The Golden Age

Is it the dawn of a Golden Age
And a swift release from pain?
The politicians fight and rage
Where doubt and chaos reign.
But out on the fields, with one accord,
And small concern for bed or board,
Men follow the lure of the Golden Star
Out where the sand and the mulgas are.

Oh, the old dry blower's out again,
And the windlass, pan and pick:
For hope, high hope, has come to men
Where the miners muster thick.
They have made a strike at the seventy mile,
And the urgent fever grows the while;
And luck may come or fortune frown,
But these are men who are ne'er cast down.

A lucky find by the old creek bed,
A shaft in the blue-bush plain,
And a thousand hungry folk are fed.
A reef with a wide, rich vein,
And a nation knows surcease of gloom,
Depression changes to a boom:
And the fever grows as the news goes forth
From Leeuwin to the farthest north.

Is it the dawn of a Golden Age?
Oh, the ways of man are strange;
For the miner's hectic pilgrimage
By hungry plain or range.
Where never a blade of wheat has grown,
Where never a seed has yet been sown,
Shall feed the land if, 'neath this ground,
Gold, and the hope of men be found.