Page 16 - eMuse Vol.9 No.11

May It Rise In

All Our Voices

Could I find my love, Australia, in a very special song,
As I seek a soulful anthem in a simple sing-a-long,
Seems the simpler the better in a language pure and neat,
Intertwined with national spirit and with winged and magic feet.

Did You Ever Think To be sung in stone cathedrals through their stained and mighty glass,

Through the wooden walls of learning of a tiny outback class,
You’d Ever . . . By the billabongs that necklace sandy lanes where rivers run,

As our nation twirls her speckled skirt beneath our blazing sun.

CHORUS
It must hammer in the voices of a people mustered to it,
Did you ever think you’d ever… see the heart of the Never Never, Never quaver in performance as they fake and blunder through it,
Track the swaying caravans of cameleers,
See a mighty master plan, the rusting rails of the Ghan, And its licence must be ‘given’ to the nation free of charge,
See the sunsets that can bring a heart to tears?
Never ‘owned’ by outside forces or materialistic raj.
Sense the raw and primal link in the ancient River Finke,
See a heart of stone they just call Uluru, Carved to flood the throats assembled when its first spurred note
Hum a simple outback tune to a Kakaduan moon, is struck,
Drink a desert sky of Namatjra blue.
Primed in sites ascribed to ‘anthem’ before the maul and ruck,
In this land of winsome wizards where the dreamtime legends lie, Matched to green of jungle canopies and the gold of beaches
Where ochred vaults hold gods of old and wedgetails catch your eye, glistening
And in the clear blue jewel of a canyon pool see the moving majesty,
On timeless rails her great ship sails the Northern Territory. And the ochre of the outback where the red sandhills are listening.

CHORUS
Interlaced with pictures perfect to reflect our place and time,
Come drink the perfect sky… where lizards learned to fly, And the conjured words that tell it, must reverberate and rhyme,
Where music first gushed forward from a stream,
And where the thrones of tribal czars, cartwheel through her stars Then set it free to wander through a world of time and tide,
Across the heartland of the Great Australian Dream.
As we guard it like a treasure and keep it by our side.
CHORUS
May It Rise in All Our Voices as our monstrous choir sings,
Let it soar above Australia on our wedge tailed eagles’ wings,
May its writer earn our anthem and those vibrant skills to build her,
May we learn to love it just as much as we learned to love ‘Matilda’.

Robert Raftery ©
Picture Writer
Brisbane Australia

16 eMuse November 2020