(Sent in by Esther Philbey)
We have sung the song of the droving days,
Of the march of the travelling sheep,
By silent stages and lonely ways,
Thin, white battalions creep.
But the man who now by the land would thrive,
Must his spurs to a ploughshare beat,
Is there ever a man in the world alive
To sing the song of the wheat ?
It's west by south of the Great Divide,
The grim, grey plains run out,
Where the old flock-masters lived and died
In a ceaseless fight with drought.
Weary with waiting and hope deferred,
They were ready to own defeat,
Till at last they heard the master-word,
And the master's word-was wheat.
Yarran and myall and box and pine,
'Twas axe and fire for all,
They scarce could tarry to blaze the line,
Or wait for the trees to fall,
Ere the team was yoked, and the gates flung wide,
And the dust of the horses' feet
Rose up like a pillar, of smoke ; to guide
The wonderful march of the wheat.
Furrow by furrow, and fold by fold,
The soil is turned on the plain;
Better than silver and better than gold,
Is the surface-mine of the grain;
Better than cattle and better than sheep,
In the fight with drought and heat,
For streak of stubbornness, wide and deep,
Lies hid in a grain of wheat.
When the stock is swept by the hand of fate,
Deep down in ins bed of clay,
The brave brown wheat will lie and wait,
For the resurrection day;
Lie hid while the whole world thinks him dead;
But the spring rain, soft and sweet,
Will over the steaming paddocks spread,
The first green flush of the wheat.
Green and amber and gold it grows,
When, the sun sinks late in the west,
And the breeze sweeps over the rippling rows
Where the quail and the skylark nest,
Mountain or river or shining star,
There's never a sight can beat,
Away to the sky-line stretching far,
A sea of rippling wheat.
When the burning harvest sun sinks low,
And the shadows stretch on the, plain,
The roaring strippers come and go,
Like ships on a sea of grain,
Till the lurching, groaning waggons bear
Their tale of the load complete,
Of the world's great work he has done his share,
Who has gathered a crop of wheat.
Princes and potentates and czars,
They travel in regal state,
But old king wheat has a thousand cars,
For his trip to the water-gate,
And his thousand steamships breast the tide,
And plough thro' the wind and sleet,
To the lands where the teeming millions bide,
That say, "Thank God for wheat !"
Notes
From the NSW Newspaper The Albury Banner and Wodonga Express 24 Feb 1933 p. 21.