Australia’s Funniest Yarns

Usually, humorous anecdotes of bush life and legend are a staple element of Australian folklore. Such pithy anecdotes are also found in other frontier traditions but Australian yarns often have a certain dryness of wit and acerbic tone that connects them to the angularity of much Australian folk culture. Most of this material revolves around white male bush workers and reflects that particular worldview.

The swagman, or itinerant bush worker, features in a great many humorous bush folktales. Most of these depict the ‘swaggie’ as a taciturn, anti-authoritarian loner, as in a brief story sometimes called ‘The Great Australian Yarn’ and often hailed as the quintessential Australian anecdote. This story of the swaggie’s reply to the squatter is known and told around the country. One Western Australian version has the incident occurring somewhere between Derby and Fitzroy Crossing:

A swaggie is battling along the dry and dusty track in blazing heat. A solitary car comes along the track and stops by the swaggie. The driver, usually said to be a farmer, landowner or ‘squatter’, leans out of the car window and asks the swaggie ‘Where ya goin’, mate?’ The swaggie replies, ‘Wyndham,’ and the driver says, ‘Climb in, I’ll give you a lift.’ The swaggie replies: ‘No thanks; you can open and shut your own bloody gates.’

The ‘Bagman’s Gazette’ was a term for the efficient word-of-mouth network on the track. News, rumour and gossip were carried along this unofficial route with amazing speed. Under the title ‘Bagman’s Gazette’, ‘The Organiser’ began his column for the Darwin Northern Standard in the Depression year of 1931 with a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. The article was about wages and politics, suggesting that not much had changed since the strikes of forty years before:

Bagmen discussing politics at a recent session around the Camp fire touched on the so-called necessity for equal sacrifice, taking it for granted that all sections would be required by this to dub up in proportion so as to save the country from financial chaos. After disposing of the theory that lower wages would increase employment and quoting their experiences in search of employment in the pastoral industry in Queensland, where wages are as low as 15/– a week, one bagman quoted the proposed British Budget as a sample of equal sacrifice. It is proposed to save Britain by reducing the unemployment dole by £66,500,000 and education grants, and teachers’ salaries by £13,000,000. This makes a total of £79,500,000 out of £96,500,000 it is proposed to save. The workers even contribute a big part of the remaining £17,000,000.

Now if this equal, sacrifice were a real thing and if those who have no income can contribute £66,500,000 to the national income, how much can those who, do not work, never have worked, never will work, and have huge, incomes, contribute in this ‘equal sacrifice’ humbug? Then again in Australia if a worker on five quid a week can sacrifice 20 per cent of that for the national good, a judge or a politician or a bondholder should be able to sacrifice all the income he or she gets above five quid. They would then still be 20 per cent above the poor plugger that works for his bit and it is more questionable whether they are worth 20 per cent more.

The bagmen were unanimous that the only patriot expected (in war time or peace) to sacrifice everything for his Country is the toiler and they furthermore thought that it is time the Workers of Australia put up a fight against this ‘equal sacrifice’ humbug and wage a reduction campaign of the super patriots, but they are only bagmen.

The ‘stump speech’ is a form of polished gibberish about nothing at all. Stump speeches featured in the United States during nineteenth century political campaigns and were also used as entertainment and as forms of ‘spruiking’ a product, often of the snake-oil variety. Australia has a similar tradition of these absurd but entertaining rants. This one is thought to date from the early Federation period with its reference to George Reid, leader of the first federal opposition, free trade advocate and eventually prime minister from 1904–5.

Ladies and gentlemen—kindly turn your optics towards me for a few weeks and I will endeavour to enlighten you on the subject of duxology, theology, botanology, zoology or any other ology you like. I wish to make an apology, yes my sorefooted, black-eyed rascals, look here and answer me a question I am about to put to your notice. I want to be very lenient with you, but what shall it be, mark you, what shall the subject of my divorce (excuse me), discourse, this evening be? What shall I talk about? Shall it be about the earth, sun, sea, stars, moon, Camp Grove or jail? Now I wish to put before your notice the labour question. It is simply deloructious—isn’t that alright? Yes, allow me to state the labour question is not what it should be.

Now look here, when I was quite a young man I worked very hard indeed, so hard, in fact, that I have seen the drops of perspiration dropping from my manly brow onto the pavement with a thud. Excuse me—yes, I say we shall not work at all! Then again, my wooden, brainless youths, answer me this: should men work between meals? No, no certainly not; it is boisterous!

Other questions I would put before your notice tonight are—why does Georgie Reid wear an eyeglass? Ha, ha my friends we don’t know where we are; therefore where we are we do not know. Yes my noble-faced, flat-feeted, cockeyed, rank-headed asses, I will put before your notice other questions but no longer will I linger on these tantalising subjects. As time wags on and as I have to leave you; certainly I will not take you with me, therefore I leave you. Now the best of fools must part and as I see a policeman coming along I will go. Goodnight!

The bullock driver, or ‘bullocky’, was an important member of the rural labour force in the era before the automobile and, in some places, for long after. The ability to control and work a team of sweating, bad tempered and reluctant beasts was highly prized and often handed down from father to son. A good bullocky could get work just about anywhere. It was a hard job, though, and the challenge of working bullock teams was a considerable one usually accomplished with a loud voice, special calls and extremely colourful language. The ability of a bullocky to swear—creatively and to good occupational purpose—was a measure of his status. Bush lore is full of songs, poems and stories about bullock drivers.

One particular tale, and its variants, has been well polished over the decades and, like quite a few other bush yarns, has also made it into literary form in Lance Skuthorpe’s (1870–1958) ‘The Champion Bullock Driver’. Bill Wannan included a version of the story—already of considerable age—in his The Australian (1954) and it has continued to be told and printed since then. Wannan’s version includes a supernatural element that led him to call it ‘The Phantom Bullocky’:

The boss is in need of a bullocky after his eight-yoke team of especially wild beasts had already sent fourteen bullockies to their graves. A bushman appears looking for a job, the boss asks him if he can swear well enough to handle a team and he replies that ‘his conversation had set the stringybark trees on fire’ in especially trying circumstances. The boss decides to give the bloke a trial and asks him to demonstrate his skills by imagining that eight panels of the wood and wire fence are a team of eight bullocks. The boss then gives the bloke the whip used by the fourteen deceased teamsters ‘the handle was six feet, the lash eighteen feet of plaited greenhide, and there was two foot of silk cracker’.

The bloke runs the whip through his fingers then begins to work the fence, swearing, cheering and cracking the whip. Before long there is a blue flame running across the top fence wire. Suddenly the graves of the fourteen dead bullockies open and they jump out, each with a whip, and hail the bloke as King of the Bullockies, cheering and swearing and cracking their whips along the now fiery fence wire. Suddenly the fence posts began to move forward, just like a team of reluctant bullocks. The phantom bullockies and the bloke continued exhorting the fence onward in the traditional manner, plying their whips all the while until the fence strained so hard it ripped out the stringybark tree against which it had been strained and moved off at a flying pace over the hill with the bloke behind. The fourteen phantom bullockies gave another rousing cheer and disappeared back into their graves. The bloke returned with the fence and the amazed boss says he is the best bullocky he has ever seen and he can have the job. The bloke then laughs, gives another cheer and jumps into the air. ‘He never came down again.’

Later versions of the tale are essentially the same, though drop the phantom bullockies and the bloke’s disappearance into thin air, simply ending with him taking the job. Another variation has the outstanding bullocky doing much the same but letting the fence disappear into the backblocks. When he asks the boss if he can have the job, the boss replies, ‘Any man who starts up a team an’ fergits to stop ’em is no bloody good to me!’

They’ve been telling this yarn since Cooper’s (or Cooper) Creek was first named, and probably long before:

A bullock driver had a crack team of beasts and on one particular trip was forced to get across a heavily flooded Cooper’s Creek. Usually this is an impossible task, but on this occasion the floodwaters didn’t look too deep, so the bullocky decided to give it a try.

He drew his team and wagon of wool up on the northern bank and spoke lovingly to them in the tender way that bullockies have, telling them that they now had a big challenge to get across the torrent. The bullocky then walked into the water and found that it was just up around his knees, showing his animals that it was not too dangerous.

He then went back and spoke lovingly to each and every one of the twenty-two beasts in the team. He told them what fine beasts they were and how he wanted them to pull together across the stream. Off they went, the lead bullock bravely forging ahead and the bullocky shouting encouragement to the team.

After a titanic effort, the bullocks, the wool wagon and the bullocky made it onto dry land at the other side. ‘Whoa,’ cried the bullocky, ‘time for a rest.’ As they settled down the bullocky looks back and sees with amazement that his champion team of bullocks have pulled the river 200 metres out of its course.

Another bullock driver tale highlights the anti-authoritarianism and irreverence heard in much Australian folk humour. This one involves a bullocky in very trying circumstances, berating his beasts in the traditional colourful manner. The local parson happens by and sanctimoniously asks the bullocky if he knows where such language will take him. ‘Yair,’ the irate driver replies, ‘to the bloody sawmill—or I’ll cut every bastard bullock’s bloody throat.’

The propensity of bullockies, or teamsters, to bad language was prodigious and legendary. It is the basis of a recitation known as Holy Dan in which an unusually righteous bullocky does not swear like the other bullockies when their beasts die of thirst in the Queensland drought. Instead, he counsels the other drivers and said it was:

The Lord’s all-wise decree,

And if they’d only watch and wait,

A change they’d quickly see.

But eventually even Holy Dan’s twenty bullocks begin to die of thirst, and he entreats the Lord to send rain. No matter how hard he prays, the rain fails to fall and finally there is only one bullock left:

Then Dan broke down—good Holy Dan—

The man who never swore.

He knelt beside the latest corpse,

And here’s the prayer he prore:

‘That’s nineteen Thou hast taken, Lord,

And now you’ll plainly see

You’d better take the bloody lot,

One’s no damn good to me’.

The other riders laughed so much,

They shook the sky around,

The lightning flashed, the thunder roared,

And Holy Dan was drowned.

The drover is a classic figure of bush lore and legend. Herding animals through heat, dust, mud and flies was tough and unpleasant work, but it seems to have inspired a great deal of humour, often based on enormous lies, like this one:

They were boasting in the bar about the biggest mob of cattle they’d ever driven here, there and every bloody where. One had drove a mob of 6000 from Perth to Wave Hill. At least, he had six thousand when he started but when he finished over two years later, he had 10 000. And so it went on.

An old bloke sat quietly in the corner, taking it all in. When there was a cool moment in the hot air, he piped up. ‘You blokes talk about droving! Let me tell you about a real drive with a really BIG mob. Me and a mate broke the Australian droving record. We picked up a big mob at Barkly. Took us two days to ride right round ’em, it was that big. Anyway, we started with this mob and drove them clear down to Hobart.’

The bar fell into a stunned silence before one of the young blokes piped up. ‘Ow’d ya get ’em across the Bass Strait?’ he asked sarcastically.

The old drover looked closely at him and said, ‘Don’t be stupid, son, we went the other way.’

Modern Australia’s founding and development coincided with the railway boom. The various colonial railways were eventually linked together by the Trans-Australian Railway, or ‘the Trans’, from 1917. Vital though the railways have been for the national economy, they do not necessarily run on time. Slow trains feature in railway yarns told throughout Australia. Versions of the following story have been collected in Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The story often begins when a male passenger jumps off a train as it approaches the platform and rushes up to the stationmaster. The man asks for an ambulance to take his wife to hospital, as she is about to have a baby. The stationmaster rings the ambulance then turns to the man and says, ‘She shouldn’t have been travelling in that condition.’ The man replies, ‘She wasn’t in that condition when she got on the train.’

Another slow train tale features the ‘Spinifex Express’ which used to run from Port Hedland to Marble Bar. It was always a pretty slow old trip and on one of these a passenger looked out the windows and saw the engine driver throwing seeds out on to the side of the track. All day the passenger watched as they crawled along. All the time the engine driver kept spreading what looked to the passenger to be tomato seeds. Eventually the passenger’s curiosity got the better of him and he walked up to the engine and asked the driver, ‘Why are you throwing tomato seeds onto the side of the line?’

The driver turned slowly round, fixed the passenger with a doleful eye and drawled: ‘The guard’s picking tomatoes.’

Some railway yarns revolve around the always-tense relationship between head office and the men working on the rail system itself. This story is told of named individuals, usually stationmasters, whose reports to head office were notoriously long and convoluted. Eventually head office formally instructed the stationmaster (in this Victorian version named Flanagan) to drastically shorten his reports in the future. The next time he had to report a derailment he wrote: ‘off again, on again, gone again. Flanagan’.

A passenger boarded the train in Melbourne intending to get off at Albury. But when the conductor checked his ticket he had to tell him that the train didn’t stop at Albury. The passenger went into a panic. ‘I have to get off at Albury, it’s a matter of life and death.’ And pleaded with the conductor to stop the train for him.

The conductor said, ‘Sorry, Sir, we can’t stop the train at an unscheduled station but I do have a suggestion. I will ask the driver to slow down at Albury and I’ll help you to alight from the train. It will be tricky and dangerous, but if I hold you outside the door by the collar and you start running we should be able to get you down without injury when your legs reach the right speed.’

The passenger was so desperate to get to Albury that he immediately agreed to this hazardous suggestion. ‘Just one thing though,’ said the conductor, ‘after you’re down be sure to stop running before you reach the end of the platform.’ The plucky passenger nodded his agreement.

As the train approached Albury, the engine driver duly slowed down as much as he could. As soon as the platform came in sight, the conductor opened the door and held the passenger out over the platform. He began running in the air as he had been instructed and the train was about halfway along the station before the conductor gently lowered him down. He hit the platform and staggered but managed to stay upright, losing momentum gradually as he slowed his running legs. He managed to come to a teetering stop just before the end of the platform. Just then the last car rolled past and he was suddenly grabbed again by the collar and hauled back onto the train. Shocked, he twisted around to see the guard smiling happily at him—‘Expect you thought you’d missed your train, Sir!’

Another favourite Western Australian railway story involves the Meekatharra gold escort:

On the old gold train, two security men were always locked into the van with the valuable cargo and it was always very hot. One day they had a bottle of whisky with them and asked the guard for some ice to cool down the drink.

The guard was friendly and soon produced a lump of ice. Of course, it melted away pretty quickly, so they asked for more ice. He brought it to them again. After a while their ice melted and they asked the guard for more. Once more he obligingly produced a nice fresh lump of ice from somewhere or other. This went on until the bottle was almost empty and they needed ice for one last drink each. Again they asked the guard for ice. But this time he said, ‘Sorry boys, I don’t think I’d better get you any more. The body’s beginning to show.’

A popular bush recitation tells the tale of a drunken shearer’s undeserved good fortune with the help of a redback spider:

By the sluggish River Gwydir

Lived a wicked red-backed spider,

Who was just about as vicious as could be:

And the place that he was camped in

Was a rusty Jones’s jam-tin

In a paddock by the show-grounds at Moree.

Near him lay a shearer snoozin’:

He had been on beer and boozin’

All through the night and all the previous day;

And the rookin’ of the rookers,

And the noise of showground spruikers,

Failed to wake him from the trance in which he lay.

Then a crafty-lookin’ spieler

With a dainty little sheila

Came along collecting wood to make a fire.

Said the spieler, ‘He’s a boozer

And he’s goin’ to be a loser:

If he isn’t, you can christen me a liar.’

‘Hustle round and keep nit honey,

While I fan the mug for money,

And we’ll have some little luxuries for tea.’

She answered, ‘Don’t be silly:

You go back and boil the billy.

You can safely leave the mug to little me!’

As she circled ever nearer,

’Till she reached the dopey shearer

With his pockets bulgin’, fast asleep and snug:

But she did not see the spider

That was ringin’ close beside her,

For her mind was on the money and the mug.

The spider sighted dinner,

He’d been daily growing thinner;

He’d been fasting and was hollow as an urn.

As she eyed the bulging pocket,

He just darted like a rocket

And he bit that rookin’ sheila on the stern.

Then the sheila raced off squealin’,

And her clothes she was un-peelin’:

To hear her yells would make you feel forlorn.

One hand the bite was pressin’,

While the other was undressin’,

And she reached the camp the same as she was born!

Then the shearer, pale and haggard,

Woke up and back to town he staggered,

Where he caught the train and gave the grog a rest:

And he’ll never know the spider,

That was camped beside the Gwydir,

Had saved him sixty smackers of the best!

First published in 1897, W.T. Goodge’s brief poetic take on swearing manages to summarise the entire colourful field of Australian bad language:

The sunburnt —— stockman stood

And, in a dismal —— mood,

Apostrophized his —— cuddy;

‘The —— nag’s no —— good,

He couldn’t earn his —— food —

A regular —— brumby,

——!’

He jumped across the —— horse

And cantered off, of —— course!

The roads were bad and —— muddy;

Said he, ‘Well, spare me —— days

The —— Government’s —— ways

Are screamin’ —— funny,

——!’

He rode up hill, down —— dale,

The wind it blew a —— gale,

The crank was high and —— floody.

Said he: ‘The —— horse must swim,

The same for —— me and him,

It’s something —— sickenin’,

——!’

He plunged me into the —— creek,

The —— horse was —— weak,

The stockman’s face a —— study!

And though the —— horse was drowned

The —— rider reached the ground

Ejaculating : ‘——?

——!’

(*A ‘cuddy’ is a small horse.)

The great Australian adjective was also useful to describe conditions in Darwin during World War II:

This bloody town’s a bloody cuss,

No bloody trams, no bloody bus,

And no one cares for bloody us,

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

The bloody roads are bloody bad,

The bloody folks are bloody mad,

They even say ‘you bloody cad’

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

All bloody clouds and bloody rain,

All bloody stones, no bloody drains,

The council’s got no bloody brains,

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

Everything’s so bloody dear,

A bloody bob for bloody beer,

And is it good? no bloody fear,

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

The bloody ‘flicks’ are bloody old,

The bloody seats are bloody cold,

And can’t get in for bloody gold,

Oh bloody, bloody Darwin.

The bloody dances make me smile,

The bloody band is bloody vile,

They only cramp your bloody style,

Oh bloody, bloody Darwin.

No bloody sports, no bloody games,

No bloody fun with bloody dames,

Won’t even give their bloody names,

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

Best bloody place is bloody bed,

With bloody ice on bloody head,

And then they think you’re bloody dead,

In bloody, bloody Darwin.

The bush has not only been implicated in the art of swearing. Many of the colourful expressions and idioms of Australian speech depend on a knowledge of the bush or at least some familiarity with its characteristics. If you are ‘flat to the boards like a lizard drinking’, you are far too busy to be bothered by anything else. ‘Stone the crows’, ‘Fair crack of the whip’ and ‘In a pig’s arse’, or simply ‘pigs’, are venerable and well-known expressions.

The large stock of vernacular insults in Australian speech include many with a bush connection:

Mad as a cut snake

Kangaroos in the top paddock

White ants in the billy (crazy)

Useless as piles to a boundary rider

Ugly as a box of blowflies

More arse than a paddock-full of cows (cheeky; forward; overconfident)

Lower than a snake’s belly

Fit as a mallee bull

Pissed as a parrot

Stir the possum

It’s Sydney or the bush

Bald as a bandicoot

As lean as a whip

As dry as a sunstruck bone

’Tis the everyday Australian

Has a language of his own,

Has a language, or a slanguage,

Which can simply stand alone.

And a ‘dickon pitch to kid us’

Is a synonym for ‘lie’,

And to ‘nark it’ means to stop it,

And to ‘nit it’ means to fly.

And a bosom friend’s a ‘cobber’,

And a horse a ‘prad’ or ‘moke’,

While a casual acquaintance

Is a ‘joker’ or a ‘bloke’.

And his lady-love’s his ‘donah’

or his ‘clinah’ or his ‘tart’

Or his ‘little bit o’ muslin’,

As it used to be his ‘bart’.

And his naming of the coinage

Is a mystery to some,

With his ‘quid’ and ‘half-a-caser’

And his ‘deener’ and his ‘scrum’.

And a ‘tin-back’ is a party

Who’s remarkable for luck,

And his food is called his ‘tucker’

Or his ‘panem’ or his ‘chuck’.

A policeman is a ‘johnny’

Or a ‘copman’ or a ‘trap’,

And a thing obtained on credit

Is invariably ‘strap’.

A conviction’s known as ‘trouble’,

And a gaol is called a ‘jug’,

And a sharper is a ‘spieler’

And a simpleton’s a ‘tug’.

If he hits a man in fighting

That is what he calls a ‘plug’,

If he borrows money from you

He will say he ‘bit your lug’.

And to ‘shake it’ is to steal it,

And to ‘strike it’ is to beg;

And a jest is ‘poking borac’,

And a jester ‘pulls your leg’.

Things are ‘cronk’ when they go wrongly

In the language of the ‘push’,

But when things go as he wants ’em

He declares it is ‘all cush’.

When he’s bright he’s got a ‘napper’,

And he’s ‘ratty’ when he’s daft,

And when looking for employment

He is ‘out o’ blooming graft’.

And his clothes he calls his ‘clobber’

Or his ‘togs’, but what of that

When a ‘castor’ or a ‘kady’

Is the name he gives his hat!

And our undiluted English

Is a fad to which we cling,

But the great Australian slanguage

Is a truly awful thing!

An extensive body of folklore grew up around the swagman who ‘humped his drum’ along the ‘tucker track’. One of the many classic yarns highlights the legendary reluctance of swagmen to indulge in more conversation than was necessary:

A couple of swaggies are tramping along together in the usual silence. Around mid-afternoon they come across the bloated carcass of a large animal on the side of the road. That night as they settle down in their camp, one says to the other, ‘Did you notice that dead horse we saw this afternoon?’

It wasn’t until lunchtime the following day that the other swaggie answered: ‘It wasn’t a horse, it was a bullock.’

The next morning he woke up but his mate was nowhere to be seen. But he’d left a note. It read: ‘I’m off, there’s too much bloody argument for me.’

One day out on the track out the back of Bourke, a swaggie runs out of food. Somewhere along the Darling River he comes across a ramshackle selection. He knocks on the door of the tumbledown shack and asks the farmer’s wife for some food for his dog, thinking perhaps that this would encourage her sympathy. But the wife refuses, saying she can’t be handing out food to lazy tramps and flea-bitten mongrels.

‘Alright then missus,’ says the swaggie, ‘but can yer lend me a bucket?’

‘What do you want that for?’ she asks suspiciously.

‘To cook me dog in.’

In this nugget from the 1930s the swaggie is called a ‘tramp’, but his sense of humour and irreverence towards the Arch–deacon and his four white ponies is pure bush:

Archdeacon Stretch, of Victoria, had been transferred to a big parish in New South Wales, where a kindly-disposed squatter, evidently somewhat partial to archdeacons, presented him with four handsome creamy ponies and a fine Abbott buggy. One day this Archdeacon was spinning along behind his creamies at a merry pace when he espied a tramp at the roadside whom he at once took aboard. Whether actuated by a purely generous impulse, or a wish to obtain the services of a gate-opener along the pastoral route, this article is little concerned. After a while, the tramp said: ‘My word, that is a fine team of creamies, sir; when’s the rest of the circus coming along?’

As well as having a sense of humour, the swaggie could, however, also display compassion to those less fortunate than himself:

Billy Seymour was another well-known swagman of the ‘Outback’ tracks, but he has since turned cane-farmer, and the bush roads know him no more. Travelling somewhere over Muttaburra way one time Billy called at a roadside humpy, and appealed to the woman who presented herself at the door, to fill his ration bags. The woman was sympathetic but said that she had very little food in the house. Her husband had been away droving for three months, and she had received no money from him during his absence. If he didn’t write soon she couldn’t imagine what she was going to do.

Billy pulled his old battered tobacco-box from his pocket and opening it, drew from its interior a crinkled and worn one-pound note. ‘Here Missus,’ he said, ‘take this; I was saving it until I got to town, but spare me days I reckon you need it more than I do.’

Another colourful swagman ended up in the first AIF, where the skills of living off the land and on one’s wits stood him in good stead:

Nomads of the long and dusty track!! Yes, I’ve met them and studied their habits and characteristics, and many of them have been strange folk indeed. Most of them belonged to the past generation of ‘matilda-waltzers’ who have since disappeared from the roads, and their place has been taken by others who will never possess the rare humor or suffer the hardships of the men I am now going to tell about. Throw a log on the fire, draw closer to the cheering blaze and listen:

Just before I left North Queensland in 1914 to enlist in the A.I.F. I met a well-known track character who was better known as ‘Sniffling Jimmy.’ He was a short nuggetybuilt fellow with a freckled face and a mop of fiery red hair that would have turned a Papuan green with envy. I.e., if the natives of our vast Northern island have a liking for red hair. He was about 35 years of age and said that in his time he had walked through nearly every city and township between Melbourne and Townsville. He rarely did any work, and with a merry twinkle in his eye he said that when a boy his mother was much concerned about his constitution, so he promised her that he would never do a day’s work if he could help it.

Jimmy was one of the very few teetotal swagmen I have met, and when he refused my offer to come in and have ‘one’ he said that he never touched anything stronger than water in his life. However, his specialty was soliciting free rations at some wayside squatter’s homestead or farmer’s home. Rarely has a swagman ever uttered such a pathetic oration. If his appeal to have his bag filled met with an abrupt refusal he would rattle off something like the following: ‘Oh, have a heart lady; If it wasn’t for me weak constitution I wouldn’t be compelled to beg for food. You see. I was reared in poverty and besides me mother and an invalid father, there were 13 other children in our family. There wasn’t enough money coming into the house to provide sufficient nourishment for all of us and as a result I did not get much to eat.’

‘But you appear healthy enough,’ said a Proserpine woman one day.

‘Ah yes lady,’ replied Jimmy, ‘but you know that outside appearances are often deceptive; me constitution is injured in me interior.’

One day in 1915 I was carrying a bag of bombs from Monash Gully to Courtney’s Post at Anzac, and about half way I came upon four men digging an eight-foot trench, through shaly ground, under snipers’ fire. I instantly recognised one of the men as ‘Sniffling Jimmy.’

‘Hullo! You are working at last,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘army rations agree with me constitution.’

Just then a sniper’s bullet lifted the dirt a few inches away from where he was working and he began to dig the pick frantically into the ground. I passed on and did not meet him again, but I hope he returned to Australia without loss of health or limb.

Others less literary and unknown also caught the swaggie’s lifestyle and ethos from another angle:

Kind friends, pray give attention

To this, my little song.

Some rum things I will mention,

And I’ll not detain you long.

I’m a swagman on the wallaby,

Oh! don’t you pity me.

At first I started shearing,

And I bought a pair of shears.

On my first sheep appearing,

Why, I cut off both its ears.

Then I nearly skinned the brute,

As clean as clean could he.

So I was kicked out of the shed,

Oh! don’t you pity me, &c.

I started station loafing,

Short stages and took my ease;

So all day long till sundown

I’d camp beneath the trees.

Then I’d walk up to the station,

The manager to see.

‘Boss, I’m hard up and I want a job,

Oh! don’t you pity me,’ &c.

Says the overseer: ‘Go to the hut.

In the morning I’ll tell you

If I’ve any work about

I can find for you to do.’

But at breakfast I cuts off enough

For dinner, don’t you see.

And then my name is Walker.

Oh! don’t you pity me.

And now, my friends, I’ll say good-bye,

For I must go and camp.

For if the Sergeant sees me

He may take me for a tramp;

But if there’s any covey here

What’s got a cheque, d’ye see,

I’ll stop and help him smash it.

Oh! don’t you pity me.

I’m a swagman on the wallaby,

Oh! don’t you pity me.

Shopkeepers would often provide passing swaggies with the means to take them through to the next stage of their journey. Henry Lawson noted this during his trek to Hungerford in 1892:

We saw one of the storekeepers give a dead-beat swagman five shillings worth of rations to take him on into Queensland. The storekeepers often do this, and put it down on the loss side of their books. I hope the recording angel listens, and puts it down on the right side of his book.

This was not because Hungerford was a prosperous place, only consisting of ‘two houses and a humpy in New South Wales, and five houses in Queensland. Characteristically enough, both the pubs are in Queensland.’ It was one of the unspoken obligations of bush life in which it was customary to provide assistance to travelers down on their luck.

Swagmen were not necessarily poorly educated, and in some cases were not even poor. There are many examples of swagmen who knew the classics, literature, art and philosophy as well as some professors. Sometimes these were men who had fallen on hard times, frequently due to the grog, perhaps gambling or other problems. Some had the means to live a settled life but chose to carry their drums along the tracks of Australia. A well-known case is that of Joseph Jenkins (1818–1898). After an early life as a successful farmer in Wales, Jenkins apparently suffered a breakdown of some sort aggravated by drinking and took passage to the colony of Victoria. Here he took to the road, taking whatever work he could get and writing award-winning poetry and campaigning in local newspapers to better the lot of bush workers. He kept a journal of his wanderings, later published as the Diary of a Welsh Swagman (1975), in which he wrote about politics, social conditions and Aboriginal people, among many other topics.

Many men spent parts of their lives as swaggies, sometimes as a necessity, sometimes as a way of seeking their fortunes as in the classic fairytales about ne’er-do-wells eventually doing well. Famous examples are the bush entrepreneur R.M. Williams and the novelist Donald Stuart. Even aristocrats were known to shoulder their swags from time to time.

In 1908, a swaggie calling himself ‘Vagrant’ gave a blow-by-blow account of the great tallies of some legendary blade men. He managed to include a little verse, a yarn or two and a wonderful story made up of many stories about the competitive and boastful life of the shearer:

The shearing figures quoted in the ‘Western Champion’ of the 12th of September as to shearing tallies, are not quite correct. Andy Brown did not shear at Evesham in 1886. In 1887 Jimmy Fisher shore fifty lambs in one run before breakfast there. I do not know the time; but they used to ring the bell mighty early those days. I have seen spectral-like forms creeping across the silent space between the galley and the shed long before the kookaburra woke the bush with his laughing song, and he is a pretty early bird.

The same year Black Tom Johnson got bushed in the gloom of that space, and lost half a run before breakfast. Fisher shore 288 at Kynuna the following year: he was a wonderful man for his 8 st. of humanity. The same year Alf Bligh shore 254 at Isis Downs; he and Charlie Byers were the first two men to cut 200 sheep on the Barcoo. The same year Bill Hamilton, now M.L.A., shore 200 sheep at Manfred Downs, and to him belongs the credit of shearing the first 200 on the Flinders.

The next year Bill died at Cambridge Gulf; but as he is alive and all right now, the account was exaggerated. Bill says: ‘That 200 at Manfred Downs was no “cake walk”.’ He used twelve gallons of water cooling down. Alick Miller shore 4163 sheep in three weeks and three days at Charlotte Plains, in 1885, and Sid (‘Combo’) Ross shore nine lambs in nine minutes at Belalie, on the Warrego, the year before.

In the early eighties there were a good number of 200-a-day men in New South Wales; but none of those celebrated personages ventured a pilgrimage northwards until 1887, when quite a number of fast men stormed the west, and their advent started a new era in the shearing world, improved tools and methods entirely superseding the old Ward and Payne, and Sorby school, and the old rum drinking ringers of the roaring days were gradually relegated to the ‘snagger brigade.’ Paddy M’Can, Jack Bird, Tom Green (‘the Burdekin ringer’), Ned Hyles, Jack Ellis (Bendigo), Mick Hoffman (the Peak Downs ringer), Billy Cardham, Jim Sloane, Jack Collins, and George Taylor (‘the Native’) had to give way to the younger brigade with improved Burgon and Ball tools, and new ideas, and, with the advent of Jack Howe, Christy Gratz, ‘Chinee’ Sullivan, Billy Mantim, George Butler, Jimmy Power, Alick Miller, Jack Reid, Allan M’Callum, and others, 180 and 200 were common enough.

Later, when machinery was introduced, tallies took a further jump. Jimmy Power shore 323 at Barenya in 1892 by machines. The same year Jack Howe shore 321 by hand at Alice Downs, his tallies for the week previous being 249, 257, 259, 263, 267, 144, a total of 1439 for the week. I doubt if this record has ever been beaten. I will say right here that Jack Howe was the best shearer I have ever seen at work. The only one approaching him was Lynch, of the Darling River, New South Wales.

No doubt figures get enlarged in circulation, and tall tallies in the bar-room mount up with the fumes of bottled beer—there is a lot of sheep shorn there. Shearers do not lie, as a rule: they boast and make mistakes casually. Jack Howe once told me the biggest mistake he ever made was in trying to shake hands with himself in a panel mirror in an hotel in Maoriland. He had just landed, and made for the first hotel. You see, he had grown a beard on the trip over, and looked like a chap he used to know on the Barcoo. The mistake was considerably intensified by the barmaid’s smile, as she watched Jack’s good-natured recognition of an old shearing mate from Queensland.

At Kensington Downs in 1885, a big Chinaman named Ah Fat rang the shed. He could shear all right, too. The men used to take day about to run him [take turns to beat him]; but the Chow had too much pace. A shearer named George Mason made great preparations to ‘wipe him out’ one day, and, after nearly bursting himself up to dinner-time, discovered that Ah Fat was not on the board: he was doing a lounge in the hut that day. I think that Chinaman must have died; everyone loved him, and, like Moore’s ‘Young Gazelle,’ with its gladsome eye, he was sure to go—

To that shed beyond the sky,

Where the angel tarboys fly,

And the ‘cut’ will last for ever, and

The sheep are always dry.

These records may be of interest to the survivors of the old school, and may, perhaps, stir up the dormant memories of the younger ones. They have been culled from past records, written on the backs of stolen telegram forms from almost every post office between Burketown and Barringun, and are given for what they merit.

‘Bowyang Bill’ recalled an experience of his younger days, just around the turn of the twentieth century. If Bill is to be believed, on this occasion at least, he worked very hard for one of the notoriously tight-fisted and hard-handed cocky farmers. (A ‘bowyang’ was a length of string tied around trousers just below the knee to keep them up. They were commonly worn by working men in the nineteenth century and many illustrations of swaggies feature them.)

Bowyang Bill begins his story with a short verse that could be a memorial for the swaggies’ way of life and death:

Remember those cockies who used to wake a fellow at 2 a.m. in the morning to start the day’s work? They are not so plentiful as they were 30 odd years back, but there’s still a few of them milking cows or growing spuds in this State.

All this takes me back to the time when I tied my first knot in the swag and started out along the dusty tracks to make my fortune. After many weeks I came to Dawson’s place. He was a long, lean hungry sort of codger, and his bleary eyes sparkled when I agreed to work for five bob a week and tucker. I didn’t know Dawson or I would have wasted no time in re-hoisting Matilda and proceeding on my way. I worked 16 hours a day on that place, and lived mostly on damper and flybog. I used to get up so early in the morning that I was ashamed to look at the sleeping fowls when I passed their camping place. I never saw those fowls moving about their yard. They were sleeping on their roosts when I went to work, and they were snoozing on the same roosts when I returned to the house at night.

Things went on like this until another young cove came along with a swag. It was also his first experience ‘carrying the bundle,’ and no doubt that was why he also agreed to work for Dawson. He said his name was Mullery. We had tea at 11 p.m. the day he arrived, and it was midnight when we turned into our bunks in the harness-room. Before I went to sleep I told Mullery what sort of a place it was, but he said he would stick it—until he earned a few bob to carry him along the track. In the next breath he told me he was greatly interested in astronomy. I didn’t know what that was until he explained he was interested in the stars. ‘Well, by cripes,’ I said, ‘you’ll get plenty of opportunities to examine them here.’

That cove was over the odds. I’m just dozing off when he leans over and says, ‘Do you know how far it is from here to Mars?’ Pulling the old potato bag wagga from my face I told him I hadn’t the faintest idea, as I had never travelled along the road to the blanky place. He mentioned the millions of miles it was from here to there. ‘Did you measure the distance with a foot-rule?’ I asked as I again drew the wagga over my face.

When old Dawson pushed his head through the door at 2 a.m. I was awake but the new chap was dead to the world. Dawson went across and yanked the blanket off him. ‘Here, hurry up’, he growled, ‘and get those cows milked before they get sun-stroke.’ ‘What’s going to give them sunstroke?’ asked Muller, as innocent as you like. ‘Why, the blanky sun, of course,’ roared Dawson. The new chap made himself more comfortable in his bunk, then he drawled, ‘There’s no danger of that, sir, and allow me to inform you that at this time of the year the sun is 93 million miles from the earth.’

‘You’re a liar,’ yelled Dawson, shaking the hurricane lamp in Mullery’s face, ‘and if you come outside I’ll prove it to you. Why, the darned sun is just peeping over the tops of the gum trees half-a-mile from here, and by the time it’s well above them you’ll be on the track again. Yes, you’re sacked, so get out of here quick and lively.’

The horse breaker had been living on mutton, tea and damper for months and was well ready for a break on the coast. As he rode through the country one night, he came to a farm run by an old cocky and his attractive young wife. He asked the cocky if he could have a bed for the night and something to eat. The uncharacteristically generous cocky said that he could share the evening meal and stay for the night. But there was only one bed, so they’d all have to sleep together. This was fine with the horse breaker and he sat down at the table as the farmer’s wife served dinner, making eyes at him as she did so. The food was wonderful and an awful lot better than the diet he’d been living on and the young wife was much easier on the eyes than the horses he’d been breaking. Unfortunately, the cocky and his wife were not heavy eaters and he hadn’t eaten his fill when the meal was cleared away and the leftovers placed in the meat safe.

As the meal was over and there was not a lot else to do, they all agreed to turn in for the night. The cocky slept in the middle of the bed, with his wife on one side and the horse breaker on the other. It wasn’t long before the old bloke was fast asleep and snoring and not long after that before the horse breaker and the young woman were fondling each other’s hands across her husband’s sleeping body. This went on for some time when there was a dreadful squawking from the chook yard. The cocky sat bolt upright in bed: ‘There’s that bloody fox again,’ he cried as he jumped, grabbed his rifle and headed out into the night. ‘Now’s our chance,’ said the young wife to the horse breaker. ‘Too right,’ he answered enthusiastically as he rolled across the bed towards her waiting arms. But to her surprise, he jumped right over her, ran to the meat safe and ate up the rest of the food.

Folklore has it that there was such a thing as a ‘Swagman’s Union’. According to this account, an organisation of this type was formed in the 1870s and had some interesting rules by which its members were allegedly regulated:

The old-time swagman is fast disappearing, but to-day my thoughts go back to some of the real old-time ‘whalers’ of the Murrumbidgee and other Southern watercourses (writes ‘Bill Bowyang’). The genuine ‘whaler’ in the halcyon days of yore was a feature of the Murrumbidgee tracks and along the routes fringing some of the Western Queensland rivers.

Those who carried the swag on the Lachlan were known as the ‘Lachlan Cruisers’ but there were also the ‘Darling Whisperers,’ the ‘Murray Sundowners,’ and the ‘Bogan Bummers.’ Each member cherished an unbounding pride in his clan, and there were at times fierce fights under the big river gums when some favored fishing hole was usurped by an interloper from an alien band.

Scanning an old scrap book recently I came across an interesting record of an occurrence that at the time created a great stir in swag men circles throughout the West. It tells of a meeting that was held to bring about a combination of the scattered units of swaggiedom in a society known as the ‘Amalgamated Swagmen of Australia.’ This first union was formed in a bend of the Lachlan, near Forbes, in 1877, and a conference of delegates from far and wide gathered for the occasion. They were a motley crew, frowsy dead beats, loony-hatters, and aggressive cadgers.

By the fitful flames of yarran and myall fires, officers were elected, branches formed, and rules drawn up. Sir William Wallaby was the first President, and Sir John Bluey, secretary; T. Billy Esq. is named as treasurer, and Dr. Johnny Cake medical adviser. The well-known firm of Walker and Tucker were solicitors. The rules were as follows:

1. No member to be over 100 years old.

2. Each member to pay one pannikin of flour entrance fee. Members who don’t care about paying will be admitted free.

3. No member to carry swags weighing over ten pounds.

4. Each member to possess three complete sets of tucker bags, each set to consist of nine bags.

5. No member to pass any station, farm, boundary rider’s hut, camp, or private house without ‘tap-ping’ and obtaining rations or hand outs.

6. Each member to allow himself to be bitten by a sheep. If a sheep bites a member he must immediately turn it into mutton.

7. Members who defame a ‘good’ cook, or pay a fine when run in, shall not be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

8. No members allowed to hum baking powder, tea, flour, sugar, or tobacco from a fellow unionist.

9. Non-smoking members must ‘whisper’ for tobacco on every possible occasion, the same as smokers.

10. At general or branch meetings non-smoking hums must give up their whispered tobacco to be distributed amongst the officers of the society.

11. Any member found without at least two sets of bags filled with tucker will be fined.

12. No member to own more than one creek, river, or billabong bend. To sell bends for old boots or sinkers is prohibited.

13. No member to look for or accept work of any description. Members found willing will be at once expelled.

14. No member to walk more than five miles per day if rations can be hummed.

15. No member to tramp on Sundays at any price.

This union is many years defunct and its original members as widely scattered as the ashes of their long-dimmed campfires, yet the spirit and the rules are adhered to sacredly, even in these days, by those who hump the swag. Par chance these rules extend to Paradise, and the sturdy beggars still tramp through eternity with Matilda up.

Amongst the old time ‘whalers’, Scotty the Wrinkler was perhaps the most famous. A garrulous Scotch man of scholarly attainments, he had, perhaps, less need to cadge than any other. Scotty I always recognised as somewhat of a poseur. His habits were so settled that he dwelt most of the year in a huge hollow log on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, near Narrandera, and he even acquired his name from the original holder, who was a Darling River Whisperer.

Australia’s long love affair with the grog begins with the ‘Rum Corps’ in colonial New South Wales and extends to the present. Along the way have been told many beery tales of mammoth sprees and monumental hangovers. The balladry of the bush overflows with references to alcohol, much of it ‘sly’ or illegal. The ‘hocussed’ or adulterated shanty grog took down many a shearer’s cheque. A famous example occurs in ‘On the Road to Gundagai’, where a bloke named Bill and his mate make the mistake of camping at Lazy Harry’s sly grog tent on their way to Sydney with the season’s shearing wages:

In a week the spree was over and our cheque was all knocked down

So we shouldered our Matildas and we turned our backs on town.

And the girls stood us nobblers as we sadly said goodbye,

And we tramped from Lazy Harry’s on the road to Gundagai.

In vain did the forces of law and order try to police and control the sly-grog trade. Colonists mostly insisted on their right to a drink and the grog quickly became an element of the ‘fair go’ ethos, as events at Pakenham demonstrated in 1879:

An interesting raid was made by the revenue officers of the Shire of Berwick, on Wednesday last, on a number of unlicensed shanty-keepers, who for some time past have been carrying on an illicit traffic in liquor in the neighbourhood of a large quarry near the Gippsland railway, about seven miles from Berwick, from which metal has been obtained for the Oakleigh end of the line. At this place a large camp of quarry men and stonebreakers has been formed consisting of about 100 tents and shanties of all kinds and descriptions, and as there are no public houses in the locality sly grog-selling is carried on to a great extent.

It came to the knowledge of the Revenue officers a few days ago that a large quantity of spirituous liquor had been sent up to the camp and having determined to take some action to put a stop to this illicit traffic, the revenue inspector, Mr. Robinson, visited the place on Wednesday last, accompanied by the inspector of licensed premises, Mr A. Cartledge, and three mounted constables, and made a sudden descent on the camp before the casks and cases; containing the liquor, could be removed or secreted by their owners. At the first place which was visited, that of Mr. R. Stout’s, about a dray load of stock was seized and placed in a dray which had been provided for the occasion.

In the meantime a large number of the navvies had assembled, and seeing the state of affairs commenced looting the shanties and grogshops in spite of the efforts of the police, who endeavoured to roll back the casks into the tents as the mob took them out, but of course were outnumbered, and the result was that casks of bottled beer and cases of brandy, whisky, &c. were smashed open and rifled. By this time the mob had increased to about 100 persons, and an assault was made on the police by a party armed with pickhandles, sticks and other weapons, and the police were rather severely handled—so much so that they had to produce their revolvers, and the revenue officer’s party took advantage of the tranquilising effect which this manoeuvre produced to retire from the camp.

The scene that ensued baffles description; yelling and screaming the mob either stoved in the ends of the casks and opened the cases and removed their contents for immediate consumption, or took them away into the bush for a future occasion. It is estimated that about £30 of spirituous liquor was taken or destroyed by the mob, including the dray load, which the inspector had seized.

Not surprisingly the police were planning to summon the known rioters to court.

Modern electronic narratives include tales circulated on paper, usually produced with some form of reprographic machine, such as the typewriter, spirit duplicator, Gestetner or, from the late 1940s, the electronic photocopier. Since the 1980s the facsimile machine, followed by email and the internet, have also provided opportunities for business send-up stories to be created and re-created. As with urban legends and some other story forms, these are often international in scope and circulation, but they are also characterised by adaptation to local circumstances.

One of the earliest known examples of these stories in Australia is a satirical item usually titled ‘The Dimboola Cat Farm’:

WILD CAT SYNDICATE, DIMBOOLA

Dear Sir,

Knowing that you are always interested and open for an investment in a good live proposition. I take the liberty of presenting to you what appears to be a most wonderful business, in which no doubt you will take a lovely interest and subscribe towards the formation of the Company. The objects of the Company are to operate a large cat ranch near Dimboola, where land can be purchased cheap for the purpose.

To start with we want 1,000,000 cats. Each cat will average about 12 kittens per year; the skins from 1/6 for the white one to 2/6 for the pure black ones. This will give us 12,000,000 skins a year to sell at an average of 2/– each, making our revenue about £2500 per day.

A man can skin about 100 cats a day, at 15/– per day wages, and it will take 100 men to operate the ranch; therefore the net profit per day will be £2425. We feed the cats on rats and will start a rat ranch; the rats multiply four times as fast as the cats.

We start with 1,000,000 rats and will have four rats per cat from which the skins have been taken, giving each rat one quarter of a cat. It will thus be seen that the whole business will be self-acting and automatic throughout. The cats will eat the rats and for the rats’ tails we will get the government grant of four pence per tail. Other by-products are guts for tennis racquets, whiskers for wireless sets, and cat’s pyjamas for Glenelg flappers. Eventually we will cross the cats with snakes, and they will skin themselves twice a year, thus saving the men’s wages for skinning and also getting two skins per cat per year.

Awaiting your prompt reply, and trusting that you will appreciate this most wonderful opportunity to get rich quick.

Yours faithfully

Babbling Brook, Promoter

A half-century or so later, the story was still going the rounds. It appeared in the form of a photocopied A4 sheet and with a few modern additions such as conversion to decimal currency and a more modern enticement to invest: ‘The offer to participate in this investment opportunity of a lifetime has only been made to a limited number of individuals—so send your cheque now!’ Otherwise, it was the same bizarre tale.

It all started back in 1966, when they changed to dollars and overnight my overdraft doubled.

I was just getting used to this when they brought in kilograms and my wool cheque dropped by half.

Then they started playing around with the weather and brought in Celsius and millimetres, and we haven’t had a decent fall of rain since.

As if this wasn’t enough, they had to change over to hectares and I end up with less than half the farm I had.

So one day I sat down and had a good think. I reckon with daylight saving I was working eight days a week, so I decided to sell out.

Then, to cop it all, I had only got the place in the agent’s hand when they changed to kilometres and I find I’m too flaming far out of town!

Bush cooks were the butt of many humorous anecdotes and yarns, especially the shearer’s cook, also known as a ‘babbling brook’, or just a ‘babbler’, in rhyming slang. For her work on Western Australian shearing sheds, author June Lacy collected many occupational anecdotes, including this one recorded from shearing legend Reg Dunbar at Kingsley in 1995:

It was the first shed and first meal after getting off the plane. The bell rings for tea. ‘What’s on cookie?’ was the usual question. ‘Good soup mate, I can recommend it,’ is the standard answer. ‘Good soup, right on,’ I replied and lifted the pot lid. A sheep’s head was staring at us. A bit of wool still on it—teeth, ears, and the tongue protruding, with a couple of carrots and onions trying to knock out the eyes. Hell, straight from the killing-pen. Turned me off soup forever. The Union Rep took one look and bellowed in no uncertain terms, ‘You won’t cook for us any more. You’re sacked, you bastard. You never wiped his nose!’

This story well illustrates the terse mode of yarn-spinning, telling the personal experience with a humorous sting in the tale that is at once amusing, suggestive of the toughness of the shearing life and falling squarely within a tradition that would be familiar to anyone involved in this line of work.

This epic from the early twentieth century tells how a drover’s cook learned the trade. (Tooraweenah is in New South Wales, near Gilgandra, and Gummin is probably Gummin Gummin station in the Warrumbungles, near Coonabarabran.)

He was working on a road job,

Out Tooraweenah way,

But he didn’t like the work at all,

And he didn’t like the pay.

He was getting six and sixpence,

And he didn’t think it right,

For he had to work so hard all day

That he couldn’t sleep at night.

He camped on an early riser,

On some leaves beneath a fly,

And he was always up before

The stars were off the sky.

He had only half a blanket,

And the nap was worn off that;

So for convenience sake he slept in

His trousers, boots, and hat.

He longed for something better,

And he longed for change of life,

So he took a job of cooking,

Off a drover chap, named Fyfe.

And he drove along to Gummin,

With a free and easy mind,

And never once regretted

The job he’d left behind.

They were shearing at the station

And the drovers and the cook

Stopped the night and had their supper

With the shearers’ ‘Babbling Brook.’

They were taking sheep from Gummin,

Three thousand head or more,

And the drover’s cook was happy,

Though he’d never cooked before.

And they rose up in the morning

Before the break of day;

And when the sun had risen,

They were a mile upon their way.

When the evening meal was over,

And his mates were all asleep,

The maiden cook then set to work

To kill his maiden sheep.

He tied its legs together

Put an edge upon his knife,

And by the camp fire murdered

The first sheep in his life.

It took him hours to skin it,

’Twas a picture then to see,

As on a rope it dangled

Beneath a leaning tree.

But he soon got used to killing,

And to fixing up the breaks,

And he soon got used to cooking

Stews and chops, and bread and cakes.

But he never had such trouble,

In the present or the past,

As the night he baked the damper,

When the rain was falling fast.

Beneath a leaning gum tree

He built a roaring fire,

Put the dough into an oven,

Which hung upon a wire.

The rain then fell in torrents,

And the cook was in a state,

As he stood above the oven,

Like a jockey losing weight.

With his overcoat he sheltered

That damper from the rain,

And he swore by all that’s holy

That he’d never cook again.

And he cursed and swore like blazes;

But it didn’t matters mend,

So he cooked on to the finish,

Till they reached their journey’s end.

And he left his mates in Gulgong,

For a different way they took.

But the boss before he said adieu

Gave a reference to the cook.

Life on the land has always been tough, but dying on it can be even harder, as the maker of this will suggests: