> Martyn Wyndham-Read > Songs > The Never-Never Land

The Never-Never Land

[ Roud - ; Mudcat 170924 ; Henry Lawson]

Martyn Wyndham-Read sang Henry Lawson’s The Never-Never Land on his 1995 Fellside album Sunlit Plains. This track was also included in 1996 on his compilation Undiscovered Australia. He noted:

[New Life, New Love and Never-Never Land] are both adapted from Henry Lawson’s poems and I would like to express my thanks to Chris Kempster for bringing them to my attention, along with 105 others in his definitive book The Songs of Henry Lawson. Chris was the first to recognise the potential of Henry Lawson’s poems as songs.

Never-Never Land is another song in praise of the ‘Mystic Realm’ of the outback and its never-ending plains. New Life, New Love is fairly self-explanatory.

This video shows Martyn Wyndham-Read singing The Never-Never Land in May 2020:

Lyrics

Henry Lawson’s poem The Never-Never Land

from Selected Poems of Henry Lawson, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1918.

By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,
By railroad, coach, and track—
By lonely graves where rest our dead,
Up-Country and Out-Back:
To where beneath the clustered stars
The dreamy plains expand—
My home lies wide a thousand miles
In the Never-Never Land.

It lies beyond the farming belt,
Wide wastes of scrub and plain,
A blazing desert in the drought,
A lake-land after rain;
To the skyline sweeps the waving grass.
Or whirls the scorching sand—
A phantom land, a mystic realm!
The Never-Never Land.

Where lone Mount Desolation lies,
Mounts Dreadful and Despair,
’Tis lost beneath the rainless skies
In hopeless deserts there;
It spreads nor’-west by No-Man’s-Land—
Where clouds are seldom seen—
To where the cattle-stations lie
Three hundred miles between.

The drovers of the Great Stock Routes
The strange Gulf Country know,
Where, travelling for the northern grass,
The big lean bullocks go;
And camped by night where plains lie wide,
Like some old ocean’s bed,
The stockmen in the starlight ride
Round fifteen hundred head.

And west of named and numbered days
The shearers walk and ride,
Jack Cornstalk and the Ne’er-do-well
And Greybeard side by side;
They veil their eyes from moon and stars,
And slumber on the sand—
Sad memories sleep as years go round
In Never-Never Land.

O rebels to society!
The Outcasts of the West—
O hopeless eyes that smile for me,
And broken hearts that jest!
The pluck to face a thousand miles,
The grit to see it through!
The Communism perfected
Till man to man is True!

The Arab to the desert sand,
The Finn to fens and snow.
The “Flax-stick” dreams of Maoriland,
While seasons come and go.
Whatever stars may glow or burn
O’er lands of East and West,
The wandering heart of man will turn
To one it loves the best.

Lest in the city I forget
True mateship, after all,
My water-bag and billy yet
Are hanging on the wall.
And I, to save my soul, again
Would tramp to sunsets grand
With sad-eyed mates across the plain
In the Never-Never Land.

Martyn Wyndham-Read sings The Never-Never Land

Where lone Mount Desolation lies,
Mounts Dreadful and Despair,
Are lost beneath the rainless sky
In hopeless deserts there;
It spreads nor’-west by No-Man’s-Land—
Where clouds are seldom seen—
To where the cattle-stations lie
Three hundred miles between.

The drovers of the Great Stock Route
The strange Gulf Country know,
Where, travelling for the southern drought,
The big lean bullocks go;
And camped at night where plains lie wide,
Like some old ocean bed,
The watchers in the starlight ride
Round fifteen hundred head.

The Arab to the desert sand,
The Finn to fen and snow.
The “Flax-stick” dreams of Maoriland,
Where seasons come and go.
Whatever stars may glow or burn
In lands far East or West,
The wandering heart of man will go
To where he loves the best.

Lest in the city I forget
True mateship, after all,
My water-bag and billy yet
Are hanging on the wall.
And I, to save my life, again
Would tramp to sunsets grand
With sad-eyed mates across the plain,
The Never-Never Land.