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The Australian Nation — When? [poem, 13 October 1894]

16 October 2012 · Leave a Comment

[Editor: A poem from the Boomerang, reprinted in The Worker, 1894.]

The Australian Nation — When?

When the Govnah’s hauty aides,
Who go chasing married ladies,
And the Colonel who gives ordahs to fire low upon the crowd
Have surrendered to the sabre
In the horny fists of labour
Or departed to some motherland where pests are still allowed.

For the coming social order
Will expel the rich marauder,
And put the gay Maginnis on their everlasting “Give,”
And that host of loafing bummers,
The Imperialist drummers,
Will discover that they’ve got to graft if they intend to live.

’Tis then the starving workers
Will uprise against the shirkers,
And the crowd that neither toil nor spin will all be swept away ;
While the capitalist stingy
Will be bringing down his bingey,
By pulverising bluestone spalls for eight long hours a day.

Then we’ll lose the swish of blood, too,
And the dear old sickening thud, too,
When Turner is a vanished dream and Patterson forgot.
And the orders and the spangles
And the bracelets and the bangles
Of the last departed lordling go for eighteenpence the lot.

Then we’ll end the imposition
Of the proud Toorak patrician,
And the loud-voiced metallician will for ever hold his jaw ;
While the Tory agitator,
With his “Britain Great and Greater,”
Must earn an honest living or depart for England’s shore.

When united is Australia,
Without fear of split or failure,
When Protection and Freetrade have done their everlasting fight,
When the rabbits are abated
And the Chinese exterminated
It’s then will be the day when a new nation sees the light.

McG.
In the Melbourne Boomerang.



Source:
The Worker (Brisbane, Qld.), Saturday 13 October 1894, page 2

Filed Under: poetry Tagged With: poem, racial poetry, SourceTrove, year1894

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