Joe Wilson and His Mates

The Never-Never Country.

    By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,
     By railroad, coach, and track—
    By lonely graves of our brave dead,
     Up-Country and Out-Back:
    To where ‘neath glorious clustered stars
     The dreamy plains expand—
    My home lies wide a thousand miles
     In the Never-Never Land.

    It lies beyond the farming belt,
     Wide wastes of scrub and plain,
    A blazing desert in the drought,
     A lake-land after rain;
    To the sky-line sweeps the waving grass,
     Or whirls the scorching sand—
    A phantom land, a mystic land!
     The Never-Never Land.

    Where lone Mount Desolation lies,
     Mounts Dreadful and Despair—
    ‘Tis lost beneath the rainless skies
     In hopeless deserts there;
    It spreads nor’-west by No-Man’s Land—
     Where clouds are seldom seen—
    To where the cattle-stations lie
     Three hundred miles between.

    The drovers of the Great Stock Routes
     The strange Gulf country know—
    Where, travelling from the southern droughts,
     The big lean bullocks go;
    And camped by night where plains lie wide,
     Like some old ocean’s bed,
    The watchmen in the starlight ride
     Round fifteen hundred head.

    And west of named and numbered days
     The shearers walk and ride—
    Jack Cornstalk and the Ne’er-do-well,
     And the grey-beard side by side;
    They veil their eyes from moon and stars,
     And slumber on the sand—
    Sad memories sleep as years go round
     In Never-Never Land.

    By lonely huts north-west of Bourke,
     Through years of flood and drought,
    The best of English black-sheep work
     Their own salvation out:
    Wild fresh-faced boys grown gaunt and brown—
     Stiff-lipped and haggard-eyed—
    They live the Dead Past grimly down!
     Where boundary-riders ride.

    The College Wreck who sunk beneath,
     Then rose above his shame,
    Tramps West in mateship with the man
     Who cannot write his name.
    ‘Tis there where on the barren track
     No last half-crust’s begrudged—
    Where saint and sinner, side by side,
     Judge not, and are not judged.

    Oh rebels to society!
     The Outcasts of the West—
    Oh hopeless eyes that smile for me,
     And broken hearts that jest!
    The pluck to face a thousand miles—
     The grit to see it through!
    The communism perfected!—
     And—I am proud of you!

    The Arab to true desert sand,
     The Finn to fields of snow;
    The Flax-stick turns to Maoriland,
     Where the seasons come and go;
    And this old fact comes home to me—
     And will not let me rest—
    However barren it may be,
     Your own land is the best!

    And, lest at ease I should forget
     True mateship after all,
    My water-bag and billy yet
     Are hanging on the wall;
    And if my fate should show the sign,
     I’d tramp to sunsets grand
    With gaunt and stern-eyed mates of mine
     In Never-Never Land.

[End of original text.]

A Note on the Author and the Text:

Henry Lawson was born near Grenfell, New South Wales, Australia on 17 June 1867. Although he has since become the most acclaimed Australian writer, in his own lifetime his writing was often “on the side”—his “real” work was whatever he could find, often painting houses, or doing rough carpentry. His writing was often taken from memories of his childhood, especially at Pipeclay/Eurunderee. In his autobiography, he states that many of his characters were taken from the better class of diggers and bushmen he knew there. His experiences at this time deeply influenced his work, for it is interesting to note a number of descriptions and phrases that are identical in his autobiography and in his stories and poems. He died in Sydney, 2 September 1922. Much of his writing was for periodicals, and even his regular publications were so varied, including books originally released as one volume being reprinted as two, and vice versa, that the multitude of permutations cannot be listed here. However, the following should give a basic outline of his major works.

  Books of Short Stories:
    While the Billy Boils  (1896)
    On the Track  (1900)
    Over the Sliprails  (1900)
    The Country I Come From  (1901)     | These works were first published
    Joe Wilson and His Mates  (1901)    | in England, during or shortly after
    Children of the Bush  (1902)        | Lawson’s stay there.
    Send Round the Hat  (1907)          | These two books were first published
    The Romance of the Swag  (1907)     | as “Children of the Bush”.
    The Rising of the Court  (1910)

  Poetry:
    In the Days When the World Was Wide  (1896)
    Verses Popular and Humorous  (1900)
    When I Was King and Other Verses (1905)
    The Skyline Riders (1910)
    Selected Poems of Henry Lawson (1918)

Joe Wilson and His Mates was later published as two separate volumes, “Joe Wilson” and “Joe Wilson’s Mates”, which correspond to Parts I & II in Joe Wilson and His Mates. This work was first published in England, which may be evident from some of Lawson’s comments in the text which are directed at English readers. For example, Lawson writes in ‘The Golden Graveyard’: “A gold washing-dish is a flat dish—nearer the shape of a bedroom bath-tub than anything else I have seen in England, or the dish we used for setting milk—I don’t know whether the same is used here....”

Alan Light, Monroe, North Carolina, June 1997.