The Graves Out West

Words:  Will Ogilvie
Tune:  Graham Jenkin












If the lonely graves are scattered in that fenceless vast God's Acre,
If no church bells chime across them, and no mourners tread between —
Yet the souls of those sound sleepers go as swiftly to their Maker,
And the ground is just as sacred, and the graves are just as green.




If we chant no solemn dirges to the virtue of their living.
If we sing no hymn words o'er them in the glory of the stars
They can hear a grander music than was ever ours for giving,
God's choristers invisible - the winds in the belars.




If we set them up no marble, it is none the less we love them:
If we carved a million columns would it bring them better rest
If no gentle hands have fashioned snow-white wreaths to lay above them,
God has laid His own wild flowers on the lonely graves out West.






From the Overlander's 1979 album, Tribute to Western Australia.  Written by Graham Jenkin.


Words from Will H. Ogilvie's Fair Girls and Gray Horses With Other Verses(1907). (Full text linked here).


The illustration to this post is a photograph of miners' graves near Chillagoe.