We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law ;
We shall come up from life's desert to your burdened banquet hall,
We shall turn your wine to wormwood, your honey into gall. We shall go where wail the children, where from your race-killing mills
Flows a bloody stream of profits to your cursed insasiate tills ;
We shall tear them from your drivers, in our shamed and angered pride,
With the fury and the fierceness of a fatherhood denied. We shall set our sisters on you, those you trapped into your hells,
When the mother instinct's stifled and no earthly beauty dwells ;
We shall call them from the living death-the death in life you gave,
To sing our class's triumph o'er your cruel system's grave. We shall strip them of their epaulettes, the panderars who fight
Your wars against the workers for a bone on which to bite.
We shall batter down your prisons, we shall set your chain-gangs free,
We shall drive you from the mountain side, the valley, plain, and sea. We shall hunt around the fences where your ax-men sweat and gape
Till they stampede down your stockades in their effort to escape;
We shall steal up through the darkness, we shall prowl the wood and town
Till they waken to their power and arise and ride you down. We shall send a message to them on a whisper down the night,
We shall bid the warrior women drive the ax-men to the fight;
We shall use your guile against you-all the cunning you have taught-
All the wisdom of the serpent to attain the ending sought. We shall come as comes the cyclone-in the stillness we shall farm,
From the calm your terror fashioned, we shall hurl on you the storm ;
We shall strike when least expected when you think toil's rout complete,
And crush you and your Hessians 'neath our brogan-shodded feet. We shell laugh to scorn your power that now holds the world in awe,
We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law ;
We shall outrage all your temples-we shall blaspheme all your gods,
We shall turn the old world over as a ploughman turns the clods. --Covington Hall. Notes From the Queensland Newspaper The Worker 31 May 1923 Page 3. American activist Covington Hall (1871-1952) was a charismatic messenger of working-class sovereignty. A journalist and poet, professor and union organizer, advocate of sabotage and the general strike, Hall was an opponent of white supremacy and empire, an advocate of gender equality. The Great Depression spawned Hobo songs, however finding Australian examples was not a simple matter until the digitisation of newspapers allowed researchers to dredge up a decent collection of them as on this website ... happy hunting