Mary From Newmarket

The stream swelled by recent Spring rains by the hedgerow flowed brown When Mary left Duhallow and old Newmarket Town She hugged and kissed her mother and she hugged her dad goodbye And the tears that welled within her heart she stifled with a sigh. Her mum and dad were tearful on their daughter leaving home Their youngest child with wavy brown hair into a young woman had grown Newmarket did not have much to offer to a woman of nineteen And wanderlust was in her heart and the far off hills were green. Song birds in the groves were singing in the early morning rain As the taxi took her to Banteer for to meet the Rosslare train And May was in her early days in the Spring of 89 At the start of her long journey to Australia and sunshine. She has travelled in Australia from Darwin to Hobart Town Across the Nullarbor to Western Australia through a country wide and brown Through the Flinders on to Adelaide and up by the Coorong The lust for wander in the young is always very strong. She has travelled by the western shore from Esperance to Broome And seen the Flinders in the Spring when wild flowers are in bloom And travelled through the Kimberleys across to Uluru Thousands of miles of sunburnt country she has driven through. The Daintree forest and the tropics of northern Queensland From living in the warmer climes she looks relaxed and tanned She well might look a stranger now in old Newmarket Town The fair skinned teenager they knew is looking rather brown. The highways and the byways of Victoria from Warrnambool to Bales And the snowy mountain ranges of southern New South Wales She's lived in Melbourne and Sydney and she's worked her way around And the last that I have heard of her for Brisbane she was bound. The wanderlust was in her heart and the World she wished to see And she left her home in Duhallow long miles beyond the sea And though the old Town of Newmarket she never could forget That she now lives so far from there she doesn't seem to regret. The stream swelled by recent heavy showers by the hedgerows flowed brown As she hugged her mum and dad goodbye and left Newmarket Town And the birds were piping softly in the drizzling morning rain As her driver drove to Banteer for to meet the Rosslare train.