There is growing optimism in West Australia concerning a revival of the gold industry. One speaker at a recent civic meeting declared that the present wave of gold fever in the West would lift the State and Australia out of the mire.

Is it the dawn of a Golden Age
   And a swift release from pain?
The politicians fight and rage
   Where doubt and chaos reign.
But out on the fields, with one accord,
And small concern for bed or board,
   Men follow the lure of the Golden Star
   Out where the sand and the mulgas are.


Oh, the old dry blower's out again,
   And the windlass, pan and pick:
For hope, high hope, has come to men
   Where the miners muster thick.
They have made a strike at the seventy mile,
And the urgent fever grows the while;
   And luck may come or fortune frown,
   But these are men who are ne'er cast down.


A lucky find by the old creek bed,
   A shaft in the blue-bush plain,
And a thousand hungry folk are fed.
   A reef with a wide, rich vein,
And a nation knows surcease of gloom,
Depression changes to a boom:
   And the fever grows as the news goes forth
   From Leeuwin to the farthest north.


Is it the dawn of a Golden Age?
   Oh, the ways of man are strange;
For the miner's hectic pilgrimage
   By hungry plain or range.
Where never a blade of wheat has grown,
Where never a seed has yet been sown,
   Shall feed the land if, 'neath this ground,
   Gold, and the hope of men be found.

"Den"
Herald, 28 January 1931, p8