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The Lonely Rider

Edward S. Sorenson

On a trail beyond Bedourie, ‘cross the rolling dunes that blaze
In red billows ‘long the Boori ‘neath the everlasting haze,
With his saddle-bags and Snider (for the dogs that roam and row),
Jogs a solitary rider on a lumbering camel-cow.

He has cleaned a soak behind him where his scattered cattle drink,
And the drifting sands that blind him build loose ridges round the brink,
There’s another, when the tramping of wild mobs drums out the day,
Where the night will see him camping, fifty lonely miles away.

Often there the drought has found him, with the starry sky o’erhead,
With the desert beasts around him and the desert sand his bed,
‘Mid the stunted native willow, tired and browned, but tough as wire,
His old saddle for a pillow, and his quartpot by the fire.

With the dawn again he’s riding to the cheerless cries of crows,
Towards a limber-line that’s hiding some small creek that seldom flows;
With the night his dromedary crops the saltbush clumps again.
And he lies alone and wary in the warrigals’ domain.

So the days and nights he passes till the shifting dunes are stilled,
Till the rains renew the grasses and the waterholes are filled,
Then among contented cattle, from the camps to homestead rails,
With a hearty swing and rattle he goes singing down the trails.

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