Something Of Value

I can see the Southern Cross tonight

While here below, bathed in it's light

The Dreamtime land safe, snug and tight is sleeping

Wrapped in complacency and contentedness

No discordant sounds disturb our rest

While the gentle souls we've dispossesed are weeping

We took it all by the gun and the sword

By the right of our race and in the name of our God

Though as outcasts ourselves, transported, condemned

None knew better than we the injustice of men

We took it all in our hunger and need

Enslaved by our past and consumed by our greed

And left them to beg for the scraps at our door

While we called them drunkards and wasters and whores

They've been drowning, drowning in their tears

for the last two hundread years

From England's New Jerusalem

to the Dreamtime land the tall ships came

with human cattle in convict chains to bind them

In the grim fight just to stay alive

Dreams must struggle to survive

Few could see the glitt'ring prize before them

We had it all in the palm of our hand

A new hope, a new dream, a new life, a new land

One last chance to break from the chains of the past

To build something of value, build something to last

This ancient land was a vast empty page

Waiting for the great writers of a brand new age

The future was ours to protect or profane

A paradise lost, a paradise gained

Now tell me, is paradise here,

after two hundred years?

So now, beneath the Southern Cross

it's time to tally up the cost

of what we've gained and what we've lost forever

Though much has gone we can't replace

Those of us who love this place

Together now, must turn and face the future

So here's to us all, we're frail humankind

who wander through life mostly helpless and blind

To our courage and cowardice, our humor and pain

Our hundred steps forward, ninety-nine back again

Yes here's to us all, the wise and the fools

The indifferent, the caring, the kind and the cruel

As we march to the beat of an uncertain drum

Stumbling towards what we may yet become

Towards the brave new frontiers,

of the next two hundred years