They would have been a relief.There was the monotonous aldermanic row,and the worse than hopeless little herd of aldermen,the weird agricultural portion of whom came in on council days in white starched and ironed coats,as we had always remembered them.
They were aggressively barren of ideas;but on this occasion they had risen above themselves,for one of them had remembered something his grandfather (old time English alderman)had told him,and they were stirring up all the old local quarrels and family spite of the district over a motion,or an amendment on a motion,that a letter --from another enlightened body and bearing on an equally important matter (which letter had been sent through the post sufficiently stamped,delivered to the secretary,handed to the chairman,read aloud in council,and passed round several times for private perusal)--over a motion that such letter be received.
There was a maintenance case coming on --to the usual well-ventilated disgust of the local religious crank,who was on the jury;but the case differed in no essential point from other cases which were always coming on and going off in my time.It was not at all romantic.The local youth was not even brilliant in adultery.
After I had been a week in that town the Governor decided to visit it,and preparations were made to welcome him and present him with an address.
Then I thought that it was time to go,and slipped away unnoticed in the general lunacy.
The Never-Never Country.
By homestead,hut,and shearing-shed,By railroad,coach,and track --By lonely graves of our brave dead,Up-Country and Out-Back:
To where 'neath glorious 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 sky-line sweeps the waving grass,Or whirls the scorching sand --A phantom land,a mystic land!
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 the grey-beard 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.
By lonely huts north-west of Bourke,Through years of flood and drought,The best of English black-sheep work Their own salvation out:
Wild fresh-faced boys grown gaunt and brown --Stiff-lipped and haggard-eyed --
They live the Dead Past grimly down!
Where boundary-riders ride.
The College Wreck who sunk beneath,Then rose above his shame,Tramps West in mateship with the man Who cannot write his name.
'Tis there where on the barren track No last half-crust's begrudged --Where saint and sinner,side by side,Judge not,and are not judged.
Oh rebels to society!
The Outcasts of the West --
Oh 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!--
And --I am proud of you!
The Arab to true desert sand,The Finn to fields of snow;The Flax-stick turns to Maoriland,Where the seasons come and go;And this old fact comes home to me --
And will not let me rest --
However barren it may be,Your own land is the best!
And,lest at ease I should forget True mateship after all,My water-bag and billy yet Are hanging on the wall;And if my fate should show the sign,I'd tramp to sunsets grand With gaunt and stern-eyed mates of mine In Never-Never Land.
End
