Mt Wellington Reverie

You can't walk through the Isle of the dead

You can't lie still in the guest house bed

There's a pair of black eyes staring down at you

From the mountain top, through y'r window

The bunks are empty, your mates are gone

Breakfast lasts an hour long

O warm bread, drawn tea

The bastards'll never get to me

But somebody knows, somebody knows

Somebody always knows

Where a body goes

I were one of two, we were joined at the shoe

When we thought to make our break

So we shimmied our locks and we knocked up a box

And we rode the thing down the waterway

Now the Derwent twists and the Derwent slides

It's a moving thing with many eyes

O who'd have thought, at all or often

That vehicle would become our coffin?

So many souls, so many souls

So many souls in the water

I left me a little daughter and I left me a girl

And I left them alone in that tired old world

O where are they now?

I am one of a gang set to work on the land

A clearin' and fellin' and killin'

The best of us here has a conscience clear

And he goes about it keen and willin'

We're shooting them from the rocks

And we're shooting them in the water

And when they're runnin' we're shootin' them in the backs

And we do it without a thought or care?

So many lies, so many lies, so many lies been told

We'll none of us here grow old

Not gracefully, not peacefully in this blind old land

In this dreaming land, some demon's land