The Outback

Some 50 kilometres out of the next country town The miles of flat paddocks looking gray to brown The hues of Australia are gray, brown and green This great Land looks different to others you've seen. They call this 'The Outback' the back of beyond To such a place bushrangers used to abscond In the remote places from the law they did hide And they lived as outlaws and as outlaws they died. That was in the eighteen eighties and nineties a turbulent time When poor sons of poor ex convicts for survival turned to crime Their plunder they hid in the Outback and their stolen gold never was found For miles on either side of the Victoria and New South Wales border they ranged the wild bushlands around. Some visitors come to Australia one might say expecting to see Emus and kangaroos in the suburbs along the main streets ranging free And though you see the odd wombat and roo dead by the rural highway live wild life much harder to view And in their wild home in the Outback one doesn't often see emu or roo. The next country town is fifty kilometres away As you drive down the highway in the heat of the day Through Australia's brown Outback a Land old as time A Land that is honoured in story and rhyme.