To Adelaide Through The Coorong Poem by Francis Duggan

From Edenhope to McLaren Vale via many a coastal town
The salt pans of the Coorong and the paddocks flat and brown
The salt lakes and the sand dunes and few houses to be seen
A flat and empty country and hardly any green.

Though nearer to McLaren Vale the roadway gets quite steep
Through brown hills above Adelaide your foot near brake you keep
A dry brown land parched from the drought the Coorong needs some rain
It rained for two days three weeks back 'twould need to rain again.

I met old man at Salt Creek his home since childhood day
And about his beloved Coorong he had so much to say
His memory goes back seventy years to when he was young boy
And this land has not changed since then 'twas always brown and dry.

Gray haired and close to eighty years with tanned and wrinkled face
In this vast dry and unsheltered land he did not seem out of place
He said the black tribes hunted here before the white man came
And in many places down the coast they still live on in name.

The salt pans of the Coorong where only saltbush grow
In a land that hasn't changed for years I'm going by one who know
And all the way from Edenhope through Meningie and further down
Two hundred miles of sunburnt coast of paddocks flat and brown.