So you’ve seen at last what we have seen so long through scalding tears: <br />You have found what we—the People—we have known for twenty years: <br />And Australia’s hymn is swelling till the furthest fence-wires hum— <br />Save your country, Legislators—and the bairns will come. <br />You would put the blame upon us—we are women, we are men; <br />And our fathers and our mothers gave the country nine and ten. <br />They had honest work and wages, and the ways to win a home— <br />Give us half the chances they had—and the bairns will come. <br /> <br />Try the ranks of wealth and fashion, ask the rich and well-to-do, <br />With their nurseries and their nurses and their children one and two, <br />Will they help us bear the burden?—but their purse-proud lips are dumb. <br />Let us earn a decent living—and the bairns will come. <br /> <br />Young men, helpless in the city’s wheel of greed that never stops, <br />Tramp the streets for work while sweethearts slave in factories and shops. <br />Shall they marry and bear children to their parents’ martyrdom? <br />Make the city what it should be—and the bairns will come. <br /> <br />Shall we give you sons and daughters to a life of never-rest, <br />Sacrificing all for nothing in the desert of the West, <br />To be driven to the city’s squalid suburb and the slum? <br />Make the city what it should be—and the bairns will come. <br /> <br />Don’t you hear Australia calling for her children unconceived? <br />Don’t you hear them calling to her while her heart is very grieved? <br />Give the best land to the farmers, make the barren West a home, <br />Save the rainfall, lock the rivers—and the bairns will come.<br /><br />Henry Lawson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/and-the-bairns-will-come/
