It Is A Big Country Poem by Francis Duggan

Where sheep and cattle are in plenty and houses and people are rare
It is a big country the country out there
A flat open country-side looking gray to brown
At least fifty kilometres from the nearest Bushtown.

The people who live here are a hardy breed
And though stories of their lives few may wish for to read
But of them it would only be fair to say
That they are heroines and heroes in their own way.

Out there in the bush from the nearest town far
A half an hour drive at the least by car
It is a big country this Land of the south
A Land that has often been ravaged by drought.

Must be a quiet place to live in where silence abound
Miles of open countryside for miles around
Mostly flat and brown paddocks with hardly any green
And few very few houses for to be seen.

It is a big country flat open and dry
And the nearest town far even as the crow fly
To the nearest small Bushtown fifty kilometres or more
And four hundred miles inland from the ocean shore.