Are the exploits slowly fading of the folk who forged this land?
Are there more important factors, today for us to understand?
Are we prepared to lose our national character?
Erase our borderlines, and forget about Australia,
where squatter and selector, fought fire, flood and drought …
the Shearer and the drover helping cut the wool clip out.
Self-reliance in this dry land; suspicious of authority,
physical and mental toughness, laconic humour tempered eagerly.
The exploits real and fabled, our robustness could quite relate,
so in our generation - old qualities are ours to celebrate,
for the musterer and stockman on a cattle or sheep run.
The swaggy and the bagman tramping 'neath the burning sun.
The diggers and the miners. with their quest for precious ore.
Bushrangers and the troopers who were the lawless and the law.
The footsteps of explorers and those who died in war.
Bullocks and the Walers; axe ring and crosscut saw.
'T'is for the struggle of our pioneers,
and who's souls we can’t restore,
that we must preserve the heritage,
of Australians who have lived before.
Categories:
walers, history,
Form: Ballad