COCKY (COCKIE) BELL

By Val Hastings

You took up your selection west of Karlowin Well.
You ploughed the land and fenced it in. The seasons did you well.
In '29 you were sowing wheat with a horse team of the best
When a combine point came springing down and stabbed you through the chest.

CH.
Cocky Bell, you were a tough man, one of our pioneers.
You were a wheatbelt cocky for only fourteen years.
You were a cocky through and through
Though it was the death of you, Cocky Bell.

For two long days and freezing nights you lay out on the ground.
Your faithful team of horses never moved nor made a sound;
But you were getting weaker as in the dirt you lay.
You prayed to God to give you strength to see another day.

Well, when your neighbour found you, you couldn't even cry,
For the blasted ants of our fair land had eaten out your eyes;
And as he held you in his arms, he marvelled at your pluck.
Then it's eighty miles to a hospital bed on the back of a Chevrolet truck.

You held hard, hard to the hand of a mate and you swore for evermore,
You swore an oath that if you lived you'd kill every ant you saw;
But your beaten body couldn't take any more. It'd had just about enough.
Cocky Bell, it got the best of you, but by Jesus, you were tough!


Catter Bugsy (Peter Bugden), tracked down the lyrics in this Mudcat thread : https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=97418&messages=18#4073450

“This song was sung in memory of those farmers out on the WA wheatfields who in days gone by, used their tractor with a rope slung over to fell trees but often the tractor would flip and they would be trapped underneath -often stuck out in the isolated paddock maybe for days and if they were lucky somebody found them.........”

I can relate to this not uncommon occurrence in my own Family History, where my G-Grandmother’s brother was impaled by his own harvester, in rural Victoria :(

“…..Cocky / Cockie arose in the 1870s and is an abbreviation of cockatoo farmer. This was then a disparaging term for small-scale farmers, probably because of their habit of using a small area of land for a short time and then moving on, in the perceived manner of cockatoos feeding…..” A.N.U.


NB   Does anyone know of a copy of this song anywhere online???                                


Cheers, R-J