Grazing Tradition Poem by Patrick Dennis

This country will eat you, give it a chance.
Harsh and brutal it is. It is your enemy, my boy.
Never forget it, especially in the soft colours of sunset
when a young mind might sweeten and think
this land is beautiful. remember then the carcass
and the midday crows; and the mud sludge we call a waterhole.
Yes, and the bare claypans and the hungry stock.

Wage war on this dismal land. It yields its brutish fruit
only to those who strike hard and deep to its roots,