While the Billy Boils: reference groups

Steelman, a hard case, seeks out old friends who have married and settled, stays to tea, then for the night, then indefinitely, and tells protesting wives he is their husband's guest.

The only escape is to move, and he helps with that too; his old schoolmate Brown tries to ease him out by inventing a sister-in-law who needs his room.

Brown flounders and apologises; Steelman cheerfully offers to move into the damp washhouse and borrows a shilling for beer, and Brown gives in.

In camp Mitchell recalls a pub he had to leave without paying, the rope he carried to lower his things, and the revolver he kept while waiting for a mate to send a pound.

The narrator recalls a night on the streets feeling like a felon; a small businessman left food scraps outside each night for a shadow, who turned out to be an old mate.

Landing at Picton, he gloomily wires a friend in the North Island 'Wire quid; stumped', takes a room at a pub and writes the sketch as the candle dies.

Smith returns laden with food, clothes, medicine and money; later Steelman prospers managing a pub, and Smith turns up broke expecting help.

A shearer hurt in a drunken shanty brawl walks ten miles to hospital with his lame dog; the doctors will take him but not the dog, and he gets up to leave.

He refuses to stay without the dog, telling how it was born on the track and how he killed its blind mother because he could not leave her behind alive.

He declares the dog a better mate than any man, which saved him from being robbed and fought beside him, then collapses; they take him in and he asks for the dog.

From the boots and the rum bottle he recognises Brummy, an old mate who could earn more than any man but drank it all, and scolds the corpse before pocketing the rum.

He sandwiches the body between sheets of bark, tears strips from his only shirt to tie it, and carries Brummy home on his shoulder with the bag of bones.

Drinkers in a shanty run down Macquarie, an absent shearer, as a loafer and a liar; an old ruined drunk called Awful Example rises to say Macquarie was his mate.

The old man denies each charge and says Macquarie never talked about any man behind his back, and the room falls into an uneasy silence.

Barcoo says Macquarie was a bully who smashed smaller men; the old man says Macquarie is dead, and the drinkers shuffle and find reasons to go outside; a gaunt stranger rides up to the back.

The old man shouts that Macquarie's mate is alive and squares up to fight Barcoo; the stranger pins him from behind and says 'It's Macquarie, old mate', and Barcoo rides off.

Bill, who believes the world is sharps and mugs, gets the narrator to cadge ten shillings from a navvy and takes charge of it.

Next morning Bill has a black eye and eighteen pence; they quarrel over who must face the landlord and toss for it, and the narrator loses.

In camp Bill boasts that he got them through; the narrator tears into him as a mug, and Bill quietly produces money he had all along.

Bill produces the rest of the money, explaining he let the narrator take the risk to pay out the publican, whom he had a grudge against; the narrator lies awake.

At last Brown comes home drunk and tries to kick Steelman out, gets a hiding, and is nursed and lectured by him next morning on how to treat a guest.

Steelman, a humorous spieler, takes the weedy, cringing Smith in hand to teach him and beats him when he fails; as Smith sets off to beg at an old Scottish couple's store, Steelman stops him in despair.

Steelman calls Smith a born mug, which hurts him most, and wearily offers to stage the business for him.

Steelman lectures Smith for failing his training and gives him a pound in disgust; later, down again, they team up, and Smith asks to borrow Steelman's overcoat for the night.

The narrator remembers how an old mate of his father's from the diggings would turn up at the selection, praise the children, slip them coins and tell stories of the old days.

In the evenings the mates yarn about old friends and talk low about the Eureka Stockade, while the father explains away his scars to the children.

The paper passes round with grumbling and accusation, and when Bill gets it back he hides it away to send to his old mate Jim.

Bill clumsily folds, ties and addresses the paper, finding his old mate's formal name strange to write.

Far away, Jim strolls to the post office on mail night hoping for a paper from Bill; old mates like these seldom write.

Bound by work, poverty and drink, they slip tobacco, books and flasks into his bunk and pockets, and pool what money they have for more.

Flood washes away his crop and soil, the next crop rusts, and nursing his cows' eyes he goes half blind himself, nursed through it by a German neighbour.

A storekeeper gives a deadbeat swagman rations to see him over the border, and an old shepherd spits over the fence on both colonies, and on the rest.

A big Irish shearer invites the Exception to eat, but he can barely manage it; the men chaff the one who volunteered to bake bread for them all.

Rats says the swag knocked him down first, so the shearers stage a mock boxing match, seconding the swag and betting, and award him the fight.

Rats borrows meat for bait and fishes imaginary cod in the grass; before they move on, Sunlight gives him half a crown and tucker and tells him to reach the water before dark.

Chinny arrives with a bony horse and a spliced bottle-cart; the boys eagerly load the furniture, the ironing table upside down with the rest between its legs.

The master asks for quiet out of respect; the dunce asks what D stands for and is elbowed by a classmate.

The men chaff the cook, who answers with pathetic speeches about his age, hard work and small wages; at smoko Geordie shears the dog to roars of laughter, and the cook rages at teatime.

The cook laments his long hours and asks why they could not play the trick on another man's dog; Geordie, trying to look ashamed, catches sight of the dog and explodes with laughter.

The cook sulks for three days, and the men grow sorry and then irritated, until he admits he only minded that the trimmed dog would make him look flash in town.

Malachi, a tall, shabby, simple station hand who has barely left the bush, is the butt of all the boys' jokes and never protests beyond 'Now, none of your pranktical jokes!'

The boys graduate to forged letters from women threatening breach of promise, in the long words he hates; a visiting bricklayer who dabbles in phrenology and seances offers a bigger joke.

They get Malachi's bumps read at a seance, then persuade him the bricklayer kills people for their skulls and admires his.

Malachi offers his skeleton after death, then bursts out through the bark wall and runs for the station, while the hidden jokers laugh themselves sick.

Sober, Bogg fossicks and splits palings, keeps his credit good and feeds any sundowner; larrikins come to play a ghost joke on him, but their leader sees him grieving over a letter, a portrait and a lock of hair.

He rails that he starved and worked harder for less at home than anywhere else, and that the country belongs to foreign speculators.

He attacks patriotism as a lie that makes men slave and fight for their masters, silencing the bagman, then asks about a grove of trees.

The sick man goes to the station for medicine and rations; the rest sound each other out about the union, curse the squatter and swap lies about outwitting bosses.

The drinkers argue drunkenly about women voting and about working men in parliament, while another tries to finish a yarn in which he is the hero.

A quarrel over 'horny heads' is smoothed over with a flask; a shearer boasts of flooring the boss-over-the-board and two blacklegs until a voice begs him to give it a rest.

The old man had been offered droving at a pittance, finding his own horse, feed and supplies; a trooper checks on the travellers, and next morning they move on.

The boy milks carelessly, dozing against the cow, drowning dirt in the bucket and beating the animals when they kick.

Sick with croup on the last night of the holidays, Arvie insists on setting the alarm for work: the firm will not wait, and someone might take his place.

Mitchell vows that if he gets a job again he will stick to it and save, and that if the boss gives him the sack he simply will not take it.

He rehearses telling the boss that taking the sack has been the cause of all his troubles and that he is comfortable and will not go.

Unpaid, he will potter about for his meals until the boss decides he may as well give him regular work, and then he will draw his wages again.

A rough boy, Bill, turns up at Jones's Alley to warn Arvie that another lad will take his job if he does not come to work tomorrow, and learns from the mother that Arvie is dead.

Half a dozen travellers spell in the hut on New Year's Eve, hoping to shear a few stragglers but mostly tramping for rations to live till next shearing.

The country past Nevertire is parched; shearers watch the train with an independent air, and an unemployed man sent with a labour bureau letter finds his job is a hundred miles off.

On a cold wet night some two hundred unemployed men sleep on the pavements of Sydney under shop verandas, sharing newspapers and rooting in rubbish bins.

At a mean station Mitchell asks the manager for any work, is refused, and asks for rations instead; told to kill a sheep and take a forequarter, he takes a hindquarter.

Bill says his mother remarried for his sake and left him a stepfamily to support; he quit the factory because his stepfather waited for his pay, and now sells papers.

Baldy Thompson, an old squatter who has been everything from swagman to politician and is now at the banks' mercy, grumbles to travellers that he cannot afford to take on more men.

A sick young newcomer lies in a bunk while the others rest and read scraps; now and then a man goes to the station for flour when the manager is likely to be out.

The narrator crosses the strait in an old rusty coastal steamer; without competition, fares are high and food is foul, and the passengers pilfer the fruit cargo to survive.

On a scorching Christmas Day an old hut-keeping shepherd plans to yard the sheep early without the super knowing, cooks his dinner and thinks of digging up an Aboriginal grave.

Oranges vanish from the deck cargo; a shearer blames the saloon passengers, the comedian drops the narrator an orange, and no man dares complain about the peel lest he seem an informer.

Two jokers eat a stolen pineapple by an open porthole; next day the men argue it is no sin to rob a company that underfeeds them, feel mean when told a poor grower may bear the loss, and feel better when blamed on a middleman.

The two old mates walk among the abandoned shafts, pick over past mistakes and plan a new shaft the father will never sink.

The father's heart is not in his poor farm but in the old rushes, and the two yarn about lost claims until the children call them to breakfast.

With no experience and much bad advice he spends days digging round and trying to burn out the first great tree.

Following local advice he doctors his sick cows and then his horses, and they all die.

On a poor selection the worn-out wife shrieks for her son to bring in the cows, and the boy milks sore-teated cows in a yard of slush, dosed with an ointment recommended by a man who knows nothing.

Only the stragglers remain, men too poor, old or disheartened to follow the rushes, fossicking in old claims; a boy sits writing on a slate beside a newly rigged windlass.

She remembers losing the dam to a flood, losing her best cows to disease, shooting a mad bullock and selling its hide, and telling suspicious strangers that her husband and sons are nearby.

In a travellers' hut a man tells how hard times sent him upcountry for work, away from a wife he loved, and how he fell in with another woman.

Mitchell tells his mate about a girl visiting his sister whom he loved but thought too good for a rough, ugly man like him, so he kept away and took two or three years' work near the border.

The consumptive newcomer is sick in the night; next morning the men idle about the deck, smoking, playing quoits and eyeing a huge log lashed by the hatch.

The women appear near the end, young wives with babies whose husbands go ahead to earn enough to send for them; nearing land the men face again the question of how to make a living.

Ten mates gather on the wharf to see off their first mate, a carpenter who can get no regular work or fair wages in Sydney, leaving his wife with her people and four pounds ten.

He is the first of the old mountain push of building tradesmen to go; they have shared good times and lean ones and famous fortnightly sprees on country jobs.

Jack, the narrator's closest mate, left today, and the narrator thinks it is time he raised his own fare and followed the others.

Bill shares out fairly, but the narrator parts from him soon after: he is too sharp to keep up with.

They made him swear never to leave while his parents lived, but within a week they were grumbling that he could not get work, so he left; he and his mate set off across the plain.

He notes the fence he helped build twenty years ago, says the people have changed, and drifts out along the track at dusk.

A timid boarder tells the landlady he must leave because the place is too far from work, inventing excuses rather than the truth, while she gushes and asks him to send her new boarders.

Another man says the boss can barely write his name and that the grinning navvy is the college man; Steelman decides there is too much humour in the camp and they leave next day.

Two broke swagmen reach the hotel of a huge, mean, violent publican and run up drinks they cannot pay for, trying to look as if they have just been paid off.

The lost coin haunts him for months; since part of it was owed to his last landlord, he feels the loss as a judgment and hopes it is enough.

A slovenly daughter is scrubbing his room, so he lies on the parlour sofa under the landlady's disapproval; he is two weeks behind, and her politeness has cooled.

A sly child comes to tidy the parlour, so he takes his hat and goes out again, wishing he were upcountry or dead.

The landlady corners him in the passage for hours about her respectability, her boarders and her children, saying she could never be hard on a young man out of work.

The contractor's men botch the work and bill her; contractor, landlord and agent each refer her to another, and she is sued while her grocer and wood-man press her for the first time in years.

The narrator carries the swags out to the veranda, then lingers chatting with the publican and decides to take a big flask of whisky too.

He drives a nail up through the boot sole, asks what they owe, hears the threat of a beating, and bolts.

The publican gives chase in a slipper and loses it in a waterhole; the two swagmen escape into the bush and stay out of sight.

A stranger in the other bed woke as he raised the window and asked to borrow the rope, so the two teamed up to lower their swags.

The shadow catching the swags was the landlord, who asked why they had not simply told him they were broke, then fed them and sent them off with supplies.

She says the landlord would not let her take her furniture if she left; Bill offers to move her that night with a mate's cart and his push, for nothing, saying the landlord can do nothing.

She hesitates over losing her few things, especially the ironing table, then agrees; at eight Bill arrives with his push, lounging by the window while one keeps watch.

A policeman stands under the lamp opposite, apparently seeing nothing, an old Irishman who once resisted evictions himself; they go ahead, Bill carrying two of the children.

Chinny drags the horse and cart out of the gutter with the mangy dog behind; the push vanishes, and the policeman is already two blocks off, walking very straight the other way.

The tree falls on the squatter's fence; he breaks ploughshares he cannot pay for, while the squatter's people rob him, burn his hut and have him charged with stock theft.

He buys sheep to fatten, but the squatter's men set dogs on them and poison his dog; his nephew is jailed on a false charge and he gets six months for beating the squatter.

Out of jail, his wife robs him and runs off, hail ruins his orchard and a ruined neighbour shares wine with him; then the survey shows his land is elsewhere and the squatter seizes everything and sues.

The police look at them as rubbish; the narrator contrasts dossing out in the city with camping in the bush, where a poor man can light a fire, wash and be left alone.

The New Zealand steamer waits inside Sydney Heads to take on English immigrants, one of whom, a radical, complains that bankers rob widows unpunished while a poor man is transported for a shilling.

Her greengrocer gives her credit; in the local court the magistrate greets the landlord, finds against her in a moment, and she is steered out into the crowd with no one to listen.

On the quay after midnight an old man carefully folds his best trousers into a pillow, puts on his rags and sleeps.

An unemployed man drags himself back to his boarding house at one on Saturday, asks hopelessly for letters, and says he has eaten when he has not.

The narrator travels steerage with shearers, tradesmen, labourers and clerks driven from Australia by hard times; a bagman whose girl thought he was travelling saloon gives her flower to the stewardess.

A well-known Sydney man spends his last shilling treating friends and waves from the saloon deck for the sake of proud female relatives, then comes forward to steerage, bitterly proud.

Men of better days undress furtively, ashamed of their poor underwear, while the drunk shearers and their friends keep up a noisy concert late into the night.

In her spare time she sews new cuffs on gentlemen's shirts for a landlady who charges double; being called 'Misses' and respectable is the one thing she has left, and her house is falling down.

A swagman steps off the train in the city and a cabman offers him a cab, which he takes as a joke at his expense.

When the cabman hints that his swag does not look well in town, the swagman defends it and his dog and threatens to have him summoned.

Having made his point he gets into the cab anyway, to leave his swag and dog while he buys clothes, and mentions he once drove a cab himself.

In the city the outcast cannot light a fire or wash, must cadge breakfast and walk in circles all day, and among well-dressed men he feels despised and criminal.

A bloated first-class Englishman comes forward to gawk at the steerage as if it were a zoo until the comedian silently points him aft; the men grumble about the food.

Two dusty shearers sit down to dinner at a pub where a pretty servant girl is laughing and joking with some young gentlemen, but she will not say a word to the shearers, whatever Dave tries.

Dave tries flattery and gossip without a word from her, then bets his mate five pounds he will make her speak.

They keep passing their cups for more tea, grumbling at its weakness, until they are brimming over; she refills them without a word or a sign of temper.

After a dozen cups each and nearly an hour, they give up and leave their cups half full, and sit outside to let the tea settle before taking the track.

He remembers sailing out to the goldfields with his brother, full of hope, and the brother's arrest at Ballarat for a killing done in drink and jealousy.

Knocked back down the hatch by a wave, he drinks with the Maori, spending his last half-crown, and decides he will fall on his feet.

At shanties on a mud flat, forlorn horses wait outside a pub, and three drovers bring a small flock in across the flat, bound for the shanty once the sheep are yarded.

The drunk shearers befriend a saloon dandy who makes a fool of himself; passengers buy sour beer from a reticent, failed-looking steward.

Bogg, the town drunk regularly fined in the police court, once wandered into the newspaper office and corrected the editor's proofs, Latin and all.

They fuss over his bunk, drag him ashore for drink after drink, and grip his hand over the rail as the steamer casts off, singing and cheering till a sergeant of police watches them.

He dresses Smith in rags and greasepaint as a dying consumptive, and scripts a tale of a faithful mate who gave up his first job in nine months to carry him.

He drills Smith in a Scottish birth, a wronged old mother, the right church and the right symptoms, and threatens him if he comes back empty-handed.

He keeps the lonely cook talking while the cook fills his bags generously and hands over cooked beef and cake; the cook and overseer decide he is a bit gone, but he is only a city man who has been around.

Asked if he is a commercial traveller, Steelman introduces himself as Stoneleigh the geologist, with Smith as his man, and watches the boss grow uncertain.

He claims to be vice-president of a geological society and lectures on the strata of the cutting as if reading a book.

He says the rock is rotting, which makes their work easier, hints at gold, tin and silver in the gullies, and asks where he might find lodgings.

He sends them for rations and argues politics all night; travellers flatter his views to get a full nosebag; shearers once woke him with a false fire alarm, and he sacked them all, but they worked as usual next day.

Next morning the narrator agreed with him some more and got a sovereign, but learned later that the best way to win Baldy was to disagree with him on every point.

At a shearing shed the soft-hearted shearer called The Oracle, who collects afflicted men, takes an interest in a forlorn swagman found wandering with no memory of who he is.

The Oracle gets the stranger a job and threatens anyone who mocks him; Mitchell jokes about working the case for money; the stranger muses that he might be a lord.

The boss sacks Smith; the men nearly revolt on his behalf until Mitchell suggests The Oracle check his bunk, where he finds he has been robbed.

The Oracle goes silently for his horse, and one by one the others find their own bunks robbed too.

He was steered there by a furniture dealer who praised the landlady and took a commission; after paying in advance he found extras charged and food of the worst kind.

The boss invites them to camp with the party and use an empty hut; after tea Steelman lectures the more thoughtful men.

In the hut Steelman reads a cheap adventure novel, then hurriedly resumes his spectacles when a serious navvy brings coffee and cake and asks if they are comfortable.

A grinning young navvy tells Steelman the boss is a university man and the country's best mineralogist, ruined by drink; Steelman decides to stay one more day and take them down.

The wife skims dusty cream with her fingers and sets the milk through a strainer full of holes.

The debate about utopian books and a notorious murderer runs on in fragments while the wife shoos fowls, scolds the children and sends a rooster flying.

She will not take the children into the house, so she puts them to bed on the kitchen table and sits up all night beside them with a club, the dog and her sewing.

Her nerves are shaken: a nephew recently died of snakebite, and she has not heard from her husband for six months since drought ruined him and sent him back to droving; her girlish hopes are long dead.

She remembers fighting a bushfire alone in her husband's trousers with her small son beside her, saved only by four bushmen who arrived in time.

Last week she drove off a menacing swagman with a batten and the dog; every Sunday she dresses the children and walks the empty track with the pram, having grown used to the loneliness.

Bill and the mother find their stories alike: fathers who died suddenly at work, mothers who scrub offices and wash; she wishes she were dead, and he tells her to cheer up.

Mrs Aspinall cleans offices, washes and nurses from dawn to dark to keep her sickly children, dreading the return of a husband supposed dead and buying off a loafing elder son.

Gunther is nearly blind, his sight made worse by a quack; a young cousin guides him, and he plans to send the boy home before the city corrupts him.

Reading the clock's motto about early rising, Arvie decides it lies; his mother lies awake over her dead husband, her gaoled and absent sons, her scrubbing and the rent.

Isley winds up the wash-dirt for his father below, insisting he can take bigger loads, and is told to send down the slate for sums.

Leaning over the shaft to hear his father, Isley falls when the windlass slips; hauled up, he says goodbye to Tom and his father and dies.

Her eldest son swears and vows to stay awake and kill the snake; a thunderstorm comes on, and the dog's gaze tells her the snake is behind the partition.

She burns the snake; her son sees her tears, hugs her and vows he will never go droving, and they sit together as day breaks.

The mother overhears a hint about a woman and the father brushes it off with the mate's help; the mate tells the story of a diggings bride.

His mother accuses him of skimping the milking and he denies it; the dairy of rotten bark is propped up and patched with newspaper.

The boy is blamed for a missing prop and a lost cow and swears he is always blamed; he hand-feeds the weaned calves and beats them when they butt.

His mother caught him sick, took the pipe and returned it to its owner; she burned his next pipe and hid his tobacco, which his father seemed to have smoked.

He hid the bowl and stem of a cherry pipe separately, but she sniffed out the bowl; he switched to cigars, then a pipe again until she gave in; she has been dead seventeen years.

He proposes to the second girl as a joke and she accepts at once, tells his family and the whole district, and he is mocked everywhere.

He sends a mate to say it was a joke and that he is already married, then flees to another town and moves again when warned she is coming; his mate begins a yarn about a youth pursued by an older woman.

He imagines shearing the farmer's sheep, growing restless and giving notice, and the farmer demanding to know if he means to marry the girl.

He will marry her for the farm and two hundred pounds, and tells his mate he can come for tucker if he is hard up, but not while Mitchell is away.

Sitting on a log at dusk he tells her he leaves tomorrow, puts his arm round her and asks if she could love him.

He kisses her, draws her behind a bush, and presses her until she promises to walk with him by moonlight, though she fears her aunt and parents would not like it.

After a week of moonlight walks he leaves by coach; she waves hopelessly and buries her face in her hands; he goes straight to a bar in the city, and they say she broke her heart.

The selector ends in the asylum, and the ruined squatter follows him there, where the two become friends.

Before going down the shaft, Jack asks his brother Tom not to let the sun go down on their quarrel; Tom refuses his hand, then sits alone feeling mean.

Bill marks articles that support his side of an old argument and sends them on; Jim answers in kind, or they send a good joke or notice of an old mate's death.

Mitchell explains that nothing maddens a dog like another dog sniffing at him through his fence; the inside dog starts it and would kill even his own brother if he got out.

Sometimes the outside dog grins, but sometimes he is short-tempered, like peaceful men who never start a row but keep it going because the other started it.

Then they go at it like a war, though if the same two dogs met outside they might become the best of mates.

Mitchell tells his mate how he came home after eight years without writing to find the family in mourning, having been reported dead, and was smothered with joy.

He waylaid his children and knocked at sundown; his wife only said, 'Well, so you've come back'; he stayed a year, then deserted her again for good.

A swagman walks into a country grocery expecting to surprise old Ben Hake after many years, and learns that Hake sold out and died and that his other friends are gone.

He asks after more names, all dead or gone, then after Mary Wild, and learns she is the grocer's wife; he refuses to see her and shoulders his swag.

Brook, fifteen years in the city, lets the cattle through the sliprails of his dead father's old selection, now let to a tenant, and feels contempt for the unhappy boy he was there.

The narrator meets an old schoolmate, now a lank, red-bearded man on his father's farm, who answers everything with 'My oath!' and says the old schoolmaster 'finished' his education.

The schoolmate says he is thinking of training as a teacher, grows uneasy at talk of the old school and escapes; the narrator wonders which of them has changed.

Billy Nowlett, a bullock-driver, was reported dead by a publican who sent the widow five pounds; she managed better without him, an old digger began courting her, and then Billy turned up.

He smells gum leaves burning in a trapper's fire, recognises Australian gums, and shouts a greeting to the trapper, who answers him like an echo from the past.

After a long silence he snaps at a tourist who sneers at Australia, and decides to visit an old mate in Sydney first.

They talk about the bush and Gunther asks after a half-brother he has lost track of, seeing the home country clearly in his mind.

His conscience worked on him, he says, so he slaved for a year to save money and went to find his wife, who was struggling alone.

'Some day,' says Mitchell bitterly: he swore never to go home without a cheque, the cheque days are over, and the track slowly turns a man's heart into a bullock's.

A young union labourer, almost a stranger in town, drowns swimming horses; his funeral gathers at a pub, and most of it is too drunk to follow the hearse.

At the cemetery the priest's holy water shows up how cheap and shabby the coffin cloth is.

The gravedigger tries to soften the fall of the clods, but they knock on the coffin all the same.

There is no grieving mate and no letters in his swag, only union papers; his name turns out to be false, and the mourners soon forget it.

Tom says 'He never knowed' and Mason answers 'What does it matter?'; the neighbours make a shroud and a woman gives up her prized table for the coffin.

Bill asks to see him, takes his hat off, sizes up the pauper coffin, and lays his hand on the dead boy's forehead before covering the weakness with a question.

Bill says kids get sharp in the alley, offers to mend her step and sends his own mother to help lay Arvie out, though he cannot come to the funeral because he must work.

He shoots a goanna that had been feeding on the body; unable to leave the sheep to report the death, he decides to bury Brummy himself.

Feeling something ought to be said, he takes off his hat and recites a garbled 'ashes to ashes' in hope of the resurrection, then walks back to the hut.

The mates recall the generous fellowship of the old fields; after the visitor leaves the father broods, and the narrator wonders whether old mates were kinder to each other than sons are to fathers.

Tom decides to go and make up, but the shaft caves in on Jack; Tom rallies the diggers to dig through from old workings.

His mother sets the alarm back two hours to let him rest; while the owners hold a ball, the alarm rings in the night and Arvie does not wake: he is dead.

A drover walking with the narrator wonders if the dead man's union ticket will count in heaven, and points out that he was the man they joked with on the bank the day before.

Bill tells her Arvie was kept at the same work, dared not ask for a rise for fear of the sack, and was bullied by the other boys; she never knew, for he never complained.

He tells them he and his mother were saving to provide for his blind younger brother; the narrator regrets the jokes, and the men take up a collection for the brother.

The narrator sets out to find someone with influence to help, then remembers his own worn-out clothes and unpaid board and goes no further.

The narrator is travelling on a drover's pass in charge of cattle trucks, obtained after two humiliating weeks besieging local influence to escape the bush; the note of introduction says 'send this beggar on'.

Only after plaster falls and injures a child does the landlord agree to repairs; the agent had always said it was not his business, and the landlord has evicted fifteen-year tenants for six weeks' arrears.

The landlord refuses her; she gets sympathy but no help, and scorns the practical help of the brothel-keeper opposite; nobody considers that the landlord himself has been ruined in the crash.

Only the publican's wife believed him; he could not collect the wages owed him or convince the police, so he went away to start again; the old swagman then shows the same tattoo on his own arm.

A man leaves a good trade in the city to take up a selection, asks his sweetheart to wait, and starts fencing at a venture because the surveyors never come.

Ploughing with a borrowed broken-down horse and a hired child, he loses his temper, beats the cheeky boy and is set on by the boy's whole family.

He wins a bet over the flask, notices the publican limping from a nail in his boot, and offers to fix it, claiming it was his old trade.

Tom digs like a madman, breaks through in time to save Jack, then collapses with a burst heart, gripping his brother's hand as he dies.

Mitchell suggests he take a dead man's name, so they call him Smith and come to treat him as a harmless lunatic, while he borrows tobacco and forgets to return it.

Smith fails to turn up to work, claiming he has forgotten again; The Oracle vows to see it through, and the boss goes to confront him.

The Oracle finds Smith drunk at a shanty, recovers the stolen goods with the shanty-keeper's help, and beats his memory back into him.

The narrator and his mate strike through the scrub to a tiny border town at the end of an unfinished government road, and camp there a day.

The town is split by a rabbit-proof fence between two colonies, with the pubs on one side and the post office on the other, and nobody's account of it can be trusted.

The country round is a barren ash-heap, the river is dry, and the stores charge high prices for sour bread and poor sugar.

Mitchell tells his mate how a farmer mocked his plain, hardworking daughter as unmarriageable, and how he laughed along and then felt sorry for her.

Trying to comfort the girl, he offers to marry her and is refused; stung, he sets out to learn whether any girl would have him by asking an even plainer neighbour.

The pursued youth gives in without a struggle, marries the older woman, and is ordered about in front of the whole boardinghouse, though she makes him a good wife.

On a coach in New Zealand a grey-bearded Australian-born man calls the poorest local country grand and Australia a mongrel desert.

He says he left Australia twice, swearing never to return, and scorns the suggestion that he visit Sydney on his way back to America.

The selector spends three hours leaning on a fence with a neighbour discussing a cow, then fools about the stick-planted orchard and asks the neighbour to dinner.

At a scalding dinner on a hot day, with fowls in the house and steers in the wheat, the shiftless selector and his guests talk social reform.

The narrator describes the cramped, greasy city dining rooms where he boards as a respectable single man, sharing a room with four others.

He meets Jack Gunther, a slight old-school bushman half deaf from a horse's kick, who has come to the city to get something done for his eyes.

They talk fencing and timber; Gunther says the doctors can only promise slow improvement, and wishes he had seen one when his eyes first weakened.

Always cheerful, he plans to sort wool by feel if the worst comes, and has the narrator describe his photographs and write to his girl.

He gives up the hospital, waits anxiously for a letter, is moved onto the stair landing by the landlord, and practises a cheap concertina in case he has to busk.

Gunther's half-brother turns up, suspicious of everyone, and takes charge of him with rough tenderness, settling the bill and carrying him off; the narrator knows he is all right.

A newspaper reports a small boy found asleep on a factory's steps at four in the morning for fear of being late; a daughter of the factory's owners gets up a subscription for an alarm clock and is praised for it.

The narrator describes the bare slab hut where thirty shearers and rouseabouts eat and sleep in season, left littered with rubbish when the shed last cut out.

He describes the brush shearing shed and glaring iron wool-shed of a station owned by a company, owned by a bank, owned mostly from England.

One of them, the Exception, is an outcast even among these men, in a boot and a slipper found in rubbish, who has stopped mending his clothes.

Pat cannot decide whether a pair of trousers found in the scrub are worth carrying, and the men make tea by feel in the dark with no firewood left.

A drover is waved away to the bar before he can join; pubs close their front doors as the procession passes, and a drunk shearer pulls himself together to take his hat off.

A pompous publican holds the priest's hat over his head throughout the service to show off his importance to the church.

From the train the narrator sketches the western railway towns: a pub, a store in its shadow, a failed rival shop and a sundowner on the veranda.

Bushmen with crape on their hats board the train; a ragged sundowner drops his swag and runs at the train, but is only killing a snake.

A bush liar boasts of lost money, telegrams offering him work anywhere and a boss he thrashed, until a quiet bushman in the corner takes him down.

Mitchell plans to go down among the farms, where a farmer once wanted to keep him and the daughters liked his fiddle, and he will never want for tucker.

The narrator praises the custom of mates remailing newspapers to each other; Bill reads his paper through, and others in the camp ask to have it after him.

Both men once courted the same girl, who married another; Bill sends Jim the notice of her twins' birth with a chuckle, and each sits brooding over the old pain.

The narrator says he would sooner see his own work marked with crosses in a mate's remailed paper than praised by critics.

Golden Gully is an abandoned goldfield, its mullock heaps and shafts slowly being reclaimed by scrub under three lone pines.

Little Isley Mason, called His Father's Mate, labours over his copybook; he has always been a favourite of the diggers.

Tom Mason, a silent hard worker of sixty, stayed on after his wife died; digging by candlelight he is lost in painful memories.

He remembers troopers taking his seventeen-year-old son for armed robbery while he went on digging, unable to look up.

His wife died of shame after the trial and hard times; he fears the same fate for Isley and prays for the boy to die before it can come; Long Tom Hopkins is introduced.

Long Tom, a good-natured one-eyed digger, stops to chat with Isley and tells him education is a failure.

Isley proudly winds alone; Tom asks about Isley's lost brother and his father's brother, and takes a newspaper from the father's coat.

The women cover the coffin with a riding-skirt and the little funeral leaves in a dray; months later Tom brings a tall young man to Mason's hut, who calls him father.

On the first day back at school the master calls the roll and reads the name of a girl who has died; her sister sobs and the school dunce brightly answers 'Dead, sir'.

The cook's sulky, unlovable poodle follows the shearers to the shed each morning; the cook, Curry-and-Rice, is a fat old ship's cook stranded among rouseabouts far from the sea.

Every man denies knowing anything, and Geordie, who did it, loudly condemns the others for a mean, dirty trick.

Fares are cheaper now, but the public will patronise the cheapest until the rival is starved out and prices rise again; the crews have grown used to the danger.

Rushing for the wharf with little money, he pulls out his ticket to read the boat's name and loses his half-sovereign.

He describes searching his pockets again and again for a lost coin and retracing every hurried farewell beer.

He once found a lost coin in a pipe bowl months later; he leaves port hoping some poor devil found his, though he would rather have found it himself.

A sailor calls the old boat safe, then says he could poke a stick through her anywhere; below, sick families lie in the stinking cabin while a young Maori plays a concertina.

A drover's wife is left alone with four children in a slab hut nineteen miles from anyone; a snake goes into the woodheap and under the house, and her eldest boy and the dog rush after it.

Her husband is careless but good to her when he has money; she bore her last children alone, helped once by an Aboriginal woman, and rode nineteen miles carrying a dead child.

Near two in the morning, with the old scarred dog watching the wall, she lays down her sewing and thinks about her life, since there is little else to think about.

She is glad but undemonstrative when her husband returns; going for wood before dawn, she finds the woodheap she praised and paid an Aboriginal man for was built hollow, and cries.

Wiping her eyes, she pokes her fingers through the holes in her handkerchief and laughs, as she once laughed when the cat seemed to cry with her.

Near daylight the snake shows itself at a crack; the dog drags it out and the woman clubs it to death, holding her eldest back in bed.

He studies Lizzie, the tenant's plain, grave niece, who watches without smiling as he struggles with the jammed rails and bangs his knee.

Next morning he helps her milk, though the work brings back the past he despises, and they kiss over the strainer in the dairy.

On the platform as he left she cried and held up her arms to him; his mate asks if he will go back and marry her some day.

He admits he is out of sorts, and they roll out their swags for the long dry stretch tomorrow.

From a train in heavy rain beyond Bourke the narrator sees dismal flooded plains, a swagman's camp and a platform of patient, damp townsfolk.

He sees a swagman trudging hopelessly through the mud with a dingo at his heels, a hawker's sorry turnout and a teamster's camp.

He spends a freezing night in an ancient van while bushmen open the windows at every stop, and the weather clears for the cities.

Three shearers on a lonely plain see what looks like a man beating a woman, hurry to stop it, and find old Rats, a crazed swagman, fighting his own swag.

He shares his Christmas dinner with his dog Five Bob, yards the sheep, and walks three miles to dig up the grave for its bones.

Coming home through a gully he finds the sun-dried body of a man lying face down under a sapling.

On the way he keeps stopping for pulls at the rum, while black goannas keep appearing and his dog will not touch them.

At the hut the corpse falls against him and later seems to stare from empty sockets; he threatens it not to play jokes on him.

He wakes after dark to a rustling on the roof, searches with his shotgun, and finally sits up outside to watch till dawn.

He lowers the body into the grave and, leaning on his spade, remembers the past and says tomorrow has come for Brummy and is coming for him.

The narrator and Mitchell reach water two hours after dark following a twenty-five-mile dry stretch on their third day out, too stiff to sit down.

Lying on their swags with tea and pipes, they curse society for not being rich, and Mitchell recalls starting to smoke at fifteen by minding an admired older youth's pipe.

His father, kept on an allowance by his mother, livened up on learning of it and asked him for a fill; they had many quiet smokes together, and he has been dead twelve years.

After being told transportation is long over, the newcomer is unconvinced; passenger after passenger points to a different part of the cliff as the place of a famous wreck.

The narrator describes the dim steerage: drunk shearers asleep with knuckles on the deck, two young Swiss emigrants with a dictionary, and a consumptive newcomer staring at nothing.

A shearer tops the complaints with a tall tale of meat so bad out west that it had to be chained up and shepherded by dogs; the Sydney man starts a dog yarn.

The Sydney man's yarn falls flat, and a commercial traveller tells of a bag that knew its own way into pubs, until the steward turns off the light.

On his last night the bricklayer walks into Malachi's hut with a pumpkin in a bag, claims it is another man's skull, and says he has come for Malachi's.

When a cow charges the squatter's daughter and her city fiance runs for the fence, Malachi stops it barehanded and is gored; dying, he wonders how his mother will manage.

Billy Anderson, who worked with her dead son Arvie, recognises her outside the court and offers to walk her home.

She cannot afford the tram; she tells her troubles over and over while Bill repeats that it is red-hot, and admits her second husband ran off and is supposed dead.

He lost his carting jobs when the banks failed and his boss went bankrupt, and the paper trade is overcrowded; he asks her why she does not go to the sister-in-law who keeps inviting her.

An old swagman tells the narrator that most old bushmen have been reported dead at some time, and that he himself was better thought of by his friends when they believed him dead.

Billy had been confused with another driver; young Joe Swallow was buried and his ghost seen, until Joe turned up and people decided the ghost had been someone else's all along.

A bushranger shot in a hold-up was identified by a tattoo as Brummy Usen, a sawmill hand; when the real Brummy turned up, the obstinate neighbours would not believe he was alive.

A young doctor hears Bogg muttering in a bar and recognises a passage of Homer and a Dublin University song: he must once have been a classical scholar.

The leader makes the gang leave Bogg alone; days later the paper reports him drowned in the river, apparently by his own hand, his sorrows unknown.

Steelman and Smith reach a cooperative gang working on a new railway line in New Zealand; a gloomy navvy tells them the boss is only the party's elected spokesman.

Steelman, dressed as a scientific gentleman with Smith as his servant, chats with the young spokesman, who says they worked the swamps up to their waists in midwinter for eighteenpence a yard.

He declares the country geologically ancient, sends Smith up a slippery bank for a specimen, and talks of upheavals and restoring the mineral kingdom.

Smith entertains the other men, and in drink calls geology bosh and his employer Old Rocks, while praising his easy, well-paid billet.

The pair wink and chuckle in the dark; they stay on for days, poking at rocks in sight of the works each morning, then loafing in the bush till dinner and lecturing on stones at night.

Sally Thompson argues there is too much sentiment about the dead and justice is owed to the living; Barcoo calls Macquarie a spieler, and the old man says he has one more point.

Taken for a fellow rouseabout by a jackaroo, Baldy calls Thompson the meanest squatter alive and then gives the lad tucker from the store; the narrator once got rations by repeating Baldy's own ideas to him.

The policeman joins in the singing; the first mate has since prospered in New Zealand; another left secretly to escape debt, dishonour and a drunken wife, and others followed.