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.