English Poetry. Henry Lawson. How the Land was Won. Генри Лоусон.

Henry Lawson (Генри Лоусон)

How the Land was Won

The future was dark and the past was dead 
As they gazed on the sea once more – 
But a nation was born when the immigrants said 
”Good-bye!” as they stepped ashore! 
In their loneliness they were parted thus 
Because of the work to do, 
A wild wide land to be won for us 
By hearts and hands so few. 

The darkest land ’neath a blue sky’s dome, 
And the widest waste on earth; 
The strangest scenes and the least like home 
In the lands of our fathers’ birth; 
The loneliest land in the wide world then, 
And away on the furthest seas, 
A land most barren of life for men – 
And they won it by twos and threes! 

With God, or a dog, to watch, they slept 
By the camp-fires’ ghastly glow, 
Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept 
With ”nulla” and spear held low; 
Death was hidden amongst the trees, 
And bare on the glaring sand 
They fought and perished by twos and threes – 
And that’s how they won the land! 

It was two that failed by the dry creek bed, 
While one reeled on alone – 
The dust of Australia’s greatest dead 
With the dust of the desert blown! 
Gaunt cheek-bones cracking the parchment skin 
That scorched in the blazing sun, 
Black lips that broke in a ghastly grin – 
And that’s how the land was won! 

Starvation and toil on the tracks they went, 
And death by the lonely way; 
The childbirth under the tilt or tent, 
The childbirth under the dray! 
The childbirth out in the desolate hut 
With a half-wild gin for nurse – 
That’s how the first were born to bear 
The brunt of the first man’s curse! 

They toiled and they fought through the shame of it – 
Through wilderness, flood, and drought; 
They worked, in the struggles of early days, 
Their sons’ salvation out. 
The white girl-wife in the hut alone, 
The men on the boundless run, 
The miseries suffered, unvoiced, unknown – 
And that’s how the land was won. 

No armchair rest for the old folk then – 
But, ruined by blight and drought, 
They blazed the tracks to the camps again 
In the big scrubs further out. 
The worn haft, wet with a father’s sweat, 
Gripped hard by the eldest son, 
The boy’s back formed to the hump of toil – 
And that’s how the land was won! 

And beyond Up Country, beyond Out Back, 
And the rainless belt, they ride, 
The currency lad and the ne’er-do-well 
And the black sheep, side by side; 
In wheeling horizons of endless haze 
That disk through the Great North-west, 
They ride for ever by twos and by threes – 
And that’s how they win the rest.

Henry Lawson’s other poems:

1. The Free-Selector’s Daughter
2. Wide Spaces
3. The City Bushman
4. I’ll Tell You What You Wanderers
5. The Sliprails and the Spur

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