The Shame of Going Back

When you’ve come to make a fortune and you haven’t made your salt

And the reason for your failure isn’t anybody’s fault

When you haven’t got a billet and the times are very slack

There’s nothing that can spur you like the shame of going back

CHORUS

Going home with empty pockets, going back hard up

Oh! it’s then you learn the meaning of humiliation’s cup

Going home with empty pockets going back hard up

Oh! it’s then you learn the meaning of humiliation’s cup

When the place and you are strangers and you struggle all alone

And you have a mighty longing for the town where you are known

When your clothes are very shabby and the future’s looking black

There is nothing that can hurt you like the shame of going back

When you’ve fought the battle bravely and are beaten to the wall

‘Tis the sneers of men not conscience that makes cowards of us all

And while you are returning, oh! your brain is on the rack

And your heart is in the shadow of the shame of going back

When a beaten man’s discovered with a bullet in his brain

They’ll post mortem him and try him then they’ll say he was insane

But it very often happens that he lately got the sack

And his onward move was owing to the shame of going back

Ah! my friend you call it nonsense, and your upper lip is curled

I can see that you have never worked your passage through the world

But when fortune rounds upon you and the rain is on the track

You will learn the bitter meaning of the shame of going back

FINAL CHORUS

Going home with empty pockets, going back hard up

Oh! it’s then you’ll learn the meaning of humiliation’s cup

Crawling home with empty pockets, going back hard up

Oh! it’s then you taste the poison in humiliation’s cup   

The Shame of Going Back:  H. Lawson / P. Roeterdink

In 1891 Henry Lawson joined the staff of The Boomerang a Brisbane weekly newspaper, from which he was subsequently sacked.  In the same year he wrote these words, the perennial consequences of a personal sense of failure.