By hut, homestead and shearing shed, <br />By railroad, coach and track- <br />By lonely graves where rest the dead, <br />Up-Country and Out-Back: <br />To where beneath the clustered stars <br />The dreamy plains expand- <br /> <br />My home lies wide a thousand miles <br />In Never-Never Land. <br />It lies beyond the farming belt, <br />Wide wastes of scrub and plain, <br />A blazing desert in the drought, <br />A lake-land after rain; <br />To the skyline sweeps the waving grass, <br />Or whirls the scorching sand- <br />A phantom land, a mystic realm! <br />The Never-Never Land. <br /> <br />Where lone Mount Desolation lies <br />Mounts Dreadful and Despair- <br />'Tis lost beneath the rainless skies <br />In hopeless deserts there; <br />It spreads nor-west by No-Man's Land <br />Where clouds are seldom seen <br />To where the cattle stations lie <br />Three hundred miles between. <br /> <br />The drovers of the Great Stock Routes <br />The strange Gulf country Know <br />Where, travelling from the southern droughts, <br />The big lean bullocks go; <br />And camped by night where plains lie wide, <br />Like some old ocean's bed, <br />The watchmen in the starlight ride <br />Round fifteen hundred head. <br /> <br />Lest in the city I forget <br />True mateship after all, <br />My water-bag and billy yet <br />Are hanging on the wall; <br />And I, to save my soul again, <br />Would tramp to sunsets grand <br />With sad-eyed mates across the plain <br />In Never-Never Land.<br /><br />Henry Lawson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/never-never-land-2/
