The Never Never Land

By homestead hut and shearing shed, by railroad coach and track

By lonely graves where rest our dead, up country and out back

To where beneath the 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 skyline sweeps the waving grass, or whirls the scorching sand

A phantom land, a mystic realm! The Never Never Land

To where 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 traveling from the southern droughts, the big lean bullocks go

And camped by night where plains are 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 greybeard side by side

They veil there eyes from moon and stars, and slumber on the sand

Sad memories as the years go round in Never-Never Land

The Arab to the desert sand, the Finn to fens and snow

The “flax-stick” dreams of Maoriland, while seasons come and go

Whatever stars may glow or burn o’er lands of east and west

The wandering heart of man will turn to one it loves the best

Lest in the city I forget true mateship after all

My water-bag and billy yet are hanging on the wall

And I to save my soul again, would tramp to sunsets grand

With sad-eyed mates across the plain in the Never-Never Land

The Never Never Land:  H. Lawson / I. MacDougall

Henry Lawson’s graphic word pictures of the country and its people who lived and worked “outback” are as applicable now as they were then.  Written in 1901 while he was in London, these words probably reflect back to trips to Bourke in western New South Wales in the early 1890’s.