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Project Gutenberg Australia HomeReturn to Index of Poems
Slowly o’er the salt-bush ridges see the moving cattle feed;
Ne’er a gilghi-hole they break for, not a clay-pan do they heed:
You can hear contented breathings through the waning afternoon,
For they’re lately from the waters of a never-dry lagoon.
It is grand to be a drover when your stores and roads are right,
But your very heart-strings tighten when the boy reports at night:
“There’s no water for the cattle till you get to Ginnagay—
To the troughs just past the station, over sixty miles away?”
There are wrinkles on your forehead, and your heart’s a lump of lead,
Thinking of three double stages and three troublous nights ahead;
And up-swells an anguished moaning, to the sullen autumn sky,
As you force the dumb brutes forward through the stages that are dry.
Onward through the choking dust-clouds, down the twining, blinding track,
To the front the strong are moving, whilst the weak are falling back;
Closely guarded by the mud-tank just abreast the western wing,
Tailing off and stretching forward, in a far-extending string.
One by one they lift their faces in a pitiful appeal,
As they scent the private waters that the coolabahs conceal;
Then it’s “Back, you sniffing brindle! there’s a boundary-rider there,
If he had the river Murray he would still refuse your prayer.”
Onward o’er the blazing sandhills to the clink of bit and bar;
Flanked by barren-flats and ridges where the well-stocked warrens are;
All the pangs of thirst concentred in each dumb brute’s sunken eye—
Oh, it’s hell to be a drover on the stages that are dry!
Some are crippled, some exhausted; all are lowing sadly weak;
There are many left to perish where a sand-streak marks the creek;
You can see the front lot stringing, but the tail is out of sight,
They begin the stage at dawning that the strong ones made last night.
There beneath that rising dust-cloud are the leaders miles away,
Rushing wildly in their madness to the troughs at Ginnagay.
Says your true and thorough stockman, “I could just it down and cry”—
For its hell to be a drover on the stages that are dry!
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