School Time In The Ghost Town Of Joadja

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School Time In The Ghost Town Of Joadja  

By Paul McCann

In the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in Australia,

A Ghost town called Joadja has lost its memorabilia .

Dogs don’t bark and bells won’t ring but it wasn’t always like that .

For once it was full of people who had come to hang their hat .

  Summers as hot as hell drove the devil himself to his knees, 

The miners built their cottages in the shade of leafy trees .

The plumbing was not perfected and kitchen sinks had not come ,

Joadja was like a kiln baking out in the summer sun .

    The winters in Joadja were not fit for human life,

As wild dogs roamed from home to home with a travel fork and knife.

The hailstones fell down like bullets and in puddles bare feet fell,

As children ran through the muck and mud to answer the school bell. 

Bells rang as wild dogs howled just like the music from Notre dame,

The children made their way to school with lunch packs minus the ham.

The children at school who were Scottish miners daughters and sons,

From Joadja’s tiny cottages they came to do their sums.

As the teacher stood before them with a mathematics test,

The kids were looking out the window and standing on their desk.     

The blackboard had not arrived yet and so each child had a page,

They sat around like a flock of black sheep locked up in a cage.

The kid’s journey was over before Joadja got a bus

 The sheep had no clean water to wash off the dirt and the dust.

The village was left a ghost town nobody heard the bell ring,

Chimes that once sounded for freedom how times can change everything.

The day was over much too soon and the old school closed its door,

It went quiet in Joadja the school bell is heard no more.

In a little mining village where the shale lay underfoot.

People were as hard as nails in their dirty old miners suit.

The village today has gone but the streets are still there to show,

Once upon a time in Joadja the street lamps used to glow.

Now in the streets of Joadja only memories are left,

The kerosene in the burners have been victims of a theft. 

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