[Editor: This poem by Louis Esson was published in Bells and Bees: Verses (1910).]
The Shearer’s Wife
Before the glare o’ dawn I rise
To milk the sleepy cows, an’ shake
The droving dust from tired eyes.
I set the rabbit traps, then bake
The children’s bread.
There’s hay to stook, an’ beans to hoe,
Ferns to cut i’ th’ scrub below;
Women must work, when men must go
Shearing from shed to shed.
I patch an’ darn, now evening comes,
An’ tired I am with labour sore,
Tired o’ the bush, the cows, the gums,
Tired, but must dree for long months more
What no tongue tells.
The moon is lonely in the sky,
The bush is lonely, an’ lonely I
Stare down the track no horse draws nigh
An’ start . . . at the cattle bells.
Source:
Louis Esson, Bells and Bees: Verses, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1910, [page 10]
Editor’s notes:
dree = to endure
stook = a group of sheaves of grain which have been placed in a field standing upright so as to enable the heads to dry
Vernacular spelling in the original text:
an’ (and)
i’ (in)
o’ (of)
th’ (the)
Hi.
Why is the poem incomplete?
It does not include the lines,
‘Friday too tired,
Saturday too drunk
Sunday too far away’.
Why is this?
Cheers John
The lines “Friday too tired, Saturday too drunk, Sunday too far away” (sometimes referred to as “The Shearer’s Wife’s Lament”) apparently come from a quotation from an Australian shearer’s wife, and have no known connection to the poem “The Shearer’s Wife” (1910) by Louis Esson.
The “Lament” lines were used in connection with the movie Sunday Too Far Away (1975). A search for the phrase “Sunday Too Far Away” in the Australian historical records reveals that the earliest known usage is 1974, as part of the pre-production work for the 1975 movie.