W & m copyright Graham Seal 1980
This song tells the story of events at Rothbury, NSW, when the police under 'Big Bill' MacKay viciously suppressed the miners' protest. It uses some of the miners' own recollections and the refrain comes from one of the Kelly bushranging ballads, usually called 'The Death of Ned Kelly'.
The year was nineteen twenty-nine,
The place was Rothbury town.
The miners were all locked out
And our wage had been knocked down.
From March unto December
We lived on bread and dole,
Until the Rothbury mine re-opened
With scabs to dig the coal
And the country knows the rest...
So the miner's dole was cut
And our strike-pay couldn't last.
But the men and women of Rothbury
Determined to stand fast.
All across the coalfields
Miners heard the call,
On a warm night in December
They met at Rothbury, one and all.
And the country knows the rest.
It was just before the morning
Of that fateful day.
All the miners gathered there
To send the scabs away.
A piper played before us
In the breaking blood-red dawn,
And when we reached the Rothbury mine-gate
A bloodier day was born.
And the country knows the rest.
The police were in the bushes
With pistols in their hands.
There were more of them on horseback
To break the miners' stand.
Just how it started, I swear I'll never know,
But the guns began firing
And the blood began to flow
And the country knows the rest.
When the firing was all over
And the police had broken through,
Many miners badly beaten,
Bullet-wounded, too.
Beneath the Rothbury mine-gate
Norman Brown was lying dead,
And the life-blood from his veins
Stained the coal-dust red
And the country knows the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment