In the eighteen-nineties the government parcelled
the rough western foothills of the Drummond range -
ten thousand acres each to a family for success.
We now have gathered up six of these to scratch and toil.
Today on the one we call The Old Station
a few lacerations of rusted corrugated iron flapping from a timber frame,
two little railed in plots,
some mauve Bougainvillea not hard season can kill;
and over in the distance the broken stockyards
on the flat that stretches out and then dips away
to the hollow and the treelined hint of a creek
cohere in the ghost-nucleus of old bush life.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem