A Bushman's Experience

[puredingo]

It was a cold, frosty morning when we shouldered our pick
And headed for Camden for Burragorang, myself, jack and Mick;
We passed down a steep, rocky mountain, a mighty cold
place,
Where the bush and scrub tore the bark off our face.
Arriving,Moingang, chief of Burragorang and king of
Aborigines was there.
He was wearing a nice crown made of skin of a bear.
We told him we were tired, hungry, footsore and cold,
And came to Burragorang to prospect for gold.

Moingang wished us good luck and expressed a desire
To give us a warm welcome, he asked his people to light up
A big fella buggerie fire;
By that fire we had a good talk,
And he gave us a good meal of damper and wild piggie
pork.
Just about midnight made a dos on the ground,
And i can assure you we slept very sound.

All our dreams where about gold'
We knew it bright, yellow, hard and cold.
Next day we built our humpy, one we found very cold,
We went about the river, digging for gold.
The work was hard and the prospects were poor,
So we started a little farm and garden for our living to be
sure.
The birds and marsupials and other pests, you know,
They never let much in our garden grow.

There was a snow white thieving cockatoo, he's cunning, he's
shy,
You cannot capture him, no matter how hard you try.
His visits are early with the watchman perched up
high,
And gives others warning and away they all do fly.
Then there's the wilie possum, he plants in a tree sprout,
Visits the garden on a dark night when there's nobody
about.
Round our little humpy we had a pair of broken delft
Which left it on the possum for he tracked her on the shelf.

There's a rusty-musty ginger fox,he sneaks about very shy,
He captured all our little pullets and made the little
Shanghai rooster cry;
There's a howling prowling dingo, he's a pest upon the run
And kills a pair of jumbugs mostly for the fun;
He feasts upon the mutton that's young and not too old,
There's the stringbark goanna, he amble sup so gay,
And chases the old hen and rooster, he swallows all the eggs
and then swaddles away.

There's the cruel, cruel black crow, his doing would
make you cry
For every poor old beast down, he picks out their eye.
Then there's the little parrot, he's about early in the morn,
He doesn't destroy the garden, but he loves the cob of
corn;
There's the harmless humpy-stumpy ugly bear, neither
white nor black,
He climbs the highest gumtree with a young one on his
back.
There's the canny, bonny rabbit, he's very distinctive you know,
And forces on a terrible drought and lays the country to;
waste.

By law we are forced to destroy him, and we all here done
our best,
You know he broke all the squatters away out west.
Great big game we hunted about the mountain top,
And we can tell you about the kangaroos, and how they,
used to hop;
We had a number almost captured, when the leader took a
slew,
And we got atngled up with old man Aussie kangaroo;
With sticks and stones we fought him right up to the rising
of the moon,Between Jack, Mick and myself, and the old man king's
coon.

How the battle ended now I'll tell you true,
we had a good supply of mutton off the old man kangaroo.
Great snakes! We used for fencing poles and porcupine for
chock,

In order to enclose a feeding place for poor old horsey Jock;
But the wallaroo and wallaby hop high and really laugh,
Scaling over our snake proof fence to eat the horses chaff.

Now I've given you the dinkum figures of boys the story
that i've told
if you go prospecting in the Burragorang, you'll get mighty
little gold;
And don't venture down the devil's gate, where the
Kowmung river below,
For there's wild animalsof all descriptions, very treacherous
and fierce, you know;
There's a great, tall, black, hairy man we call the Bennicia
Bull,
Hear his thundering voice rolling thru the mountain, and
the echo comes back and says
"I'm the king of the Burragorang and you better keep away!"

The trees grow very tall in the kowmung, they grow right
towards the sky,
In which the mighty eagle builds his nest and the young
ones they do cry.
Higher in the Darby, higher in the day,
Higher in the Darby, 'twas on Darby day.



Joe Feld, Upper Burragorang

[corvus]

Nice wee poem thanks, don't expect it to be published
corvus

[puredingo]

All that typing and that's the thanks I get? One lousy response.

Thanks anyway Corvus at least you've made this years Christmas card list as for the rest of you, yous'e have just made THE list ............

[walkerchris77]

Congratulations on the poem. I didn't read it all cause its was a lot of typing but it was sounding good.

[puredingo]

Thanks Chris, I'll learn to condense in the future...Like, say, There once was a man from nantucket.....