The Never-Never Land (abridged) (1901)
by Henry Lawson (1867–1922)
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[ V.1 ]
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.
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[ V.2 ]
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.
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[ V.3 ]
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.
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[ V.4 ]
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.
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[ V.5 ]
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.
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[ V.6 ]
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.
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[ V.7 ]
The Arab to the desert sand,
The Finn to fens and snow,
The 'Flax-stick' dreams of Maoriland,
Where 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.
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[ V.8 ]
Lest in the city I forget
True mateship, after all,
My waterbag 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.
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