[Editor: This song by Charles Thatcher was published in Thatcher’s Colonial Songster, 1857.]
The Green New Chum.
New Original Song by Thatcher.
Tune — Nice Young Man.
Come all of you assembled here,
Just listen for awhile,
I’ll give you my adventures now,
At which I know you’ll smile.
In the colony I’ve just arrived,
My togs, I know, look rum;
And you can see with half an eye,
That I’m a green new chum.
I came out here, like many more,
To pick up lots of gold;
If I greas’d my boots ’twould stick to them,
At home I had been told;
But deuce a nugget could I find,
When up here I had come;
And now 1 see that I have been,
A deluded, green new chum.
I went and bought a shovel,
And a thundering heavy pick,
The eye of it, I’m confident,
Was full four inches thick.
Two diggers then were passing by,
One pointed with his thumb;
And said, “Lor, Bill, just twig his tools,
There goes a green new chum.”
The first hole that I ever sunk,
Was there on Fiery Creek;
And as it run full ten feet deep,
It took me just a week.
When on the bottom I fell through,
Which made me look quite glum;
I’d sunk on a tremendous drive,
Wasn’t I a green new chum?
Two diggers working close by me,
Said they were going to town,
And asked me if I’d buy their hole,
And begged me to go down.
They scraped up nuggets with a knife,
The sight quite struck me dumb;
I gave an ounce and a half for it,
Like a foolish, green new chum.
Next morning I well fossicked it,
And washed the bottom out;
The tub turned out a pennyweight,
And I began to doubt.
Of course you know they’d peppered it,
The gold was all a hum;
They’d sold it me because they saw
I was a green new chum.
I see you all enjoy the joke,
And at me loudly laugh;
But now you know I’m used to it,
And can stand a deal of chaff.
But there’s a cove that’s grinning there
When he ought to be quite dumb;
I’m sure he needn’t laugh at me,
He’s another green new chum.
Source:
Charles R. Thatcher. Thatcher’s Colonial Songster, Containing All the Choice Local Songs, Parodies, &c., of the Celebrated Chas. R. Thatcher, Charlwood & Son, Melbourne, 1857, pages 18-20
Editor’s notes:
new chum = a recently-arrived immigrant
twig = look at; to consider or perceive; understand or figure out (to be aware of a situation)
[Editor: Corrected need’nt to needn’t.]
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