During 1917 the star of the music hall stage Harry Lauder was touring France with his own style of show for the troops.
In his book “A Minstrel in France.” He describes his first encounters with Australian soldiers.
“But it was not long before the silence of the town was broken by another sound. It was marching men we heard, but they were scuffling with their feet as they came; they had not the rhythmic tread of most of the British troops we had encountered. Nor were these men, when they swung into sight, coming around a pile of ruins, just like any British troops we had seen. I recognized them as once as Australians— Kangaroos, as their mates in other divisions called them—by the way their campaign hats were looped up at one side. These were the first Australian troops I had seen since I had sailed from Sydney, in the early days of the war, nearly three years before. Three years! To think of it—and of what those years had seen!
"Here's a rare chance to give a concert!" I said, and held up my hand to the officer in command.
"Halt!" he cried, and then: "Stand at ease!" I was about to tell him why I had stopped them, and make myself known to them when I saw a grin rippling its way over all those bronzed faces—a grin of recognition. And I saw that the officer knew me, too, even before a loud voice cried out:
"Good old Harry Lauder!"
That was a good Scots voice—even though its owner wore the Australian uniform.
"Would the boys like to hear a concert?" I asked the officer.
"That they would! By all means!" he said. "Glad of the chance! And so'm I! I've heard you just once before—in Sydney, away back in the summer of 1914."
Then the big fellow who had called my name spoke up again.
"Sing us 'Calligan,'" he begged. "Sing us 'Calligan,' Harry! I heard you sing it twenty-three years agone, in Motherwell Toon Hall!"
"Calligan!" The request for that song took me back indeed, through all the years that I have been before the public. It must have been at least twenty-three years since he had heard me sing that song—all of twenty-three years. "Calligan" had been one of the very earliest of my successes on the stage. I had not thought of the song, much less sung it, for years and years. In fact, though I racked my brains, I could not remember the words. And so, much as I should have liked to do so, I could not sing it for him. But if he was disappointed, he took it in good part, and he seemed to like some of the newer songs I had to sing for them as well as he could ever have liked old "Calligan."
I sang for these Kangaroos a song I had not sung before in France, because it seemed to be an especially auspicious time to try it. I wrote it while I was in Australia, with a view, particularly, to pleasing Australian audiences, and so repaying them, in some measure, for the kindly way in which they treated me while I was there. I call it "Australia Is the Land for Me," and this is the way it goes:
There's a land I'd like to tell you all about
It's a land in the far South Sea.
It's a land where the sun shines nearly every day
It's the land for you and me.
It's the land for the man with the big strong arm
It's the land for big hearts, too.
It's a land we'll fight for, everything that's right for
Australia is the real true blue!
Refrain:
It's the land where the sun shines nearly every day
Where the skies are ever blue.
Where the folks are as happy as the day is long
And there's lots of work to do.
Where the soft winds blow and the gum trees grow
As far as the eye can see,
Where the magpie chaffs and the cuckoo-burra laughs
Australia is the land for me!
Those Kangaroos took to that song as a duck takes to water! They raised the chorus with me in a swelling roar as soon as they had heard it once, to learn it, and their voices roared through the ruins like vocal shrapnel. You could hear them whoop "Australia Is the Land for Me!" a mile away. And if anything could have brought down that tottering statue above us it would have been the way they sang. They put body and soul, as well as voice, into that final patriotic declaration of the song.
We had thought—I speak for Hogge and Adam and myself, and not for Godfrey, who did not have to think and guess, but know—we had thought, when we rolled into Albert, that it was a city of the dead, utterly deserted and forlorn. But now, as I went on singing, we found that that idea had been all wrong. For as the Australians whooped up their choruses other soldiers popped into sight. They came pouring from all directions.
I have seen few sights more amazing. They came from cracks and crevices, as it seemed; from under tumbled heaps of ruins, and dropping down from shells of houses where there were certainly no stairs. As I live, before I had finished my audience had been swollen to a great one of two thousand men! When they were all roaring out in a chorus you could scarce hear Johnson's wee piano at all—it sounded only like a feeble tinkle when there was a part for it alone.
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