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George Essex Evans

Australia

Earth's mightiest isle. She stands alone.
The wide seas wash around Her throne,
Crowned by the red sun as his own.
This is the last of all the lands
Where Freedom’s fray-torn banner stands,
Not wrested yet from freemen’s hands.

The world’s gray page lies bare to-day—
The rise of nations—the decay.
Will She, too, rise—and fall as they?

She called men to Her, and they came,
Whose deaths have given the Desert name.
Their fame is written with Her fame.

We toil and strive. We have our hour.
But She shall grow from power to power,
To wear the splendour of her dower.

The trust is ours—to us alone.

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Welcome

Prince of the race whose Empire is the Sea,
We welcome thee!
Thy ensign floats above our harbour-mouth.
A fairy’s hand
Has decked the great Queen City of the South.
By arch and roof, in bannered street and stand,
The vast crowd waits.
The cannon thunder greeting from the strand.
But in our hearts a deeper note vibrates—
The loving welcome of a loyal land.
’Tis the same race that from the iron North
Went faring forth,
Flying the flag of England at the fore;
Nor saw again
The masted city, with its ceaseless roar,
The flower-flecked meadow and the leafy lane,
The steepled hill,
Or ivied ruin rising from the plain,
But for a sign that they remembered still,
Built Greater Britains over all the main.

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Kara

Chequered with sunshine and shade—the umbrage of white clouds in motion—
Rearing their summits to Heaven, broken like waves on their strands,
Northward and southward and seaward the mountains arise from the ocean—
Poised on a height above all, Kara, the beautiful, stands.

Kara, whose mountain the ranges lie under in turbulent surges—
Billows of purple and blue that stretch from her base to the sea—
Kara that knoweth the breath of the storm-wind, the sound of his dirges
Sweeping her gorges and clefts, or sighing to river and tree.

High as an eagle’s nest, crowning a summit storm-beaten and hoary,
Framed in a setting of green which sombre tints deepen and tone,
Gleam all the station’s white roofs, refracting the Summer-god’s glory:
Ribbons of silvery light surmounting gray masses of stone.

Beauty is round it, and peace; and silence and sunlight enfold it,
Clothing with mystical charm summit and forest and scar,
Fair as a dream of delight it seemeth to eyes that behold it,
Roofed by the azure of heaven, with sheen of blue waters afar.

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The Splendour And The Curse Of Song

Methought the unknown God we seek in vain
Grew weary of the evil He had wrought—
The piteous litanies of human pain—
Till here and there some lonely souls He sought
To bear the message of Immortal Thought,
And sent them forth to wander ’midst the throng
Crowned with the splendour and the curse of Song.
But that which still was kindred to the stars
Fought with the flesh and moaned within its cell,
And beat its wings against its prison bars.
Thus, soaring oft to heights sublime, they fell,
Dragged by the flesh into the gulfs of hell;
Till all their days were as a tumult long
Between the splendour and the curse of Song.

Yet often ’mid the fever of distress
Some singer’s lips would chant so sweet a strain
That storm-tossed souls forgot their weariness,
And comfort crept about the bed of pain,
And men took heart and dreamt of heaven again;

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From Loraine

I have seen the plains lying baked and bare,
When drought and famine hold revel there,
And the cattle sink where the rotting shoals
Of the fish float dead in the waterholes.

I have seen the plains when the flood brings down
The leagues of its waters, sullen and brown,
When only the tops of the swaying trees
Mark the creek that wound thro’ the level leas,
And all is a sea to the straining eyes
Save some lonely hut on a distant rise.

I have seen the plains in the mad delight
Of the racing flames in their crimson flight,
When the whip of the wind will not stay or spare,
And woe to the rider who lingers there!

But, O! the plains when their beauty burst
On our wondering eyes as we crossed them first!
When the sun shone bright and a soft wind blew,

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In Collins Street

I stood in the heart of the city street,
I felt the throb of her pulses beat,
The thunder of life on the sunny air,
The waves of the people everywhere,
Like the stirring lilt of a mighty song
Ran the fever of life in the moving throng,
With the hope and joy and the want and woe
Of a million souls in its ebb and flow.
Like a floating straw in an eddy caught
My soul was whirled in the city’s thought—
The purse-born pride and the scheming brain,
The grinding need and the grasping gain;
The silent strength that is born to rule,
And the shallow laugh of the feckless fool,
The fresh young face where no shadow lies,
And the quenchless pain in the harlot’s eyes.

I stood in the heart of the city street,
And I heard not the tread of the passing feet,
For the days were grey and the nights were long,

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At The Base Hospital

The willows sweep the water, and the rushes lean a-down,
And I see the river shining far away,
With a snowy cloud above it, floating softly, like a crown,
And the water-hen and wildfowl at their play.
Are the magpies still at battle in the crooked appletrees?
Is the ripple flow still singing at the bar,
By the long-grassed sandstone pocket where the cattle lie at ease?
And the sun is on the river at Glenbar.
They are bringing in the dying, they are bearing out the dead,
And I watch the nurses moving to and fro,
In the long, low, white-washed wardroom, I lie dreaming on my bed,
And it may be that I, too, shall have to go.
But we faced the Mauser bullets when they whistled down the wind,
And we felt the fight we fought was worth a scar,
For we battled for the Empire and the land we left behind
And I battled for the honour of Glenbar.

Half-dead upon the barren veldt I heard the stockwhips crack
(’Twas the rattle of the Maxim’s deadly rain),
I was riding old Campaspe, as we wheeled the leaders back,

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Women Of The West

They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill,
The houses in the busy streets where life is never still,
The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best:
For love they faced the wilderness -the Women of the West.

The roar, and rush, and fever of the city died away,
And the old-time joys and faces-they were gone for many a day;
In their place the lurching coach-wheel, or the creaking bullock-chains,
O'er the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plains.

In the slab-built, zinc-roofed homestead of some lately taken run,
In the tent beside the bankment of a railway just begun,
In the huts on new selections, in the camps of man's unrest,
On the frontiers of the Nation, live the Women of the West.

The red sun robs their beauty and, in weariness and pain,
The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again;
And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say
The nearest woman's face may be a hundred miles away.

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The Land Of The Dawning

Darkrose her shore in seas of amethyst
By tropic breezes kissed,
A summer land in watery wastes forlorn,
Her ranges floating in the snow-white mist
And gold of early morn.
The tides of Empire ebbed and flowed afar;
The thrones of nations in the dust were hurled,
Silent she slept beneath the morning star,
A virgin world.
Love, Birth, and Death, the stress of Age and Race,
Changed not her maiden face—
Unstocked her pastures and untilled her soil—
She who for labour builds a throne apace
Saw not her people toil;
Down the low valleys, up the stormy steeps,
Careless they roamed at will: the land was free
From desert stark to where the mangrove sleeps
Upon the sea.

There dropped no anchor at her river bars

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The Spirit Of Poetry

All things are Hers. Concealed or manifest,
Found or unfound, Her Spirit lives in each—
Dumb till the Master-Soul its secret guessed
And gave its silence speech.
All things are Hers. She is the Crystal Queen
Of all men’s vision, and the moving breath
Which through the greyness of the sordid scene
Gloweth and quickeneth.

She is the flower-maid of the dreaming noon,
The goddess of the temple of the night;
Where the berg-turrets gleam beneath the moon
She builds Her throne of white.

She knows the Battle-Hymn of mighty wars
When wind and ocean thunder on the strand.
She knows the song the lonely river-bars
Sing to the listening land.

Armoured and helmeted and spurred for fight

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