While The Billy BoilsSearchWe are sated of songs that drone the praise,Of a world beyond our ken;We are bored by the ballads of beaten waysAnd milk-and-water men;We are tired of the tales the lovers toldTo the cooing amorous dove;We have banned the minstrelsy of old,And the lyrics of languid love;We are done with the dirges cut and driedIn the London square and slum;But we’re ripe for a rhyme whose metres strideThrough salt-bush scrub and gum.Sing us a song unsung by menOf the narrow and cautious creed;Write with a strong and strenuous penThe rhymes our hearts can read.
While we stand where the ways of men have end,And the untrod tracks commence,We weary of songs the poets pennedIn pastoral indolence;The sleepy sonnet that lovers makeWhere weeping willows arch,Can not the passionate soul awake,Of men who outward march.Our harps are hung in the towering treesAnd the mulga low and grey;Our ballads are sung by every breezeThat flogs the sea to spray.We want no lay of a moonlit strand,No idyll of daisied mead,For the rhymes that our hearts can understandAre the rhymes our hearts can read.
We need no monody planned and built,In the shade of an abbey grey,But the pulse and throb of a lusty liltThat quickens the human clay.Tell us of men whose axes biteThe hearts of the mountain gum;Sing of the pioneers who fightTo waken the desert dumb.We want to hark to the heart within,Of the men who feel and know;For only the men who’ve sampled sinCan write of its joy and woe.Give us a ballad that swings alongWith the bound of a striving steed;Give us — whether it’s right or wrong —The rhymes our hearts can read.
We want to travel from page to pageThrough dusty drive and stope,To catch the hiss of the rushing cage,The roll of the winding rope.Give us the rip-saw’s grind and screamAs it sunders the giant log;The groan and the creek of the bullock teamAs it flounders across the bog;The swish and the crack of the stockmen’s whipsIn the roar of the night stampede.Give us the music that bites and grips —The rhymes our hearts can read!
Sing of the days of hasty camps,When Bayley blazed the track.Write of the shining starry lampsThat beacon the wild out-back.Sing to the soul of the hardest caseThat bears his swag of sin;Of nights of wine and the bold embraceWhen revelry roped him in;Tell of the times we’ve fought for fun,A wearisome hour to wile,And whether we lost or drew or wonSwung out with a cheery smile.Write of the men for whom God waits —Men of a Christ-like creed;Sing of the mates who die for mates,In the rhymes our hearts can read!