Campin’ round Coonamble.
Keepin’ up the strike,
Through the black soil country
Plugging on the ‘bike’;
Half a thousand shearers,
What had we to gain
Campin’ round Coonamble.
Campin’ in the rain?
Twenty bob a hundred
Shearing with machines!
Good enough in these times
We know what it means –
Sinking tanks and fencing,
Shearing’s better pay
Twenty bob a hundred
Twenty bob a day!
Every little farmer
Up Monaro side
Sends the boys a-shearing
Hoping to provide
Something for the homestead;
All his hopes are vain,
While we’re round Coonamble,
Campin’ in the rain.
Up at old man Tobin’s
First pen on the right
Don’t I know his wethers,
Know ‘em all by sight!
Many a year I shore ‘em
Like to shear again,
Better game than campin’,
Campin’ in the rain.
What’s the use of talking
Five-and-twenty bob,
While there’s hundreds hungry
Looking for a job?
Darling Harbour casuals,
Hollow in the cheek,
Cadging from the Government
Two day’s work a week.
When with peal of trumpets,
And with beat of drums,
Labour’s great millennium
Actually comes;
When each white Australian,
Master of his craft,
Keeps a foreign servant
Just to do the graft;
When the price of shearing
Goes to fifty bob,
And there’s no man hungry
Looking for a job;
Them, if they oppress us,
Then we’ll go again
Campin’ round Coonamble,
Campin’ in the rain.
Notes
Written when reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald on the shearing troubles at Coonamble.
In 1902 the Machine Shearer’s Union organised a strike for better wages and conditions.
Trouble came to a head at Wingadee, the biggest sheds in the Coonamble district, where pickets were arranged by the shearers. The phrase ‘on the bike’ refers to the shearers, who used bicycles to ride to and from Coonamble with news; the shearers’ camp was at Woodlands outside Coonamble. Paterson was sent by the Sydney Morning Heralds to report on the situation.
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