Page:Songs from the Southern Seas and Other Poems (1873).djvu/70

Find a tiny speck, some ten miles from shore:
If the chart be good, there is something more,—
For a shoal runs in on the landward side,
With five fathoms marked for the highest tide.
You have nought but my word for all the rest.
But that speck is the island of Rottenest.

'Tis a white sand-heap, about two miles long,
And say half as wide; but the deeds of wrong
Between man and his brother that there took place
Are sufficient to sully a continent's face.
Ah, cruel tales! were they told as a whole,
They would scare your polished humanity's soul;
They would blanch the cheeks in your carpeted room.
With a terrible thought of the merited doom
For the crimes committed, still unredrest.
On that white sand-heap called Rottenest.

Of late years the island is not so bare
As it was when I saw it first; for there
On the outer headland some buildings stand.