The Relief of Mildura
The doctors had run out of whisky,
And our stock of liquor was spent.
Save one pour half dozen of lager,
That belonged to the Rechabite tent.

And the sky was as brass above,
And the land was fevered with drought.
As we wandered with blistered gullets,
And tongues that were hanging out.

And ever the Murray to tempt us,
At the edge of the sun-cracked flat,
But no, we were men of Mildura -
We hadn't come down to that.

But daily the torture lasted,
And daily the horror grew,
Of the drought that we dare not utter -
The thing that all of us knew.

Someone must try the water,
Must yield to the fatal law.
So we shared in that devil's gamble -
And mine was the shortest straw.

One moment of human weakness,
Then I stepped to the rivers brink.
It was flowing before me, water,
And I was condemned to drink.

And then, oh, was it an angel,
Or that daft lass, Jessie Brown,
Cried "Dinna ye sniff the reek
O' the pipes of Echuca town?"

And louder and ever louder,
And near and nearer the while,
We heard the beat of her paddles,
The rescuing steamboat Nile.

With her bar-doors breathing a blessing,
On her mission of mercy she came,
And the sunlight blazed on the bottles,
In a halo of living flame.

And "Courage!" the skipper shouted,
As he moored to the blighted scrub,
"There's forty tons of liquor aboard,
Consigned to the local club."

Then madly rushed through our being,
The warm wee current of life,
We didn't wait for a corkscrew,
We hacked off the heads with a knife.

And the brass band burst into music,
The temperance banners waved,
And we saw three stars in the evening sky,