We have sung the song of the droving days,
    Of the March of the traveling sheep;
By silent stages and lonely ways
    Thin, white battalions creep.
But the man who by the land would thrive
    Must his spurs to a ploughshare beat.
Is there ever a man in the world alive
    To sing the song of the wheat!

It’s west by south of the Great Divide
    The grim grey plains run out,
Where the old flock masters lived and died
    In a ceaseless fight with drought.
Weary with waiting with hope deferred
    They were ready to own defeat,
Till at last they heard the master-word
    And the master-word was wheat.

Yarran and Myall and Box and Pine -
    ‘Twas axe and fire for all;
They scarce could tarry to blaze the line
    Or wait for the trees to fall,
Ere the team was yoked and the gates flung wide,
    And the dust of the hoses’ feet
Rose up like a pillar of smoke to guide
    The wonderful march of wheat.

Furrow by furrow, and fold by fold,
    The soil is turned on the plain;
Better than silver and better than gold
    Is the surface-mine of the grain.
Better than cattle and better than sheep
    In the fight with the drought and heat.
For a streak of stubbornness wide and deep
    Lies hid in a grain of wheat.

When the stock is swept by the hand of fate,
    Deep down in his bed of clay
The brave brown Wheat will lie and wait
    For the resurrection day:
Lie hid while the whole world thinks him dead;
    But the spring rain, soft and sweet,
Will over the steaming paddocks spread
    The first green flush of the wheat.

Green and amber and gold it grows
    When the sun sinks late in the west
And the breeze sweeps over the rippling rows
    Where the quail and the skylark nest.
Mountain or river or shining star,
    There’s never a sight can beat -
Away to the skyline stretching far -
    A sea of the ripening wheat.

When the burning harvest sun sinks low,
    And the shadows stretch on the plain,
The roaring strippers come and go
    Like ships on a sea of grain;
Till the lurching, groaning wagons bear
    Their tail of the load complete.
Of the world’s great work he has done his share
    Who has gathered a crop of wheat.

Princes and Potentates and Czars,
    They travel in regal state,
But old King Wheat has a thousand cars
    For his trip to the water-gate;
And his thousand steamships breast the tide
    And plough thro’ the wind and sleet
To the lands where the teeming millions bide
    That say, "Thank God for Wheat!"