Saltbush Bill J.P., and Other Verses | Page 4

try,
Gathering grain or
chaff;
One of her favoured servants toils at an epic high,
One, that a
child may laugh.
Yet if we serve her truly in our appointed place,
Freely she doth
accord
Unto her faithful servants always this saving grace,
Work is
its own reward!~
Song of the Wheat

We have sung the song of the droving days,
Of the march of the
travelling sheep;
By silent stages and lonely ways
Thin, white
battalions creep.
But the man who now by the land would thrive

Must his spurs to a plough-share beat.
Is there ever a man in the
world alive
To sing the song of the Wheat!
It's west by south of the Great Divide
The grim grey plains run out,

Where the old flock-masters lived and died
In a ceaseless fight with
drought.
Weary with waiting and hope deferred
They were ready to
own defeat,
Till at last they heard the master-word --
And the
master-word was Wheat.
Yarran and Myall and Box and Pine --
'Twas axe and fire for all;

They scarce could tarry to blaze the line
Or wait for the trees to fall,

Ere the team was yoked, and the gates flung wide,
And the dust of
the horses' feet
Rose up like a pillar of smoke to guide
The
wonderful march of Wheat.
Furrow by furrow, and fold by fold,
The soil is turned on the plain;

Better than silver and better than gold
Is the surface-mine of the grain;

Better than cattle and better than sheep
In the fight with drought
and heat;
For a streak of stubbornness, wide and deep,
Lies hid in a
grain of Wheat.
When the stock is swept by the hand of fate,
Deep down in his bed of
clay
The brave brown Wheat will lie and wait
For the resurrection
day:
Lie hid while the whole world thinks him dead;
But the
Spring-rain, soft and sweet,
Will over the steaming paddocks spread

The first green flush of the Wheat.
Green and amber and gold it grows
When the sun sinks late in the
West;
And the breeze sweeps over the rippling rows
Where the
quail and the skylark nest.
Mountain or river or shining star,
There's
never a sight can beat --
Away to the sky-line stretching far --
A sea

of the ripening Wheat.
When the burning harvest sun sinks low,
And the shadows stretch on
the plain,
The roaring strippers come and go
Like ships on a sea of
grain;
Till the lurching, groaning waggons bear
Their tale of the
load complete.
Of the world's great work he has done his share

Who has gathered a crop of wheat.
Princes and Potentates and Czars,
They travel in regal state,
But old
King Wheat has a thousand cars
For his trip to the water-gate;
And
his thousand steamships breast the tide
And plough thro' the wind and
sleet
To the lands where the teeming millions bide
That say:
"Thank God for Wheat!"
Brumby's Run
Brumby is the Aboriginal word for a wild horse. At a recent trial a
N.S.W. Supreme Court Judge, hearing of Brumby horses, asked: "Who
is Brumby, and where is his Run?"
It lies beyond the Western Pines
Towards the sinking sun,
And not
a survey mark defines
The bounds of "Brumby's Run".
On odds and ends of mountain land,
On tracks of range and rock

Where no one else can make a stand,
Old Brumby rears his stock.
A wild, unhandled lot they are
Of every shape and breed.
They
venture out 'neath moon and star
Along the flats to feed;
But when the dawn makes pink the sky
And steals along the plain,

The Brumby horses turn and fly
Towards the hills again.
The traveller by the mountain-track
May hear their hoof-beats pass,

And catch a glimpse of brown and black
Dim shadows on the grass.
The eager stockhorse pricks his ears
And lifts his head on high
In

wild excitement when he hears
The Brumby mob go by.
Old Brumby asks no price or fee
O'er all his wide domains:
The
man who yards his stock is free
To keep them for his pains.
So, off to scour the mountain-side
With eager eyes aglow,
To
strongholds where the wild mobs hide
The gully-rakers go.
A rush of horses through the trees,
A red shirt making play;
A
sound of stockwhips on the breeze,
They vanish far away!
. . . . .
Ah, me! before our day is done
We long with bitter pain
To ride
once more on Brumby's Run
And yard his mob again.
Saltbush Bill on the Patriarchs
Come all you little rouseabouts and climb upon my knee;
To-day,
you see, is Christmas Day, and so it's up to me
To give you some
instruction like -- a kind of Christmas tale -- So name your yarn, and
off she goes. What, "Jonah and the Whale"?
Well, whales is sheep I've never shore; I've never been to sea, So all
them great Leviathans is mysteries to me;
But there's a tale the Bible
tells I fully understand,
About the time the Patriarchs were settling on
the land.
Those Patriarchs of olden time, when all is said and done, They lived
the same as far-out men on many a Queensland run -- A lot of roving,
droving men who drifted to and fro,
The