Eric Bogle - Something of Value lyrics

I can see the Southern Cross tonight While here below, bathed in it's light The Dreamtime land safe, snug and tight is sleeping Wrapped in complacency and contentedness No discordant sounds disturb our rest While the gentle souls we've dispossesed are weeping We took it all by the gun and the sword By the right of our race and in the name of our God Though as outcasts ourselves, transported, condemned None knew better than we the injustice of men We took it all in our hunger and need Enslaved by our past and consumed by our greed And left them to beg for the scraps at our door While we called them drunkards and wasters and who*es They've been drowning, drowning in their tears for the last two hundread years From England's New Jerusalem to the Dreamtime land the tall ships came with human cattle in convict chains to bind them In the grim fight just to stay alive Dreams must struggle to survive Few could see the glitt'ring prize before them We had it all in the palm of our hand A new hope, a new dream, a new life, a new land One last chance to break from the chains of the past To build something of value, build something to last This ancient land was a vast empty page Waiting for the great writers of a brand new age The future was ours to protect or profane A paradise lost, a paradise gained Now tell me, is paradise here, after two hundred years? So now, beneath the Southern Cross it's time to tally up the cost of what we've gained and what we've lost forever Though much has gone we can't replace Those of us who love this place Together now, must turn and face the future So here's to us all, we're frail humankind who wander through life mostly helpless and blind To our courage and cowardice, our humor and pain Our hundred steps forward, ninety-nine back again Yes here's to us all, the wise and the fools The indifferent, the caring, the kind and the cruel As we march to the beat of an uncertain drum Stumbling towards what we may yet become Towards the brave new frontiers, of the next two hundred years