Explore "Those Names" by Andrew Barton Paterson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The shearers sat in the firelight, hearty and hale and strong, / After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along: / The 'ringer' that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before, / And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score, / The tarboy, the cook, and the slushy, the sweeper that swept the board, / The picker-up, and the penner, with the rest of the shearing horde.
There were men from the inland stations / where the skies like a furnace glow, / And men from the Snowy River, the land of the frozen snow; / There were swarthy Queensland drovers who reckoned all land by miles, / And farmers' sons from the Murray, where many a vineyard smiles. / They started at telling stories when they wearied of cards and games, / And to give these stories a flavour they threw in some local names, / And a man from the bleak Monaro, away on the tableland, / He fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and he started to play his hand.