Ride Ned Ride

Born in the red dust where the fences ran thin, they called him Ned he called for a land that belonged to its sons.

Not distant kings and ledger-books, but the people under the sun.

Ride, Ned, ride australia's first republican cry, iron on your shoulders, defiance in your eye. They branded you an outlaw, they wrote you out of the page, But you stood for a wider freedom on a young and hungry stage.

He saw farms lost to mortgages, saw justice sold in distant lands. So he took a stand for the small and the poor, for the digger and the dray. A claim for a country's voice that had no place to say.

First to speak of a republic, not with paper but with heart, a crude and human manifesto, a people’s act of art.

Not just theft and banked up bullets a dream beneath the steel, to break the chain that reached across, to turn the law to real.

At Jerilderie he wrote a letter, a manifesto on the run, a claim for homes and fairer days beneath the southern sun. They mocked his armour, called him beast, then took him to the gallows.

Ride, Ned, ride not just a thief beneath the sky, iron on your shoulders, a question in your eye. They branded you an outlaw, they bound you to their stage, Yet somewhere in the clatter your words found other wage.

So let them carve the stories as they please upon the stone, not saint, not sinner a human, torn — who dared to speak aloud. A voice among the many, both defiant and unbowed. Ride ned ride.