The Happy Warrior (37 page)

Give us a chance to beat the Huns.

We're on this job, the going's tough,

We're out to call Hitler's bluff.

We don't know the word ‘defeat'

Although we took a knock at Crete.

We had to leave some pals behind

But fate, to them, has been unkind.

We're carrying on, we'll see this through

That's if we get some help from you.

Give us your best, send us the stuff

Till Hitler cries he's had enough,

A sporting chance of one-to-one

To meet this murderous brutal Hun,

Brutal both on land and sea,

Chief oppressor of the free.

You heard of how we fared in Crete

Through lack of arms a forced retreat

Falling back against [the] grain

While paratroops fell down like rain,

Gliders, carriers, dropping tanks,

Smashing our depleted ranks.

Against such odds our chance was small

But we fought on, our backs to the wall;

Stukas made death dealing swoops

Trying to destroy our troops,

But man for man and gun for gun

We'll clean this earth of brutal Hun

And when his lust for power has gone

A peaceful world shall carry on,

A wiser Britain then shall know

And be prepared for any foe.

The lessons that this war has taught

Must not be lost for want of thought.

Let costs of war, with all its strife,

Be measured first in human life,

And when our boys from o'er the foam

With duty done come sailing home

See to it then that they're repaid:

For every sacrifice they made,

They who kept Australia free,

Have risked their all for you and me.

Pte Albert Edward Godwin

(AWM PR 86 160)

On Army Tradesmen

A country pollie had a notion, while scraping cow dung off a boot

To get rid of army tradesmen and save us all some loot,

“We'll replace 'em all wiv civvies, youse know how quick they goes,

Jus' look 'ow fast they scamper when the knock off siren blows.”

“So now when grunts and tankies go slogging through the bush

Why, we'll send along Fred Nerk to help maintain the push —

Except of course on weekends (when 'e 'as a two-day rest)

Or if 'e strikes for 'igher wages, hmm, now won't that be a pest.

Or when 'e claims for dirt and danger and for 'ard layin' too,

Or flexes off on Fridays or takes a sickie, or a few.”

(Then our pollie will relent and say “We'll keep them green instead,”

While clouds of fat pink piglets go flying overhead).

Capt. Don Buckby

On Immigration

We sit in splendid isolation

Indulge in high pontification

On a subject vital to our nation:

The make up of our immigration.

To question earns a racist tag

While xenophobes hold high the flag

Each cause the migrant's hope to sag;

He's on a rock, a lonely shag

One group says, maintain your roots,

The next, be Aussies to your boots,

Either choice not the other suits —

We can at times be callous brutes.

There is no answer short and sweet

No path to guide the new chum's feet;

Do you blame him then if he's discreet

And does not seek to risk defeat?

Capt. Don Buckby

On Progress

Great blocks of glass and concrete rear up to strike your eye

And cast an ugly silhouette against the northern sky;

The Brisbane of my childhood has swiftly changed her face,

Cast off her grace and beauty to become a barren place.

Gone her shady awnings with their canvas gaily hung,

Reduced to rag and matchwood when the wreckers hammer swung;

Gone Cloudland and the Cecil, the Belle Veue and the ‘Cri',

To a generation's mem'rys we bid a sad goodbye.

As a lad of thirteen summers it seemed the grandest treat

As with my mother and a brother I walked a city street

To buy a Loyal from Wallace Bishop and lunch at an hotel:

The former's moved, the latter's gone as this tale to you I tell.

Yes, our city's changed, but for the best, the pollies quickly say,

We have buildings, towers and freeways to match Sydney any day;

But Sydney had to pay the price when her building boom did start —

That vibrant, bustling city, now owns a cold dead heart.

Adelaide and Charters Towers have progressed but kept their looks,

Perhaps we should have taken leaves from those two cities' books;

Progress need not mean destruction and a crane boom swinging high

Bear that in mind when next the glass and concrete strikes your eye.

Capt. Don Buckby

Australia in the 90s

Forlorn our youthful country stands, despair upon her face,

The hopes, the dreams her firstborn held, all dashed without a trace,

Her population ageing, her economy in debt,

By crashing market prices she is cruelly beset.

Cast back her mind, just fifty years, her world was smiling then,

Through expended blood and treasure she'd escaped the tyrants' den

The grind of the depression, was a distant mem'ry now,

While the tensions of the Cold War had yet to crease her brow.

How quickly that scene altered in a short four-decade span,

From the years of dull indolence when Menzies was the man,

To the tumult of the sixties when the Beatles took control

And a war in South East Asia on her young men took a toll.

Then came those seething seventies when Whitlam's men held sway,

And the dull minds of the Liberals were brusquely swept away;

In their haste to push their program they made some awful blues

That perhaps our children's children may yet pay off the dues

Next came the heartbreak eighties, with hard drugs, AIDS and war,

Divisive immigration and stock markets through the floor,

Labour's men again in charge from Fraser's wasted years

Saw street crime and inflation the cause of countless tears.

So what now for the nineties, does yet a light shine through?

The Middle East again in flames God knows what might ensue.

If we, by chance, escape world war, we're still by troubles cursed,

With pensions and pollution right up there with the worst.

'Tis said, the hour brings the man, pray God that hour is near,

This Nation's close to fracture through want and hate and fear;

Our forebears in their ignorance made black men's lives a hell —

I fear we may be doomed to share, that bitter fate as well.

Capt. Don Buckby

Australia

In the not so distant past Australians shunned help like a curse

Now it seems there's plenty willing to live off the public purse.

Perhaps their pride burned stronger in the ‘not-so-easy' days —

Has technology seduced us to seek the softer ways?

Our past abounds with stories of the will to fight and win,

Nowadays, it seems the fashion to try once then give in.

Yes, there are examples of the chanced hands that won

The Hardys and the Hancocks, and look how well they've done.

But for each who shows the spirit to put life to the test,

You'll see a thousand shirkers who accepted second best.

They're the ones who squeal the loudest 'bout the state the country's in,

The first to duck for cover should the call come to ‘put in'.

Our pollies woo their voters and seek to please them all,

They avoid the hard decision lest their cushy job should fall.

They've built an expectation that the world owes us our keep,

In retaining ‘middle ground' they resemble milling sheep.

But the blame's not theirs in total (insipid as they are)

The truth is, You and I have let it go too far.

We've lived beyond our means and capacity to pay

With our lazy working habits and our love of holiday

Poor product, too expensive to compete with foreign trade,

Sets our Lucky Country's future on a course of wane and fade.

The days of wool and coal are drawing to their end,

Other nations sell it cheaper and that's where the buyers spend.

Our foreign debt is mounting on the dollars daily fall,

A crushing welfare burden has our backs against the wall.

'Though it's not the loss of dollars that's the greatest tragedy —

It's the toll on our young people that every day you see.

They haunt employment centres for jobs that are not there

And each day their expectation grows a little more threadbare

It will take a mighty effort to retrieve our children's hope

But without that, with life's trials, they will surely never cope.

We regularly hear some pollie give forth his vapid spiel,

Some wishy-washy twaddle that they hope will make us feel

That they have the plan to ‘make it right' and keep us ‘strong and free'

But it's hard to give much credence when just ‘politics' we see.

Some words that they speak give us some slight cause to hope

But they do not take them far enough to get us up the slope.

Then the Opposition side has their chance to e'en the score

But they promise nothing different that we haven't tried before.

Do they think that cheap point scoring can solve this country's plight?

This is the crucial battle that together they must fight.

One has the ear of business and one the working man

And both will be required in the drafting of the plan.

We must regain the spirit that made our Nation great

And dispel this selfish torpor that keeps us second rate.

For the warning bell has sounded and we'd better heed it's call

There may not be much time left before we lose it — all !

Capt. Don Buckby

If

If these thoughts have never crossed your mind,

then let them do so now,

That this world would be a better place, if only we knew how.

How to look beyond the strictures of self, and self alone,

How to take a stand against a wrong,

not cowardly condone.

How to foster in our children a feeling of their worth,

How to teach them

that there's more to life, than pursuit of wealth and mirth.

How to teach them of the difference

'tween the body and the soul

And that both need to be nurtured to make a person whole.

How to not impose upon their childhood

to make them grow too fast,

But to offer them the wisdom of the errors of your past.

Capt. Don Buckby

On Urban Ponds

The endless, mindless clamour of the teeming, smelly street,

With the grimy, run-down hovels their symbols of defeat,

Those chains of fear and family bind fast the little man:

He stays the hapless pawn of a cruel, uncaring plan.

If he would but lift up his eyes to see the chance beyond

He'd no longer stay a tadpole in this murky urban pond.

Capt. Don Buckby

A Word With Banjo

I heard a song the other day, I knew the jingle well,

They say it's survived a hundred years, but who can really tell.

Your song is but a memory for the republic of my time,

And for all your city living, you wrote a bloody good bush rhyme.

You wrote of a young Australia, that was home to sheep and bloke,

To mounted troops and billabongs and a truth not now bespoke;

You told a rhythmic story of a bloke whose luck was out,

Whose tuckerbag was finally full when three troopers were about.

Now the irony of your sad tale should not be lost, my friend,

For do we not all search and find a billabong in the end?

At least a hundred years ago, your swagman jumped alone,

He begged not for a welfare cheque, nor pension card, nor home.

He faced the consequences of his lonely isolation

Of the choices that he made and the road that he had taken;

He died the way he lived, a rebel in your song —

How many today can claim this, from their murky billabong?

Banjo, don't you see? your rhymes no longer rhyme,

Your iambic pentameter has lost a beat with time,

You spoke of an Australia, young and proud and free,

Where men and women worked by day, and spent nights peacefully,

Where a gun wasn't necessary to see your kids to school,

Where if you stole another man's swag you were a bloody fool;

But these are not the values of the swagman of today —

He has no truth or honour, and knows that someone else will pay.

It gladdens me that you don't know how your land did fare,

And I'm glad to know that your billabong did not your swagman spare,

But most of all I'm glad to know, that one hundred years ago

Our Country wasn't politically correct, and nor were you Banjo.

Tony Anetts

Sacrifice

Why can't the world remember,

The lessons of the years;

The horrors of each conflict

Bringing many bitter tears

To wives and daughters left behind,

Who pray for peace to reign,

So they may see their husbands

And their fathers once again.

A chap I know from Moree,

With a bonny child and wife,

He considered them worth fighting for

And so he risked his life

To resist the German madman,

Who wants to rule the world;

He's the type of Aussie soldier,