Collected and edited by Peter Bridge with Gail Dreezens.

Part 2

However the Ode had its ancestors in WA and t’otherside. Here we have the first glimmerings of its life in Western Australia:-

18 June, 1887. The Weekly Times.
In Australia everything is so horribly new, one is so continually being reminded that we live in a country without a vestige of old associations, that it is a pleasure to be now and then brought face to face with some rite or ceremony that carries the thoughts back to the old world, and to a period when the

 “Land of gum and Mallee tree,

 Land of kangaroo and wallaby,”

had yet to wait many a century before it should be needed as an overflow reservoir for the Anglo-Saxon race.

*   *   *   *

If any of my readers are curious on the subject of quotations I may tell that, to the best of my knowledge, they will not find the couplet, “Land of gum, &c.,” in the works of any English or Australian poets. They have an history of their own. Though not of my composition, it is the first time, I believe, that they have figured in print. Some years ago I happened to be travelling with sheep up the river Murray in South Australia towards the New South Wales border. Our party stopped for one night at a place known as Develin’s Pound, where there is a dilapidated edifice that had once done duty as a public-house, but was then, and had, for several years, been deserted. This building was a favorite resort for “sundowners” on their way up the river, and it walls were a repository of their thoughts and opinions, both sacred and profane – with the profane decidedly preponderating. Many of the scribblings struck me as possessing a certain amount of rude originality, but in nearly all of them the “rudeness” – to use a mild term – was so very marked, that they are unfit to be put in print. My quotation is a copy of one of the inscriptions at Develin’s Pound, and as it is somewhat more refined than the others I give it in full.

 

 “Land of gum and Mallee tree,

 Land of kangaroo and wallaby,

 Squatters home, and squatters hell,

 Land of beggars fare thee well!”

The poet, I should explain, is speaking of South Australia, which colony he is forsaking for New South Wales.

22 May, 1894. The Geraldton Murchison Telegraph. The Sydney correspondent of the London Figaro writes:-

Australia just now has a very bad attack of gold-fever. I have just returned to Sydney after a tour through the interior of New South Wales. Everywhere I met men packing up their traps preparatory to embarking for West Australia. The “rush” of the early days was not more pornounced than that of the present, though the gold-seekers of to-day set out with a wider knowledge of mining and minerals than their fore-fathers. From Coolgardie, the centre of the new mining district, come reports of a contrary character. To some men fortune has been kind. These find West Australia, if not a pleasant place, at least one that can be endured. Others describe the field and its surroundings as “Hell” itself. The other day I came across a poem by a disgusted prospector, which hits the situation to a nicety.

Here ‘tis:-

 

Land of scrub dust and desert sand

Whose arid plains will not yeald food for man

Whose mighty lakes are naught but leads of salt

Where the weried traveler cannot hault

To quench his burning thirst with Adam’s ale

Or wash his hide from dust most stale

Whose great rich mines are skite and gass

Boomed up by men with lying tongues and cheeks of brass

You other siders take heed in time

Come not near this curset rechet clime

There is nothing here but scrub sault and sand

Western Austrelea is old hell for a free white man.

Advance Australia

Latest version (1 June, 1894, Victoria Express)

Advance Australia! Chosen land

Of blackguards, great and small

Where rogues and cheats and scoundrels band

To prey on people all.

 

Where Legislators mostly are

A very mouldy lot!

Where Editors WOULD BE on a par

With Solon; but ARE NOT!

 

Where Chinkies, Japs and Afghans roam

Abroad, at their sweet will;

Where Leprosy stalks near our home

And hideous fears instil.

 

Where every vice in man is found, 

And youth is vicious, too! –

Where fraud and treachery rank abound

And murder’s nothing new!

 

Advance Australia! Yes you may

In a very far off day;

When all these blots are wiped away

And better men have sway.

Ex.

 

27 April, 1895. The Eastern Districts Chronicle

COOLGARDIE. – A correspondent writes in the following strain to a Sydney contemporary concerning Coolgardie. The paragraph runs: -

‘This is an accursed country – the worst outside Gehenna. It is the birthplace of beautiful mirages, – of deadly insects, and lovely-hued reptiles; of songless birds, of venomous flies, of undrinkable water, immersion in which peels the skin from the hardest hand; and of the most virulent ‘Barcoo rot’ in any part of the Australias. But it is a land fairly teeming with gold, and one that will vie with any known area in gold production. The more I see of the country the more am I satisfied that it is too huge to be coped with in a decade. Picture an auriferous area of over 200,000 square miles, and constantly extending to every quarter of the compass. Consider that, collectively, at insignificant intervals, thousands of claims have been located; that each of these claims is intersected by a lode, whether good, bad or indifferent, and then sit down and solemnly sum up the net potentialities of such a field. The one thing necessary to success is a bountiful water supply. That is merely a question of a couple of millions of money. In two years Esperance Bay will undoubtedly be brought to the back doors of Coolgardie. Then not only will the mines, for various reasons, be on a better footing for economical working than any other group in Australasia, but the country will be rendered fit for man and beast. I am no optimist. Five years hence let this picture be brought to light.

8 April, 1895. The Coolgardie Miner.

What weak-minded efforts at describing Coolgardie are made by some of the “Jackaroo” visitors. One named Doolake, a crow-eater, dubs the field “the land of sin, sand, salt, sorrow and sore eyes.” He should have added swelled head, also.

10 May, 1895. The Geraldton Express.

You can always tell a Westralian letter by the colour of the envelope. There are stains and streaks of reddish dust all over it, and, in addition to the dust, there is often a faint, sickly, perfume attached to the epistle – an odour of desert and flies and old meat-tins and other things too numerous to mention. Westralia has a smell that is all its own, and whoever has been there and met it will remember it ever after as the smell of a lost land, and a busted mine, and a lying prospectus, and a fishy Government, and a God-for-gotten population, and as the odour of the last scrag-end of the world generally. Having got these remarks off its chest, the Bulletin feels rather better. – Bulletin.

 

26 June 1896. The Geraldton Express.

In the Ovens and Murray Advertiser (Vic.) the irrepressible Frank Weston writes long and appreciative articles upon the Murchison goldfields. It is refreshing to find someone ‘boosting up’ the Murchison in the Eastern Press, and the Geraldton Chamber of Commerce ought to be duly grateful to Frank. His appreciation stops at the mines, though. The lines which he quotes (from an anonymous writer) are not likely to boom Westralia as a picturesque health-resort. Here they are:-

Farewell To The Fields

Land of deceitfulness and lies,

Of large “Bungarrows,” dust and flies,

Whose rivers, save it rains or snows,

Are beds in which no water flows –

Why call them rivers, goodness knows!

 

No plumed songster greets the eye,

For all the birds in silence fly,

Save Daw and Crow with hideous cry;

Whose history will hand down to fame

The “Wealth of Nations” fearful shame;

Whose beef and mutton taste the same.

 

Thou, land with no good thing whatever,

I leave thee now, I trust forever,

The greatest sinner here I trow,

With brand of Cain upon his brow,

Summoned to answer judgment’s knell

Would gladly take his last farewell

To seek some better place in H—l.

Land only fit for Natives few,

I bid thee now a long adieu!

P.P.C. To The Murchison Fields

(By a Fever-Stricken Disappointed Prospector)
15 July 1896. The Murchison Times and Day Dawn Gazette.

Land of the Red-spot-spider, fare thee well!

Region of sin, sand, centipede and sorrow.

No more within thee shall my footsteps dwell,

If Gascard’s coach is outward bound to-morrow!

Home of the “wild-cat” and the “duffing” reef,

Whose “surface shows” pinch out at fifty feet,

Sump hole for cash, wrung from a boom as brief,

As “two-ounce crushings” when a sale’s complete!

 

Chosen abode of Barcoo and “bung-eye;”

Gaunt breeding place for all Earth’s myriad flies,

Where typhoid stalks through camp, and bush, and mine,

Carving on brightest hopes and lives – “here lies – –“

Desert of Mulga-bush and red hot earth

Salt as Lot’s wife, and parched as Sodom’s site;

Tired winds moan through thy countless leagues of dearth,

Sighing to tell whose bones bleach there so white!

 

In thy drear waste, mid drought and dust – and thirst

Made maddening by “tinned-dog” for daily tuck—

I’ve lingered long; and may I perish first

Ere I return; for here I cut my luck!

 

If for my sins and follies, Fates decree

That somewhere vile in penance I shall dwell,

Calmly I’ll choose that realm (if choice be free)

Beneath; but not these environs of h-ll!

 

Thus! From my feet thy ochreous dust I shake!

My homeward fare I’ll raise – steal, beg, or borrow.

And everlasting leave of thee I’ll take

When Gascard’s coach is outward bound to-morrow!

“S.”

4 October, 1896. The Geraldton Express

A few weeks ago the aspect of this district could only be characterised as an “abomination of desolation;” and the expression “Thou scorched and sunburnt land of Hell,” originally addressed by an exasperated “new chum” to Western Queensland, might far more appropriately have been applied to this part of Westralia. But Jupiter Pluvius has changed all that! And the æsthetic sense of an admirer of Nature, would be delighted by a glimpse of the landscape, which is now spread before our eyes. The prospect from Mount Hall, of the silvery lake with its verdant islands, stretching away to the “far blue hills” in the distance, might well remind a person of poetic temperament – if such an unlucky being exists in Nannine – of the lines of Tennyson, descriptive of the legendary Avilion:-

 

 ………… “It lies

Deep meadowed, happy, fair,

With orchard-lawns, and bowery hollows,

Crowned by Summer seas.”

 

Nannine, March 25^th, 1896

10 April, 1897. Tothersider

The insect world of W.A.

O, blighting fly and bumble bee.

O, centipede and Esperance flea.

O, scorpions fierce and thrifty ants,

That often clamber up my --------

18 June, 1897. The Geraldton Express

A daily paper says that “a belief prevails in some scientific quarters that at a certain depth gold exists in vast masses as a virgin ore, and may be hewn out like coal.” This, of course, refers to Westralia, which is well-known (by mining experts and company promoters) to consist simply of a superstratum, more or less thick, of sand, scrub, mosquitoes. Six Families, corned-beef tins, rum shanties, and blasphemy resting on a bed of solid bullion. There is no telling, except by experiment, just how thick this superstratum may be. But the British investor may rest assured that if he will keep on (which, just now, it seems he won’t) sending out money the Westralian miners will eventually strike the gold, even if they have to dig down to the centre of the earth for it. – Melbourne Punch.