Classic Poem

By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,
By railroad, coach, and track—
By lonely graves where rest our dead,
Up-Country and Out-Back:
To where beneath the clustered stars
The dreamy plains expand—
My home lies wide a thousand miles
In the Never-Never Land.

It lies beyond the farming belt,
Wide wastes of scrub and plain,
A blazing desert in the drought,
A lake-land after rain;
To the skyline sweeps the waving grass,
Or whirls the scorching sand—
A phantom land, a mystic realm!
The Never-Never Land.

Where lone Mount Desolation lies,
Mounts Dreadful and Despair—
'Tis lost beneath the rainless skies
In hopeless deserts there;
It spreads nor'-west by No-Man's-Land—
Where clouds are seldom seen—
To where the cattle-stations lie
Three hundred miles between.

The drovers of the Great Stock Routes
The strange Gulf country know—
Where, travelling from the southern droughts,
The big lean bullocks go;
And camped by night where plains lie wide,
Like some old ocean's bed,
The watchmen in the starlight ride
Round fifteen hundred head.

And west of named and numbered days
The shearers walk and ride,
Jack Cornstalk and the Ne'er-do-well
And Greybeard side by side;
They veil their eyes from moon and stars,
And slumber on the sand—
Sad memories sleep as years go round
In Never-Never Land.

O rebels to society!
The Outcasts of the West—
O hopeless eyes that smile for me,
And broken hearts that jest!
The pluck to face a thousand miles—
The grit to see it through!
The Communism perfected
Till man to man is true.

The Arab to the desert sand,
The Finn to fens and snow,
The “Flax-stick” dreams of Maoriland,
While the seasons come and go;
Whatever stars may glow or burn
O'er lands of East and West,
The wandering heart of man will turn
To one it loves the best.

Lest in the city I forget
True mateship after all,
My water-bag and billy yet
Are hanging on the wall;
And I, to save my soul again,
Would tramp to sunsets grand
With sad-eyed mates across the plain
In the Never-Never Land.