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Our story starts one August day when clouds were black as mud
The weather girl on telly had announced there’d be a flood
We took it with a grain of salt—us locals know the score
We’re larrikins with balls of steel; we’ve seen it all before
Wait. He knew that voice … Kirsty! It had to be her!
Now in our town, there lives a man, the toughest of the tough
His ute’s a wond’rous marvel when he steers it through the rough
A dog atop the trayback, and a bullbar made of steel
There’s nothin’ he can’t do when he gets in behind the wheel
Hogey is his name, this bloke, a legend in these parts
A craggy sun-burnt Aussie, loves his beer, loves his darts
A genius with a spanner, car mechanic is his trade
But Hogey is a hero too; that’s just the way he’s made
Joey ran his hand through his hair. He checked his paisley shirt for fairy floss bits. Holy heck, Kirsty was back in Clarence.
He reached the front of the tent but a volunteer—Angelo’s son, maybe?—tried to bar him entry.
‘Performance in progress,’ whispered the boy. ‘We have to wait until we’re in between poems to move in and out.’
Joey knew that. It was a committee rule that he’d agreed upon, hadn’t he?
But is our hero tactful? Has he kept up with the times?
Alas, our Aussie legend … well, he’s fallen quite behind
He’s never heard of quinoa and he’s never learned to text
He’s never learned the meaning of politically correct
So on this day, down main street, zoomed a moped, aqua green
And Hogey did a double take—what’s this he’d gone and seen?
He scratched his arse, he looked to God, he stroked his grizzled jaw
He said, ‘That’s rich, some city twit, he won’t get bleeding far’
The laughter rolled through the tent. Bugger it, Joey thought. To hell with protocol; he wasn’t missing the rest of a bush poem about his own moped. He held up his lanyard. ‘Emergency committee business,’ he whispered and sidestepped around the boy until he was in the tent.
With at least eighty others. All of whom seemed to be standing in the way of him seeing the stage.
But city twits were soon forgot when Hogey heard the call
From Tim McGee, the farmer, who was known by one and all
His bull, his champion bull, eight-hundred kilos of prime beef
