The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168402 Message #4077796
Posted By: Stewie
01-Nov-20 - 06:40 PM
Thread Name: Mudcat Australia-New Zealand Songbook
Subject: RE: Rise Up Mudcat Songbook - Australia
WHILE THE BILLY BOILS (D.M.Wright/P.Garland
The speargrass crackles under the billy and overhead is the winter sun There’s snow on the hills, there’s frost in the gully, that reminds me of things that I’ve seen and done Of blokes that I knew, and mates that I’ve worked with, and the sprees that we had in the days gone by And a mist comes up from my heart to my eyelids, I feel fair sick and I wonder why
There is coves and coves! Some I liked partic’lar, and some I would sooner I never knowed But a bloke can’t choose the chaps that he’s thrown with in the harvest paddock or here in the road There was chaps from the other side that I shore with that I’d like to have taken along for mates But we said, ‘So long!’ and we laughed and parted for good and all at the station gates
I mind the time when the snow was drifting and Billy and me was out for the night We lay in the lee of a rock, and waited, hungry and cold, for the morning light Then he went one way and I the other – we’d been like brothers for half a year He said: ‘I’ll see you again in town, mate, and we’ll blow the froth off a pint of beer’
He went to a job on the plain he knowed of and I went poisoning out at the back And I missed him somehow – for all my looking I never could knock across his track The same with Harry, the bloke I worked with, the time I was over upon the coast He went for a fly-round over to Sydney, to stay for a fortnight – a month at most
He never came back, and he never wrote me – I wonder how blokes like him forget We had been where no one had been before us, we had starved for days in the cold and wet We had sunk a hundred holes that was duffers, till at last we came on a fairish patch An’ we worked in rags in the dead of winter while the ice-bars hung from the frozen thatch
Yes, them was two, and I can’t help mind them – good mates as ever a joker had But there’s plenty more as I’d like to be with, for half of the blokes on the road is bad It sets me a-thinking, the world seems wider, for all we fancy it’s middling small When a chap like me makes friends in plenty and they slip away and he loses them all
The speargrass crackles under the billy and overhead is the winter sun There’s snow on the hills, there’s frost in the gully and, oh, the things that I’ve seen and done The blokes that I’ve knowed and the mates that I’ve worked with, and the sprees that we had in the days gone by But I somehow fancy we’ll all be pen-mates on the day when they call the roll of the sky
Another poem by NZ's 'outback laureate', David McKee Wright. Above is the complete poem. In this YT clip, Phil Garland amends and shortens the poem: