Yes , you are lauded in song, in legend, picture and story,
Trekkers whose tented wagons trailed through the desert of yore.
Lauded in song are your deeds, but what of the sturdy Settlers,
Souls, forgotten and lonely, toilers who tarried behind?
Resolute pioneers, they strove with the obstinate desert,
Laboured and sorrowed and suffered through weary profitless years:
Oft was their toil frustrated by locusts' aerial legions,
Oft was their labour made void by drought and blight and disease:
Yet, unfailing in spirit, they conquered the wild with their ploughshares,
Making the wilderness fruitful, winning their bread from the waste.
Far from the land of their fathers, they waged their beneficent warfare,
Drinking new courage and strength fresh from the soul of the veld:
Thrilled by the spell of its silence, awed by the might of its vastness,
Cleansed in its dawns and sunsets, calm to the scourge of its sun,
Friendless and lone, they found peace in the southern sky's benediction,
Found, in the sunlit veld, sanctuary and home.