[aus-soaring] I'd Rather Be Soaring

[Christopher McDonnell]

I was sitting in my office today ministering to the Industrial and Workers Compensation needs of South Australia and noticed out the window that it was the first barely decent day of summer we have had. Some stanzas of a poem learnt in my schooldays came to mind:- I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all. And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste. I remembered that the IS 32 was being flown to Waikerie for the State Comps, so I rang the pilot on his mobile thinking to myself:- And I somehow fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal - But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow". He answered his mobile, a communication that did not fit the description:- (And I think the same was written in a thumbnail dipped in tar) and advised that he had landed at Waikerie after a marginal but pleasant flight. I went back to my work thinking:- In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. (apologies to A B "Banjo" Paterson)   Christopher Mc Donnell AHSG