Well, I've mustered on the open plain,
And thickest mountain scrub,
Slept in a swag through pouring rain,
Moleskins stained with saddle-rub.
Even in far-gone days of youth,
I loved to be a camper.
But let me tell you a tale, uncouth,
Of when I cooked my first bush damper.
Though never a task would make me cower,
Champion cook I may not be,
Yet I chucked a bag of flour,
In the pack with my billy and tea.
That night I belted together the mix -
This ought to be an easy run -
There shouldn't be any special tricks,
To creating this doughy bun.
Kneading it up 'till it wasn't like grease,
I patted it 'round with glee -
This would be a victorious masterpiece,
For a proud male chef, like me.
I dropped it in the cast iron pot,
And hurled it onto the fire.
This damper would really hit the spot,
That taste that fine cooks desire.
But the cooking did not go to plan,
'Twas not what I 'visaged at all.
Instead of that lovely golden tan...
...I had a jet-black cannon ball!
No-one could eat this hellish dish -
It could not be dissected.
If this damn damper was a fish,
It's that one John West rejected !
I tried to split it with the axe.
I dropped it out of a tree.
The rotten coot, before it cracks,
It won't get the better of me !
This miserable, mangy, mongrel thing,
I'd fix it up for good.
I gave a great, almighty swing
With this U-beaut lump of wood.
Yet even deadly impacting pace,
From a venomous, lethal waddy,
Couldn't crack the hardened case
Of damper that's gone a bit shoddy !
Disgusted, I was, I got kind of dirty,
My tempered nerves were frayed.
I shot it with the .30-30...
...But the bullet just ricocheted !
I threw that damper off a cliff,
Not far from my mountain abode.
It fell thirty trees and cracked the diff''
Of a truck, down below on the road !
Some Uni professor made the find -
He thought it a meteorite !
A brand new research grant was signed,
Those scientists worked through the night.
But the X-rays would not penetrate.
The laser could not cut the skin.
Ultrasonics revealed nothing great.
Nitric acid didn't even sink in !
It was sent to a lab in Russia,
Where they tried techniques modern and new,
Like a nuclear-powered crusher...
...But it jammed up the teeth and she blew !
The damper was launched on a mushroom cloud
That billowed so awesomely noble.
The after-effects of this blast, so loud,
Was what eventually triggered Chernobyl.
Meanwhile, that lumpy black warhead,
Assumed orbit over land, sea and coast.
So never, ever let it be said...
...My cooking doesn't rise above most !
It broke Skylab's antennae bolt,
Causing a gyroscopic failure,
And, because of this dampered fault,
It crash-landed in Australia.
A matter of just two days later,
Following Skylab's fiery rain,
The damper created a crater,
When it re-entered our earthly domain.
This is where I found it laying,
In the paddock, again on the farm,
Just after the news had been saying,
U.F.O. sightings cause wide-spread alarm.
There was only one solution,
I would have to act in haste,
I made this strict resolution:
This damper must not go to waste.
So I took it to Thomson's Workshop,
To be engineered in style.
Even with diamond-tipped tungsten top,
To sink a few notes took a while.
But, now, every second Saturday.
My damper and I take a trip,
(You need to have some sport or play,
So into sheer stress you don't slip).
Fair dinkum, my damper truly reigns,
Just as simple as you like -
Clobbering ten-pins down in the lanes...
...Almost every bowl is a strike !!
Mark Feldman