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Updated: June 27, 2025
In mere self-defence, I would have been constrained to keep up a series of general and impersonal reflections till the swagman lost his individuality say, five or six hours but I was rescued from this tyranny by the faint rattle of a buggy on the other side of the river.
But as luck would have it, I runs butt agen the very man I'd ratherest meet of anybody in the country." The swagman paused, and slowly turned toward me, in evident trouble of mind "He did n't tell you two blokes I was logged for stack-burnin'?" And the poor fellow's flickering eyes sought my face appealingly. "Indeed he did n't, mate."
He would probably be at the farmhouse. I must get my clothes changed, and look after him. It was about a mile and a half northward to the river. Before reaching it, I saw, crossing the flat in the direction of the Victorian river road, a swagman whom I recognised in the distance as my friend Andy.
Now that man's deafness was genuine, and I spoke in my ordinary tone, yet the magic word vibrated accurately and unmistakably on the paralysed tympanum. Let your so-called scientists account for that. "If you can spare it," replied the swagman, with animation.
Until recently, Australian city artists and editors who knew as much about the bush as Downing Street knows about the British colonies in general seemed to think the horse-collar swag was still in existence; and some artists gave the swagman a stick, as if he were a tramp of civilization with an eye on the backyard and a fear of the dog.
Would n't you, therefore if you were on a floating log, remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow; standing, like the Apollo Sauroctones, with your hand on the adjacent stump, and, to enhance your resemblance to that fine antique, clad in simplicity of mien and nothing else if you were sadly realising the loss of your best clothes, with all the things in the pockets, including a fairly trustworthy watch if, in addition to this, the patient face of the spratless swagman was rising before you till you involuntarily muttered "O Julius Caesar! thou art mighty yet!" and the nasty part of your moral nature was reminding you that you might have had anything up to four-pounds-odd worth of heavenly debentures; whereas, having failed to put your mammon of unrighteousness into celestial scrip, to await you at the end of your pilgrimage, you were now doubly debarred from retaining it in your pilgrim's scrip, by reason of having neither scrip nor mammon under such circumstances, I say, would n't you be very likely to take the sunset on your left, and swim for the north bank, without doing an equation in algebra to find out which way the river ought to run?
That swagman had a history, highly important, at all events, to himself. He had been born; he lived; he would probably die and if any human being wants a higher record than that, he must work for it. This man's personal value, judged by the standard which I, for one, dare not disown, was certainly as high as that of the average monarch or multi-millionaire.
About two miles from the Waterholes Philip overtook another swagman, a man of middle age, who was going to Nyalong to look for work. He had tried the diggings, and left them for want of luck, and Philip, having himself been an unlucky digger, had a fellow feeling for the stranger. He was an old soldier named Summers. "I am three and fifty years old," he said, "and I 'listed when I was twenty.
"Ye moight foine it dang aisy yeerself, Dave," observed a middle-aged diner significantly. "I been a misfortunate man, there's no denyin'," continued the swagman; "but I never done a injury to nobody in my life, so fur as I'm aware about." "What did he get the three months for?" asked Dave, turning to Tam.
Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as thick and black as New Orleans molasses.
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