HOW THE LAND WAS WON

The future was dark and the past was dead

As they gazed on the sea once more —

But a nation was born when the immigrants said

‘ Good-bye!’ as they stepped ashore!

In their loneliness they were parted thus

Because of the work to do,

A wild wide land to be won for us

By hearts and hands so few.

The darkest land’ neath a blue sky’ s dome,

And the widest waste on earth;

The strangest scenes and the least like home

In the lands of our fathers’ birth;

The loneliest land in the wide world then,

And away on the furthest seas,

A land most barren of life for men —

And they won it by twos and threes!

With God, or a dog, to watch, they slept

By the camp-fires’ ghastly glow,

Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept

With‘ nulla’ and spear held low;

Death was hidden amongst the trees,

And bare on the glaring sand

They fought and perished by twos and threes —

And that’ s how they won the land!

It was two that failed by the dry creek bed,

While one reeled on alone —

The dust of Australia’ s greatest dead

With the dust of the desert blown!

Gaunt cheek-bones cracking the parchment skin

That scorched in the blazing sun,

Black lips that broke in a ghastly grin —

And that’ s how the land was won!

Starvation and toil on the tracks they went,

And death by the lonely way;

The childbirth under the tilt or tent,

The childbirth under the dray!

The childbirth out in the desolate hut

With a half-wild gin for nurse —

That’ s how the first were born to bear

The brunt of the first man’ s curse!

They toiled and they fought through the shame of it —

Through wilderness, flood, and drought;

They worked, in the struggles of early days,

Their sons’ salvation out.

The white girl-wife in the hut alone,

The men on the boundless run,

The miseries suffered, unvoiced, unknown —

And that’ s how the land was won.

No armchair rest for the old folk then —

But, ruined by blight and drought,

They blazed the tracks to the camps again

In the big scrubs further out.

The worn haft, wet with a father’ s sweat,

Gripped hard by the eldest son,

The boy’ s back formed to the hump of toil —

And that’ s how the land was won!

And beyond Up Country, beyond Out Back,

And the rainless belt, they ride,

The currency lad and the ne’ er-do-weel

And the black sheep, side by side;

In wheeling horizons of endless haze

That disk through the Great North-west,

They ride for ever by twos and by threes —

And that’ s how they win the rest.