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The Last Muster

Edward S. Sorenson

The men were riding listlessly behind the moving mob,
    A sense of loss impending held them all;
The wind across the ridges in faint gusts appeared to sob,
    And far away the cattle seemed to call;
For most things on the station that stand high in their regards
    Were passing with the setting of the sun;
With stragglers they were heading for the Wooroowoolgen yards,
    The last that they would muster on the run.

Old stockmen who had known it when they first began to ride,
    And oft had viewed the clash of warring spears;
Had seen the pastures dwindle and the bush stripped of its pride,
    The roaming myalls vanish with the years;
They'd seen selectors' fences string across the cattle camps,
    Where often they had galloped to and fro,
And over hills and gullies and across the reedy swamps.
    Where nothing used to block them long ago.

With every strip cut off it, and with every mile of wire,
    The veterans of the stockwhip felt a pang,
For ranging over broad domains was dear to son and sire,
    And sweet the forest glory and its tang.
‘Twas cheery 'mong the wildings of the furred and feathered kind
    That vanished from the stockman's narrowed range,
With all the olden splendour that the years had cast behind,
    And left the hills and valleys bare and strange.

Wild cattle in the bramble and the brumbies in the hills,
    Had led them oft a swift and stirring chase,
When scrubby gorge and shingle took a toll in sudden spills;
    But little recked the riders in the race.
They'd bustled in the dawning in the noisy branding-yard,
    With blazing logs to light them by the rails;
They'd backed the station outlaws when the days were long and hard,
    And ever they were eager on the trails,

A thousand times they'd mustered, and the hardest was the last;
    The straggler mob the saddest company
Of all the herds they'd numbered from the far romantic past
    And branded with the famous “Diamond D”;
For now their haunts were broken into little bits of farms,
    Their scented groves and valleys cut and cleared;
And with the winding river stripped of all its olden charms
    The cattle-run they knew had disappeared.

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