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I am a researcher and catalogue worker at the Bendigo Historical Society in Victoria, Australia. I have had no previous interest in the Anglo-Boer War and it is only the finding of a poem (a parody on Kipling's "The Absent-Minded Beggar") that has brought me to this site and posting my query about the poem in the Ephemera section of the forum. We know that at least 100 men volunteered from this town alone and we imagine that the unusual poem written in 'mock German' would have been brought back to Bendigo by one of these men.