By rock and ridge and riverside the western mail has gone, Across the great Blue Mountain Range to take that letter on. A moment on the topmost grade while open fire doors glare, She pauses like a living thing to breathe the mountain air, Then launches down the other side across the plains away To bear that note to 'Conroy's sheep along the Castlereagh'.
And now by coach and mailman's bag it goes from town to town, And Conroy's Gap and Conroy's Creek have marked it 'further down'. Beneath a sky of deepest blue where never cloud abides, A speck upon the waste of plain the lonely mailman rides. Where fierce hot winds have set the pine and myall boughs asweep He hails the shearers passing by for news of Conroy's sheep. By big lagoons where wildfowl play and crested pigeons flock, By camp fires where the drovers ride around their restless stock, And past the teamster toiling down to fetch the wool away My letter chases Conroy's sheep along the Castlereagh.
Now this is the law of the Overland that all in the West obey, A man must cover with travelling sheep a six-mile stage a day; But this is the law which the drovers make, right easily understood, They travel their stage where the grass is bad, but they camp where the grass is good; They camp, and they ravage the squatter's grass till never a blade remains, Then they drift away as the white clouds drift on the edge of the saltbush plains, From camp to camp and from run to run they battle it hand to hand, For a blade of grass and the right to pass on the track of the Overland. For this is the law of the Great Stock Routes, 'tis written in white and black -- The man that goes with a travelling mob must keep to a half-mile track; And the drovers keep to a half-mile track on the runs where the grass is dead, But they spread their sheep on a well-grassed run till they go with a two-mile spread. So the squatters hurry the drovers on from dawn till the fall of night, And the squatters' dogs and the drovers' dogs get mixed in a deadly fight; Yet the squatters' men, though they hunt the mob, are willing the peace to keep, For the drovers learn how to use their hands when they go with the travelling sheep; But this is the tale of a Jackaroo that came from a foreign strand, And the fight that he fought with Saltbush Bill, the King of the Overland.