Judith Wright
Country Town
Country Town
This is no longer the landscape that they knew,
the sad green enemy country of their exile,
those branded men whose songs were of rebellion.
The nights were cold, shepherding; and the dingoes
bawling like banshees in the hills, the mist coming over
from eastward chilled them. Beside the fire in the hut
their pannikin of rum filled them with songs
that were their tears for Devonshire and Ireland
and chains and whips and soldiers. Or by day
a slope of grass with small sheep moving on it,
the sound of the creek talking, a glimpse of mountains,
looked like another country and wrenched the heart.
They are dead, the bearded men who sang of women
in another world (sweet Alice) and another world.
This is a landscape that the town creeps over;
a landscape safe with bitumen and banks.
The hostile hills are netted in with fences
and the roads lead to houses and the pictures.
Thuderbolt was killed by Constable Walker
long ago; the bones are buried, the story printed.
And yet in the night of the sleeping town, the voices:
This is not ours, not ours the flowering tree.
What is it we have lost and left behind?
Where do the roads lead? It is not where we expected.
The gold is mined and safe, and where is the profit?
The church is built, the bishop is ordained,
and this is where we live: where do we live?
And how should we rebel? The chains are stronger.
Remember Thunderbolt, buried under the air-raid trenches.
Remember the bearded men singing of exile.
Remember the shepherds under their strange stars.
