The Grey Gypsies

This is becoming ever more topical as more and more

Baby boomers reach retirement, usually with a life of

Full employment and some “super” behind them.

Grey Gypsies

They cut their teeth in leaner days, when hunger stalked the lands

And fathers tramped to look for work in thin disheartened bands.

Black billies carried water over scores of lonely tracks,

While many vied to mend a fence, or swing a splitters’ axe.

They waved at older brothers marching of to meet the Hun

And draw the line in jungle trails to halt the Rising Sun.

Those graduates from acne to the lather-up and shave,

Returned as weary elders, or were left to fill a grave.

They helped rebuild a labour force, depleted by the war,

In offices and factories along our eastern shore;

And grew a grand suburbia, a rich and sprawling seam,

In quarter acre modules of The Great Australian Dream.

And few of them as bushmen ever moved a mob of sheep,

Or watched the stars from campsites while their cattle milled in sleep,

Or sat all day on station hacks or diesel belching steeds,

To check the boundary fences or to trash and bury weeds.

And less have broken brumbies or have roped and branded steers,

Or driven miles on mulga tracks to shout and swallow beers,

Or fought a war with dingoes on the parched Willorcha Plains,

Or spent a month surrounded when the Channel Country rains.

And fewer still trucked road trains South from Katherine and Bourke,

Or buzzed the Gulflands buffalo as part of daily work,

Or gouged at Andamooka chasing fire locked in stone,

Or gained an education in a class that met by phone.

And none were raised on barra in the gorges of the West,

Nor handled pain of cicatrice as manhood’s final test,

Or read the sign of kangaroo in gibber plain and scrub,

Or dug for roots of desert bush to steal its fattened grub.

But traveling the Simpson and neglected Canning Route,

From Geraldton to Gwabegar, those graying gypsies hoot;

In four wheel drives and caravans our old romantics teem;

On modern version walkabouts, they’re living out a dream.

Max Merckenschlager.