Those were the days when each man trusted the other and rarely found his trust betrayed – when a helping hand was readily extended to the needy or the unfortunate battler even before it was sought.
Rough days they were, but they were gladsome and bright with the spirit of manliness and a faith in each other’s good qualities.
They had to be born, for in early Coolgardie
We had to appear to our folks in the East
As patient explorers, courageous and hardy,
Facing fortune and famine, wild blizzard and beast;
We had to account in the pannikin papers
For whiskers that covered us well to the waist,
And our penchant persistent for dodging the drapers,
Our singlets unlaundered , our bluchers unlaced.
The days we avoided tonsorial shears
Were the days I invented the Old Pioneers.
They were mostly invented at storekeepers’ swarries,
At publicans’ picnics, at send-offs and such,
When blokes who drove buses and brewery lorries
Put in the professional picturesque touch;
Their streets changed to scrub and their cabs into camels,
Their furniture vans to a pack-horse outback;
And traffic suburban and similar trammels
Metamorphosed to mulga and spinifex track.
Responsible quite for much travail and tears
Is the man who invented the Old Pioneers.
Reunions in Perth with the sturdy old story
Of pains and privations in desert and scrub,
Have given new life to the anecdote hoary,
The skeleton grim and the cannibal club.
bolsters up B. with his tiresome old twaddle
Of waterless wastes and of tuckerless tracks.
And B. supports A., and together they toddly
The mulga main street all beset with the blacks.
A knowledge of boomerangs, waddies and spears
Has the man who invented the Old Pioneers.
These Old Pioneers, mostly gloomy and grizzled,
With a tear in their eye and a clove in their breath,
Sigh for the men and the miles that have mizzled
“When we, sir! By Gad, sir! faced danger and death!
The race is retreating, it’s finished, it’s flaccid,
These young men for nothing but war seem to care;
Oh, give us the mulgaland bush, where the blacks hid,
The succulent saltbush and prickly pear!”
This is the prayer poured into the ears
Of the man who invented the Old Pioneers.
By Dryblower
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Moya Sharp
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