Augie March – Mt Wellington Reverie lyrics

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 your 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