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Title: Ben Duggan
Author: Henry Lawson [
More Titles by Lawson]
Jack Denver died on Talbragar when Christmas Eve began,
And there was sorrow round the place, for Denver was a man;
Jack Denver's wife bowed down her head -- her daughter's grief was wild,
And big Ben Duggan by the bed stood sobbing like a child.
But big Ben Duggan saddled up, and galloped fast and far,
To raise the longest funeral ever seen on Talbragar.
_By station home
And shearing shed
Ben Duggan cried, 'Jack Denver's dead!
Roll up at Talbragar!'_
He borrowed horses here and there, and rode all Christmas Eve,
And scarcely paused a moment's time the mournful news to leave;
He rode by lonely huts and farms, and when the day was done
He turned his panting horse's head and rode to Ross's Run.
No bushman in a single day had ridden half so far
Since Johnson brought the doctor to his wife at Talbragar.
_By diggers' camps
Ben Duggan sped --
At each he cried, 'Jack Denver's dead!
Roll up at Talbragar!'_
That night he passed the humpies of the splitters on the ridge,
And roused the bullock-drivers camped at Belinfante's Bridge;
And as he climbed the ridge again the moon shone on the rise;
The soft white moonbeams glistened in the tears that filled his eyes;
He dashed the rebel drops away -- for blinding things they are --
But 'twas his best and truest friend who died on Talbragar.
_At Blackman's Run
Before the dawn,
Ben Duggan cried, 'Poor Denver's gone!
Roll up at Talbragar!'_
At all the shanties round the place they'd heard his horse's tramp,
He took the track to Wilson's Luck, and told the diggers' camp;
But in the gorge by Deadman's Gap the mountain shades were black,
And there a newly-fallen tree was lying on the track --
He saw too late, and then he heard the swift hoof's sudden jar,
And big Ben Duggan ne'er again rode home to Talbragar.
_'The wretch is drunk,
And Denver's dead --
A burning shame!' the people said
Next day at Talbragar._
For thirty miles round Talbragar the boys rolled up in strength,
And Denver had a funeral a good long mile in length;
Round Denver's grave that Christmas day rough bushmen's eyes were dim --
The western bushmen knew the way to bury dead like him;
But some returning homeward found, by light of moon and star,
Ben Duggan dying in the rocks, five miles from Talbragar.
_They knelt around,
He raised his head
And faintly gasped, 'Jack Denver's dead,
Roll up at Talbragar!'_
But one short hour before he died he woke to understand,
They told him, when he asked them, that the funeral was 'grand';
And then there came into his eyes a strange victorious light,
He smiled on them in triumph, and his great soul took its flight.
And still the careless bushmen tell by tent and shanty bar
How Duggan raised a funeral years back on Talbragar.
_And far and wide
When Duggan died,
The bushmen of the western side
Rode in to Talbragar._
[The end]
Henry Lawson's poem: Ben Duggan
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