Howdy Folks.

To celebrate Australia day, we're releasing we released this song called The Flood

I'm trying to work out a d/l function for a celebratory giveaway deal type thing  so we can give some copies away but the module I had went kerplooey. in the meanwhile you can have a listen to the song.

As I write this I realise I owe a great debt of gratitude to my 5th class teacher, Mr Maitland, who inspired in me a love of Bush Poetry.

Mr Maitland never tired of Henry Lawson, made us reenact choice scenes from a gold rush story and read to us, with passion and conviction, poems by bush balladeers such as Banjo Patterson and Dorothea McKellar.  

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me! 

For the rest visit the official Dorothea McKellar site cos they asked me not to post the whole thing : http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm

For my money, no one sets you more in the mind of the New South Welshman than Banjo.

There's something quintessentially Australian about his awe for the bush, something universal amongst us, even for those who view the 26th of January through a sadder frame.

Antipodeans, imports all, for none truly emerged from, but all came to, her fatal shores.

For those who have travelled in the darkness and the wonders of diamond studded skies, clawed red earth and mud from the cleats of your boots or wandered along an empty beach wondering if you were the only person on earth and made a little sadder to see a far figure, you are united in your awe of the far flung place in which you find yourself luckiest to be.

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better

Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just `on spec', addressed as follows, `Clancy, of The Overflow'.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
`Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving `down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of `The Overflow'.

Thank you Mr Maitland.

The Flood

She’s empty in the dry

Shying from the sky

Deep beneath her sands

 does she keep hidden

The lone & single spark

The secrets of her heart

A piece of her to herself

she’s forbidden

But comes the time

 her seasons change

The heavens open

cross her plains And rivers

She breaks her drought

 with flooding rains

And riders,to a man

 lift up their gaze.

So lay me down

In the press of the waters

No I won’t drown

Float like a reed in her creek

She’s not far now

Though I fail at her borders

If I wait until her rivers’ rise

the flood shall carry me.

Through all does she endure

 The heat and dust so cruel

green and pleasant lands

so long forgotten

The sharpness of her gaze

her azure skies inveigh

a fearless binding will

that can not soften

But you who do not know her well

tremble ‘neath her tempest

and her fury

yet to her summons will I fly

when shadows 

grow much longer

 than my days