Mount Tangletfoot

ON Tanglefoot are found no stones
About the forest’s leafy floor,
Save where a dead man’s bleaching bones
Have lain these forty years, or more;
And there a cairn lifts, ’mid the trees,
Built patiently by grieving mates
To mark throughout the centuries
The sepulchre of old Bill Bates.

WHEN Tanglefoot lay deep in snow
Where paling-splitters had their shacks
The bullock teams were loth to go
Down to the plain o’er treacherous tracks;
But old Bill Bates, ’gainst all appeals,
Set out one morning with his load,
To fall beneath his waggon’s wheels
And die upon the lonely road.

THEY found him when for long he’d lain
Half-hidden in a snowdrift there.
But paths were blocked now to the plain;
So, with a half-remembered prayer,
They laid him in a shallow grave
Beside the track, his sorrowing mates.
“He was a white man,” said Joe Shave —
The funeral rites of old Bill Bates.

THEN Jackson said to Peter Brent,
As the last clods above were prest:
“Ole Bill deserves a monument;
The wild dogs will not let him rest
Like this. I want, from every man —
Because Bill was a dead straight bloke —
A dinkum promise for my plan.”
And solemnly the vow was spoke.

THEN day by day and week by week,
As slow teams sought the higher land,
A great stone from the foothill creek
Each bullocky bore in his hand;
And Peter Brent and Long Joe Shave
And Jackson and a dozen mates
Piled them all reverent on the grave
In memory of old Bill Bates.

ON Tanglefoot were once no stones
Where great trees yearn to rake the skies;
But now, above his bleaching bones,
A great cairn lifts where Bill Bates lies.
And as the teams plod up the hill
Men’s hats are raised unto this day:
For men remember old Bates still,
Tho’ all his mates are worlds away.