creepers twined about the chimneys and the sills,
And the garden flamed with colour like an Eden through the trees,

She would come along the gully, where the ferns grew golden fair,
In the stillness of the morning, like the spirit of the place,
With the sunshafts caught and woven in the meshes of her hair,
And the pink and white of heathbloom sweetly blended in her face.

She was fair, and small, and slender-limbed, and buoyant as a bird,
Fresh as wild, white, dew-dipped violets where the bluegum’s shadow goes,
And no music like her laughter in the joyous bush was heard,
And the glory of her smile was as a sunbeam in a rose.

He was working on a station in the Western when I knew him,
And he came from Conongamo, up the old surveyors’ track,
And the fellows all admitted that no man in Vic. could ‘do him,’
Since he’d smothered Stonewall Menzie, also Anderson, the black.
Bob was modelled for a fighter, but he’d run to beef a trifle;
For his science every rouseabout was satisfied to vouch,
And Red Fogarty advised us he delivered like a rifle,
And his stopping,well, beside him Harry Sallars was a slouch.

Not a man of us had met him till he settled on the station,
This was early in the Sixties, what we call the good old days,
And it’s cheerfully admitted Robert owed his reputation
To a crippled jaw, a broken nose, and eyes that looked both ways.
We were certain on the face of it our guess was not an e...

A quaint old gabled cottage sleeps between the raving hills.
To right and left are livid strife, but on the deep, wide sills
The purple pot-flowers swell and glow, and o'er the walls and eaves
Prinked creeper steals caressing hands, the poplar drips its leaves.
Within the garden hot and sweet
Fair form and woven color meet,
While down the clear, cool stones, 'tween banks with branch and blossom gay,
A little, bridged, blind rivulet goes touching out its way.

Peace lingers hidden from the knife, the tearing blinding shell,
Where falls the spattered sunlight on a lichen-covered well.
No voice is here, no fall of feet, no smoke lifts cool and grey,
But on the granite stoop a cat blinks vaguely at the day.
From hill to hill across the vale
Storms man's terrific iron gale;<...

Down to it is Plugger Bill,
Lyin' crumpled, white 'n' still.
Me 'n' him
Chips in when the scrap begins,
Carin' nothin' for our skins,
Chi-iked as the 'Eavenly Twins,
Bill 'n' Jim.

They 'ave outed Bill at last,
Slugged me cobber hard 'n' fast.
It's a kill.
See the purple of his lip
'N' the red 'n' oozy drip!
Ends our great ole partnership,
Jim 'n' Bill

Mates we was when we was kids;
Camp, 'n' ship, 'n' Pyramids,
Him 'n' me
Hung together, 'n' we tore
Up the heights from Helles shore,
Bill a long 'arf head afore,
Fine to see!

Then it was we took a touch,
Simple puncture, nothin' much;
But we lay
'N' we stays the count, it seems,
In a sorter realm of dreams
Where the sun infernal gleams
Night...

Marching somewhat out of order when the band is cock-a-hoop,
There's a lilting kind of magic in the swagger of the troop,
Swinging all aboard the steamer with her nose toward the sea.
What is calling, Billy Khaki, that you're footing it so free?

Though his lines are none too level,
And he lacks a bit of style.
And he's swanking like the devil
Where the women wave and smile,
He will answer with a rifle
Trim and true from stock to bore,
Where the comrades crouch and stifle
In the reeking pit of war.

What is calling, Billy Khaki? There is thunder down the sky,
And the merry magpie bugle splits the morning with its cry,
While your feet are beating rhythms up the dusty hills and down,
And the drums are all a-talking in the hollow of the town.

Bill...

All was up with Richard Tanner
‘Wait-a-Bit’ we called him. Dead?
Yes. The braceman dropped a spanner,
Landed Richard on the head;
Cracked his skull, sir, like a teacup,
Down the pump-shaft in the well.
Braceman hadn’t time to speak up,
Tanner never knew what fell.

Tell the widow? Who’d go through it?
No one on the shift would stir;
But Pat Ryan said he’d do it
‘Nately break the news to her.’
Pat’s a splitter, and a kinder
Heart I never wish to know.
Stephens told him where to find her,
Begged him gently deal the blow.

In a very solemn manner
Ryan met the dead man’s wife
‘Mornin’ to yez, Widdy Tanner!’
Says he gravely, ‘Such is life!’
‘I’m no widow!’ says she, prying
For the joke in Ryan’s eye.
‘’Scuse me, mum,’ says Pa...

Dear Ned, I now take up my pen to write you these few lines,
And hopin' how they find you fit. Gorbli', it seems an age
Since Jumbo ducked the Port, 'n' drilled 'n' polished to the nines,
He walked his pork on Collins like a hero off the stage,
Then hiked a rifle 'cross the sea this bleedin' war to wage.

The things what's 'appened lately calls to Jumbo's mind that day
Our push took on the Peewee pack, 'n' belted out their lard,
With twenty cops to top it off. But now I'm stowed away,
A bullet in me gizzard where I took it good and hard,
A-dealin'-stoush 'n' mullock to the Prussian flamin' Guard.

At Bullcoor mortal charnce had dumped a mutton-truck of us
From good ole Port ker-flummox where we didn't orter be,
All in a 'elpless hole-the Pug, Bill Carkeek, Son, 'n' Gus,...

As bullets come to us they're thin,
They're angular, or smooth and fat,
Some spiral are, and gimlet in,
And some are sharp, and others flat.
The slim one pink you clean and neat,
The flat ones bat a solid blow
Much as a camel throws his feet,
And leave you beastly incomplete.
If lucky you don't know it through.

The flitting bullets flow and flock;
They twitter as they pass;
They're picking at the solid rock,
They're rooting in the grass.
A tiny ballet swiftly throws
Its gossamer of rust,
Brown fairies on their little toes
A-dancing in the dust.

You cower down when first they come
With snaky whispers at your ear;
And when like swarming bees they hum
You know the tinkling chill of fear.
A whining thing will pluck your heel,

When the horse has been unharnessed and we've flushed the old machine,
And the water o'er the sluice is running evenly and clean;
When there's thirty load before us, and the sun is high and bright,
And we've worked from early morning and shall have to work till night,
Not a man of us is weary, though the graft is pretty rough,
If we see the proper colour showing freely through the stuff.

With a dandy head of water and a youngster at the rear
To hand along the billy, boys, and keep the tail race clear,
We lift the wash and flash the fork and make the gravel fly.
The shovelling is heavy and we're soaked from heel to thigh;
But it makes a fellow tireless and his thews and sinews tough
If the colour's showing freely as he gaily shifts the stuff.

When Geordie Best is pumpi...

In politics there’s room for jest;
With frequent gibes are speeches met,
And measures which are of the best
Are themes for caustic humor yet.
E’en though the pulpiteer we fret
With sundry quiddities we fling,
We pray you never to forget
That cricket is a serious thing.

The crowd assembles at a Test,
And Hobbs at length is fairly set,
Though Gregory rocks ‘em in with zest;
The barrackers may fume and fret
When Parkin has contrived to get
Five men of ours, we feel the sting,
And give expression to regret,
For cricket is a serious thing.

They have the lead; we would arrest
A sort of rot.No epithet
Is proper, though they’ve got our best
For next to nothing, and your bet
Is good as lost.Don’t sit and sweat;
Due reverence to the ...