Farewell To The Gold

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One of my favourite songs is 'Farewell to the Gold', written in 1969 by Paul Metsers about New Zealand gold prospectors and their almost inevitable disappointment and their dreaming and their scheming to gain fortunes always just fatefully out of reach. I became aware of the song through the fine cover version by Nic Jones, recorded on his album 'Penguin Eggs' [cover, pictured], released in 1980 on Topic Records. Its chorus goes:

"Farewell to the gold that never I found,
       Goodbye to the nuggets that somewhere abound;
       For it's only when dreaming that I see you gleaming
             Down in the dark deep underground."

These days, I often feel that the gold is that memory of a childhood, with the cocoon of a welfare state that made my generation one of the healthiest and most secure working-class generations in all of recorded history, with the prospect of a fair and equitable society stretching beyond our own lives into a future populated by our equally well-fed and looked-after future generations. A dream that was briefly reality has returned to be just that: a dream. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fight and strive to once again find that gold, however: just don't let the bastards grind you down...

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