New Zealand Verse/While the Billy Boils
XLII.
While the Billy Boils.
The speargrass crackles under the billy and overhead is the winter sun;There’s snow on the hills, there’s frost in the gully, that minds me of things that I’ve seen and done,Of blokes that I knew, and mates that I’ve worked with, and the sprees we had in the days gone by;And a mist comes up from my heart to my eyelids, I feel fair sick and I wonder why.
There is coves and coves! Some I liked partic’lar, and some I would sooner I never knowed;But a bloke can’t choose the chaps that he’s thrown with in the harvest paddock or here on the road.There was chaps from the other side that I shore with that I’d like to have taken along for mates,But we said, “So long!” and we laughed and parted for good and all at the station gates.
I mind the time when the snow was drifting and Billy and me was out for the night—We lay in the lee of a rock, and waited, hungry and cold, for the morning light.Then he went one way and I the other—we’d been like brothers for half a year;He said: “I’ll see you again in town, mate, and we’ll blow the froth off a pint of beer.”
He went to a job on the plain he knowed of and I went poisoning out at the back,And I missed him somehow—for all my looking I never could knock across his track.The same with Harry, the bloke I worked with the time I was over upon the coast,He went for a fly-round over to Sydney, to stay for a fortnight—a month at most!
He never came back, and he never wrote me—I wonder how blokes like him forget;We had been where no one had been before us, we had starved for days in the cold and wet;We had sunk a hundred holes that was duffers, till at last we came on a fairish patch,And we worked in rags in the dead of winter while the ice bars hung from the frozen thatch.
Yes, them was two, and I can’t help mind them—good mates as ever a joker had;But there’s plenty more as I’d like to be with, for half of the blokes on the road is bad.It sets me a-thinking the world seems wider, for all we fancy it’s middling small,When a chap like me makes friends in plenty and they slip away and he loses them all.
The speargrass crackles under the billy and overhead is the winter sun;There’s snow on the hills, there’s frost in the gully, and, oh, the things that I’ve seen and done,The blokes that I knowed and the mates I’ve worked with, and the sprees we had in the days gone by;But I somehow fancy we’ll all be pen-mates on the day when they call the Roll of the Sky.