Henry Lawson

How the Land Was Won

    The future was dark and the past was dead
      As they gazed on the sea once more--
    But a nation was born when the immigrants said
      ‘Good-bye!’ as they stepped ashore!
    In their loneliness they were parted thus
      Because of the work to do,
    A wild wide land to be won for us
      By hearts and hands so few.

    The darkest land ’neath a blue sky’s dome,
      And the widest waste on earth;
    The strangest scenes and the least like home
      In the lands of our fathers’ birth;
    The loneliest land in the wide world then,
      And away on the furthest seas,
    A land most barren of life for men--
      And they won it by twos and threes!

    With God, or a dog, to watch, they slept
      By the camp-fires’ ghastly glow,
    Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept
      With ‘nulla’ and spear held low;
    Death was hidden amongst the trees,
      And bare on the glaring sand
    They fought and perished by twos and threes--
      And that’s how they won the land!

    It was two that failed by the dry creek bed,
      While one reeled on alone--
    The dust of Australia’s greatest dead
      With the dust of the desert blown!
    Gaunt cheek-bones cracking the parchment skin
      That scorched in the blazing sun,
    Black lips that broke in a ghastly grin--
      And that’s how the land was won!

    Starvation and toil on the tracks they went,
      And death by the lonely way;
    The childbirth under the tilt or tent,
      The childbirth under the dray!
    The childbirth out in the desolate hut
      With a half-wild gin for nurse--
    That’s how the first were born to bear
      The brunt of the first man’s curse!

    They toiled and they fought through the shame of it--
      Through wilderness, flood, and drought;
    They worked, in the struggles of early days,
      Their sons’ salvation out.
    The white girl-wife in the hut alone,
      The men on the boundless run,
    The miseries suffered, unvoiced, unknown--
      And that’s how the land was won.

    No armchair rest for the old folk then--
      But, ruined by blight and drought,
    They blazed the tracks to the camps again
      In the big scrubs further out.
    The worn haft, wet with a father’s sweat,
      Gripped hard by the eldest son,
    The boy’s back formed to the hump of toil--
      And that’s how the land was won!

    And beyond Up Country, beyond Out Back,
      And the rainless belt, they ride,
    The currency lad and the ne’er-do-weel
      And the black sheep, side by side;
    In wheeling horizons of endless haze
      That disk through the Great North-west,
    They ride for ever by twos and by threes--
      And that’s how they win the rest.