Dusty Gravel Road - Lyrics.

Have you ever travelled northward past the slime dumps of Kalgoorlie

Out along the old Broad Arrow Road

And seen the heaps of mullock like tombstones in a graveyard

That signify the finding of a load

Have you ever stopped to wonder how many picks and shovels

And aching muscles on bodies young and old

Have scraped the dust of legend the clay and ironstone

Searching for a dish of yellow gold

CHORUS

For the passing of some years seats you in a four-wheel drive

Exhaust pipe leaves your sweat and your worries far behind

The air-conditioned faint nor-easter blows cool air across your mind

Traveling on that dusty gravel road

Ahead there’s corrugations and you spot the blackened carcass

Of a tyre gone to pieces on the side

Christ what happens if you break down, the petrol tank is holed

Or worst of all your grog supply runs dry

Like the heroes in that legend maybe you’ll walk a while

Maybe you’ll get lucky hitch a ride

But would you push your barrow loaded up with life’s possessions

Like some of them damn near three hundred mile

At the turnoff there’s some diggings and you stop to rest a while

As nightfall pulls a curtain on the day

By the last few glints of sunlight something on that yonder hillside

Beckons you to come and walk that way

Glittering in the gully, piles of champagne bottles

Signs they caught up with a golden fate

And you lift the flimsy fliptop from a frosty ice-cold can

And join their celebration just eighty years too late

Dusty Gravel Road: Words & Lyrics: A. Mann

This song, written in the nineteen eighties, is a tribute to the “old timers”, the original diggers who by their perseverance and application under extreme hardship, discovered and opened up the Western Australian Goldfields.  It was not until 1986 that the output of gold in Western Australia in a single year exceeded that of the halcyon year of 1904.