In the absence of the author, who is now resident in Western Australia, it devolves upon us to make the customary acknowledgments to the various journals from which these stories are reprinted. Most o...

You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hat...

The worst bore in Australia just now is the man who raves about getting the people on the land, and buttonholes you in the street with a little scheme of his own. He generally does not know what he is...

The Western train had just arrived at Redfern railway station with a lot of ordinary passengers and one swagman. He was short, and stout, and bowlegged, and freckled, and sandy. He had red hair and sm...

We were tramping down in Canterbury, Maoriland, at the time, swagging it⁠—me and Bill⁠—looking for work on the new railway line. Well, one afternoon, after a long, hot tramp, we comes to Stiffner’s Ho...

Jack Drew sat on the edge of the shaft, with his foot in the loop and one hand on the rope, ready to descend. His elder brother, Tom, stood at one end of the windlass and the third mate at the other. ...

“Well, I dunno,” said Tom Marshall⁠—known as “The Oracle”⁠—“I’ve heerd o’ sich cases before: they ain’t commin, but⁠—I’ve heerd o’ sich cases before,” and he screwed up the left side of his face whils...

One of the hungriest cleared roads in New South Wales runs to within a couple of miles of Hungerford, and stops there; then you strike through the scrub to the town. There is no distant prospect of Hu...

“This girl,” said Mitchell, continuing a yarn to his mate, “was about the ugliest girl I ever saw, except one, and I’ll tell you about her directly. The old man had a carpenter’s shop fixed up in a sh...

The Blenheim coach was descending into the valley of the Avetere River⁠—pronounced Aveterry⁠—from the saddle of Taylor’s Pass. Across the river to the right, the grey slopes and flats stretched away t...

The scene is a small New South Wales western selection, the holder whereof is native-English. His wife is native-Irish. Time, Sunday, about 8 a.m. A used-up looking woman comes from the slab-and-bark ...

Macquarie the shearer had met with an accident. To tell the truth, he had been in a drunken row at a wayside shanty, from which he had escaped with three fractured ribs, a cracked head, and various mi...

I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place in the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per night⁠—“Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillin...

In one of these years a paragraph appeared in a daily paper to the effect that a constable had discovered a little boy asleep on the steps of Grinder Bros’ factory at four o’clock one rainy morning. H...

An oblong hut, walled with blue-grey hardwood slabs, adzed at the ends and set horizontally between the round sapling studs; high roof of the eternal galvanized iron. A big rubbish heap lies about a y...

While out boating one Sunday afternoon on a billabong across the river, we saw a young man on horseback driving some horses along the bank. He said it was a fine day, and asked if the water was deep t...

“I’d been away from home for eight years,” said Mitchell to his mate, as they dropped their swags in the mulga shade and sat down. “I hadn’t written a letter⁠—kept putting it off, and a blundering foo...

Draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train. Then you’ll have the bush all along the New South Wales western line from Bathurst on. The railway to...

The yarn was all lies, I suppose; but it wasn’t bad. A city bushman told it, of course, and he told it in the travellers’ hut. “As true’s God hears me I never meant to desert her in cold blood,” he sa...

“I’ll get down among the cockies along the Lachlan, or some of these rivers,” said Mitchell, throwing down his swag beneath a big tree. “A man stands a better show down there. It’s a mistake to come o...

Steelman was a hard case. If you were married, and settled down, and were so unfortunate as to have known Steelman in other days, he would, if in your neighbourhood and deadbeat, be sure to look you u...

The stranger walked into the corner grocery with the air of one who had come back after many years to see someone who would be glad to see him. He shed his swag and stood it by the wall with great del...

There is an old custom prevalent in Australasia⁠—and other parts, too, perhaps, for that matter⁠—which, we think, deserves to be written up. It might not be an “honoured” custom from a newspaper manag...

“If ever I do get a job again,” said Mitchell, “I’ll stick to it while there’s a hand’s turn of work to do, and put a few pounds together. I won’t be the fool I always was. If I’d had sense a couple o...

We lay in camp in the fringe of the mulga, and watched the big, red, smoky, rising moon out on the edge of the misty plain, and smoked and thought together sociably. Our nosebags were nice and heavy, ...

It was Golden Gully still, but golden in name only, unless indeed the yellow mullock heaps or the bloom of the wattle-trees on the hillside gave it a claim to the title. But the gold was gone from the...

It was the first Monday after the holidays. The children had taken their seats in the Old Bark School, and the master called out the roll as usual:⁠— “Arvie Aspinall.”⁠ ⁠… “ ’Es, sir.” “David Cooper.”...

The dog was a little conservative mongrel poodle, with long dirty white hair all over him⁠—longest and most over his eyes, which glistened through it like black beads. Also he seemed to have a bad liv...

At least two hundred poor beggars were counted sleeping out on the pavements of the main streets of Sydney the other night⁠—grotesque bundles of rags lying under the verandas of the old Fruit Markets ...

We crossed Cook’s Straits from Wellington in one of those rusty little iron tanks that go up and down and across there for twenty or thirty years and never get wrecked⁠—for no other reason, apparently...

The two-roomed house is built of round timber, slabs, and stringy-bark, and floored with split slabs. A big bark kitchen standing at one end is larger than the house itself, veranda included. Bush all...

Steelman was a hard case, but some said that Smith was harder. Steelman was big and good-looking, and good-natured in his way; he was a spieler, pure and simple, but did things in humorous style. Smit...

Brook let down the heavy, awkward sliprails, and the gaunt cattle stumbled through, with aggravating deliberation, and scattered slowly among the native apple-trees along the sidling. First there came...

One o’clock on Saturday. The unemployed’s one o’clock on Saturday! Nothing more can be done this week, so you drag yourself wearily and despairingly “home,” with the cheerful prospect of a penniless S...

I lately met an old schoolmate of mine upcountry. He was much changed. He was tall and lank, and had the most hideous bristly red beard I ever saw. He was working on his father’s farm. He shook hands,...

The two travellers had yarned late in their camp, and the moon was getting low down through the mulga. Mitchell’s mate had just finished a rather racy yarn, but it seemed to fall flat on Mitchell⁠—he ...

“Does Arvie live here, old woman?” “Why?” “Strike me dead! carn’t yer answer a civil queschin?” “How dare you talk to me like that, you young larrikin! Be off! or I’ll send for a policeman.” “Blarst t...

It was raining⁠—“general rain.” The train left Bourke, and then there began the long, long agony of scrub and wire fence, with here and there a natural clearing, which seemed even more dismal than the...

“Why, there’s two of them, and they’re having a fight! Come on.” It seemed a strange place for a fight⁠—that hot, lonely, cotton-bush plain. And yet not more than half a mile ahead there were apparent...

It was a very mean station, and Mitchell thought he had better go himself and beard the overseer for tucker. His mates were for waiting till the overseer went out on the run, and then trying their luc...

“Five Bob!” The old man shaded his eyes and peered through the dazzling glow of that broiling Christmas Day. He stood just within the door of a slab-and-bark hut situated upon the bank of a barren cre...

The moon rose away out on the edge of a smoky plain, seen through a sort of tunnel or arch in the fringe of mulga behind which we were camped⁠—Jack Mitchell and I. The timber proper was just behind us...

We were delayed for an hour or so inside Sydney Heads, taking passengers from the Oroya, which had just arrived from England and anchored off Watson’s Bay. An Adelaide boat went alongside the ocean li...

Malachi was very tall, very thin, and very round-shouldered, and the sandiness of his hair also cried aloud for an adjective. All the boys considered Malachi the greatest ass on the station, and there...

“Nothing makes a dog madder,” said Mitchell, “than to have another dog come outside his fence and sniff and bark at him through the cracks when he can’t get out. The other dog might be an entire stran...

She lived in Jones’s Alley. She cleaned offices, washed, and nursed from daylight until any time after dark, and filled in her spare time cleaning her own place (which she always found dirty⁠—in a “be...

We caught up with an old swagman crossing the plain, and tramped along with him till we came to good shade to have a smoke in. We had got yarning about men getting lost in the bush or going away and b...

At the local police court, where the subject of this sketch turned up periodically amongst the drunks, he had “James” prefixed to his name for the sake of convenience and as a matter of form previous ...

Well, we reached the pub about dinnertime, dropped our swags outside, had a drink, and then went into the dinin’-room. There was a lot of jackaroo swells, that had been on a visit to the squatter, or ...

The first man that Steelman and Smith came up to on the last embankment, where they struck the new railway line, was a heavy, gloomy, labouring man with bowyangs on and straps round his wrists. Steelm...

The chaps in the bar of Stiffner’s shanty were talking about Macquarie, an absent shearer⁠—who seemed, from their conversation, to be better known than liked by them. “I ain’t seen Macquarie for ever ...

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, drov...

There were ten of us there on the wharf when our first mate left for Maoriland, he having been forced to leave Sydney because he could not get anything like regular graft, nor anything like wages for ...