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Updated: May 15, 2025
I once heard a bushman say that no one but a skunk would be guilty of this tobacco trick that it is about the meanest trick a man could be capable of because it spoils the chances of the next hard-up swaggy who asks the victim for tobacco.
At battabum, or riding of the At bum to buss, or nose in breech. wild mare. At Geordie, give me my lance. At Hind the ploughman. At swaggy, waggy or shoggyshou. At the good mawkin. At stook and rook, shear and At the dead beast. threave. At climb the ladder, Billy. At the birch. At the dying hog. At the muss. At the salt doup. At the dilly dilly darling. At the pretty pigeon. At ox moudy.
A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked for work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the station without tucker. Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and crossed Sandy Creek.
Perhaps, for several reasons, it was more prevalent among diggers than with the comparatively settled bushmen of to-day the poor, hopeless, wandering swaggy doesn't count in the matter, for he has neither the wherewithal nor the opportunity to honour the old custom; also his movements are too sadly uncertain to permit of his being honoured by it.
I stared at the place again and caught sight of a ghostly-looking light between the lines of the foundations, which I presently made out to be a light in a tent. "There's someone camping there," I said. "Yes," said the driver, "some old swaggy or `hatter. I seen him comin' down. I don't know nothing about that there place." I thought and remembered.
But just at that instant Billy's aunt jumped to her feet, her eyes large with excitement, and pointed toward the open session door, where framed against the light stood Mark Carter, straight and tall facing the circle of men, and behind him, out in the dark, with only his swaggy old sweater shoulder and the visor of his floppy old cap showing around the door jamb lurked Billy. "There! There!"
Swaggy scratched his head, reflectively. "Well," he said, "you're the first man that has thought so these ten years. What do I want with a cab?" "To go where you're going, of course." "Do I look knocked up?" "I didn't say you did." "And I didn't say you said I did.... Now, I've been on the track this five years.
Some day I might be flashing past in a buggy or saloon-carriage or, the chances are it will be you and you might look out the window and see an old swaggy tramping along in the dust, or camped under a strip of calico in the rain in the scrub. We never realize the miseries of life till we look back the mistakes and miseries that had to be and couldn't be helped. It's all luck luck and chance."
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