We present this work in honor of the poet’s 140th birthday.

The patient Earth spins on among the stars
Like an old lady in the Halls of Space,
Whose candles – set on Heaven’s window bars –
Wonder and wink at her excessive pace.

She mends Time’s garments with her age-long thread,
And patches Knowledge with forgotten lore
Dropped on the threshold by the ones who’ve fled
Out of this life through the grave’s narrow door.

On, on she spins with dignity and grace,
Crushing relentlessly our faintest hopes,
Whilst grave astronomers examine Space
For explanations, with long telescopes.

The Wind at intervals on air will croon
For her to spin to, but she goes on still,
When all is silent and the clown-faced Moon
Gazes and gapes above a sleeping hill.

I’ve often wondered why she never tires,
And why her candles – high on Heaven’s bars –
Don’t go right out like ordinary fires,
Or cheap gas-stoves – or threepenny cigars.

We present this work in honor of the 45th anniversary of the poet’s death.

My father and my mother never quarrelled.
They were united in a kind of love
As daily as the Sydney Morning Herald,
Rather than like the eagle or the dove.

I never saw them casually touch,
Or show a moment’s joy in one another.
Why should this matter to me now so much?
I think it bore more hardly on my mother,

Who had more generous feelings to express.
My father had dammed up his Irish blood
Against all drinking praying fecklessness,
And stiffened into stone and creaking wood.

His lips would make a switching sound, as though
Spontaneous impulse must be kept at bay.
That it was mainly weakness I see now,
But then my feelings curled back in dismay.

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 150th birthday.

“Our loss was light,” the paper said,
“Compared with damage to the Hun”:
She was a widow, and she read
One name upon the list of dead
Her son, her only son.

We present this work in honor of Western Australia Day.

We are sated of songs that drone the praise,
Of a world beyond our ken;
We are bored by the ballads of beaten ways
And milk-and-water men;
We are tired of the tales the lovers told
To the cooing amorous dove;
We have banned the minstrelsy of old,
And the lyrics of languid love;
We are done with the dirges cut and dried
In the London square and slum;
But we’re ripe for a rhyme whose metres stride
Through salt-bush scrub and gum.
Sing us a song unsung by men
Of the narrow and cautious creed;
Write with a strong and strenuous pen
The rhymes our hearts can read.

While we stand where the ways of men have end,
And the untrod tracks commence,
We weary of songs the poets penned
In pastoral indolence;
The sleepy sonnet that lovers make
Where weeping willows arch,
Can not the passionate soul awake,
Of men who outward march.
Our harps are hung in the towering trees
And the mulga low and grey;
Our ballads are sung by every breeze
That flogs the sea to spray.
We want no lay of a moonlit strand,
No idyll of daisied mead,
For the rhymes that our hearts can understand
Are the rhymes our hearts can read.

We need no monody planned and built,
In the shade of an abbey grey,
But the pulse and throb of a lusty lilt
That quickens the human clay.
Tell us of men whose axes bite
The hearts of the mountain gum;
Sing of the pioneers who fight
To waken the desert dumb.
We want to hark to the heart within,
Of the men who feel and know;
For only the men who’ve sampled sin
Can write of its joy and woe.
Give us a ballad that swings along
With the bound of a striving steed;
Give us — whether it’s right or wrong —
The rhymes our hearts can read.

We want to travel from page to page
Through dusty drive and stope,
To catch the hiss of the rushing cage,
The roll of the winding rope.
Give us the rip-saw’s grind and scream
As it sunders the giant log;
The groan and the creek of the bullock team
As it flounders across the bog;
The swish and the crack of the stockmen’s whips
In the roar of the night stampede.
Give us the music that bites and grips —
The rhymes our hearts can read!

Sing of the days of hasty camps,
When Bayley blazed the track.
Write of the shining starry lamps
That beacon the wild out-back.
Sing to the soul of the hardest case
That bears his swag of sin;
Of nights of wine and the bold embrace
When revelry roped him in;
Tell of the times we’ve fought for fun,
A wearisome hour to wile,
And whether we lost or drew or won
Swung out with a cheery smile.
Write of the men for whom God waits —
Men of a Christ-like creed;
Sing of the mates who die for mates,
In the rhymes our hearts can read!

We present this work in honor of ANZAC Day.

To the Others
You once smiled a friendly smile,
Said we were kin to one another,
Thus with guile for a short while
Became to me a brother.
Then you swamped my way of gladness,
Took my children from my side,
Snapped shut the law book, oh my sadness
At Yirrakalas’ plea denied.
So, I remember Lake George hills,
The thin stick bones of people.
Sudden death, and greed that kills,
That gave you church and steeple.
I cry again for Warrarra men,
Gone from kith and kind,
And I wondered when I would find a pen
To probe your freckled mind.
I mourned again for the Murray tribe,
Gone too without a trace.
I thought of the soldier’s diatribe,
The smile on the governor’s face.
You murdered me with rope, with gun
The massacre of my enclave,
You buried me deep on McLarty’s run
Flung into a common grave.
You propped me up with Christ, red tape,
Tobacco, grog and fears,
Then disease and lordly rape
Through the brutish years.
Now you primly say you’re justified,
And sing of a nation’s glory,
But I think of a people crucified –
The real Australian story.