Vonda Stanley's collection of early Australian bush poems

The Never Never Land

 

By hut, homestead, 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Lest in the city I forget

True mateship after all,

My water-bag 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.

Henry Lawson