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Kitchen, outhouses, bachelors' quarters, saddle-rooms, and store-rooms had been built on in a kind of straggling quadrangle, with many corners and unexpected doorways and passages; and it is reported that a swagman once got his dole of rations at the kitchen, went away, and after turning two or three corners, got so tangled up that when Fate led him back to the kitchen he didn't recognise it, and asked for rations over again, in the firm belief that he was at a different part of the house.
Somebody said to me, "Yer wanter go out back, young man, if yer wanter see the country. Yer wanter get away from the line." I don't wanter; I've been there. You could go to the brink of eternity so far as Australia is concerned and yet meet an animated mummy of a swagman who will talk of going "out back." Out upon the out-back fiend! About Byrock we met the bush liar in all his glory.
So one drowsy afternoon at the time of the year when the breathless day runs on past 7 P.M., Mrs Myers sat sewing in the bar parlour, when a clean-shaved, clean-shirted, clean-neckerchiefed, clean-moleskinned, greased-bluchered altogether a model or stage swagman came up, was served in the bar by the half-caste female cook, and took his way to the river-bank, where he rigged a small tent and made a model camp.
The swagman we have always with us And comfortable ecclesiasticism marks a full stop there, blasphemously evading the completion of a sentence charged with the grave truth, that the Light of the world, the God-in-Man, the only God we can ever know, is by His own authority represented for all time by the poorest of the poor.
Robinson, while looking out from the verandah of his house over the plains, observed a strange object approaching at some distance. He said to himself, "That is not a horseman, nor an emu, nor a native companion, nor a swagman, nor a kangaroo." He could not make it out; so he fetched his binocular, and then perceived that it was a human being, stark naked.
Only last week a gallows-faced swagman having satisfied himself that there were no men on the place threw his swag down on the veranda, and demanded tucker. She gave him something to eat; then he expressed his intention of staying for the night. It was sundown then.
Nosey was there, holding forth to Bill the Butcher, Dick Smalley, Frank Barton, Bob Atkins, Charley Goodall, and George Brown the Liar. A dispute occurred, in which the presumptuous stranger joined, and Nosey promptly knocked him off the verandah into the gutter. A valid claim to satisfaction was thus established, and the swagman showed a disposition to enforce it.
Rough, squarish face, curly auburn wig, bushy grey eyebrows and moustache, and grizzly stubble eyes that reminded one of Dampier the actor. He was a squatter of the old order new chum, swagman, drover, shearer, super, pioneer, cocky, squatter, and finally bank victim. He had been through it all, and knew all about it.
Been fifteen years in this God-forgotten country, too," he said reminiscently, placing his elbows on the table, and gazing at the wall in front of him. "Fifteen years livin' mostly with the blacks and the Chineyman, and livin' like a black or a Chineyman, too. And what have I got to show for it? I've got to hump my bluey out of this, and take to the road like any other broken-down old swagman."
Langholm suddenly remembered the Australian swagman whom he had seen "knocking down his check" at a wayside inn within a few miles of Normanthorpe, and Steel's gratuitously explicit statement that neither he nor his wife had ever been in Australia in their lives. There was one lie at least, then why not two?
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