A cruel wind off the Blue Mountains
cannot move your cheap coal haze
as brackish as the drinking water
as cloying as your twisted ways:
Lawrence your ghosts are just
an earlier world trying to tell us
there must be more to life
than the game-show ute
and the farming wife
more than the dirty blonde rousie
with her fag and her tats
more than the idiot son's holding
across a ditch that once grew totara
more than the sewing circle
or the art club or the business club
where they rubber-stamp the proclamations
from our masters in the North
Across the 'sludgie' there's the gully
Blue Spur's charm's completely gone
an overgrown memorial says it:
this place doesn't like itself
The gold ran out in just a few years
and bully-boys have run the town
since Joss-house went and pub burned down
the cemetery's overgrown now
headstones smashed, the grass is long
the school is still a place of torture
the mayor still poses in his robes
this is the place that time forgot
its railway was its only pride
the trucks will soon find somewhere else
to rumble through into the night:
Lawrence you silly country tart
can you not even attract the shearer's dog?