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Fifty Years Ago

Edward S. Sorenson

The tracks were long when I was ten
    And trudging miles to school
By winding streams and marsh and fen,
    And many a mystic pool;
When scrubs were deep and forests wide,
    And blacks roamed to and fro,
And on the roads crept dray and slide—
    Back fifty years ago.

The dogleg fence cut off the bight,
    The bark-roofed hut was new,
Where ‘possums gambolled through the night
    And scrambled down the flue;
And in the bush from dawn to dark
    With mallet, axe and throw,
The shingle-splitters made their mark
    Back fifty years ago.

No prophet dreamed of motors then,
    Or bikes nor telephones,
Of things to change the ways of men
    Ere we should make old bones.
The horse and buggy was our pride,
    And great was “Cobb and Co.,”
O’er cattle-runs all wild and wide
    Back fifty years ago.

The bush was good to those who knew,
    Though oft their ways were wrong,
And sweet with fruit and honey dew,
    With avian chirp and song.
Ere axe and firestick wantonly
    Laid scrub and forest low
Where clanged the weird corroboree
    Of fifty years ago.

Though often hard and rudely spent
    And keyed to bullock-drays,
Sweet-savored times of good content
    Were those old vanished days;
And for the spoil of bush and shack
    That none again can know,
I’d turn the hand of old Time back
    To fifty years ago.

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