Andrew Barton Paterson (Эндрю Бартон Патерсон)
The Lung Fish
The Honorable Ardleigh Wyse Was every fisherman’s despair; He caught his fish on floating flies, In fact he caught them in the air, And wet-fly men -- good sports, perhaps -- He called ”those chuck-and-chance-it chaps”. And then the Fates that sometimes play A joke on such as me and you Deported him up Queensland way To act as a station jackaroo. The boundary rider said, said he, ”You fish dry fly? Well, so do we. ”These barramundi are the blokes To give you all the sport you need: For when the big lagoons and soaks Are dried right down to mud and weed They don’t sit there and raise a roar, They pack their traps and come ashore. ”And all these rods and reels you lump Along the creek from day to day Would only give a man the hump Who does his fishing Queensland way. For when the barramundi’s thick We knock ’em over with a stick. ”The black boys on the Darwin side Will fill a creek with bitter leaves And when the fish are stupefied The gins will gather ’em in sheaves. Now tell me, could a feller wish A finer way of catchin’ fish?” The stokehold of the steamship Foam Contains our hero, very sick, A-working of his passage home And brandishing a blue gum stick. ”Behold,” says he, ”the latest fly; It’s called the Great Australian Dry.”
Andrew Barton Paterson’s other poems:
947
