The swagman cometh
By Dave Riley
Maybe you are fed up with the city and its teeming peoples. Their ways and means, as getting and lending and spending, lay waste your inner world and are too much for you. The car is noisy and toxic, while the train is always crowded.
So what do you do? You go bush and waltz your matilda all over, no collar or stockings to cramp your style. As you tramp the land, the scent of eucalyptus and dung fill the air and the rhythm of an old work enters your soul. Camped by a billabong under the shade of a spreading coolabah tree, you sing as you wait for your billy to boil, "Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"
While your thoughts are focused on a mug of steaming chamomile tea, a jumbuck comes down to drink at the billabong. You ask yourself: do I fit the legend? Having eaten nothing but two Weet-Bix at breakfast, a lamb roast would go down just fine.
At this moment the ethics of the deed being previewed are worth meditating on. For a vegetarian, there would be no qualms of conscience. The jolly jumbuck has as much right to its sheepish joy as you have to yours. Anything else would be anathema. So if you were so inclined, that jumbuck would stay out of your tuckerbag (and you could quietly starve).
But low on cash and without a McDonald's in cooee, maybe you could go something a little more filling than a Mars bar and half a packet of crisps — your tuckerbag's current contents. With lamb selling at $1.99 a kilogram, who would miss one little baa baa? Sheep demography being what it is, there are sure to be millions more where this one came from.
Besides, for one hundred years it's been kosher for the homeless to live off mutton and tea. Ask any Anzac what they fought for. Many a digger went into battle with a rifle at the shoulder and Waltzing Matilda on their lips. The right of tramps to carry off jumbucks has been written in blood by the nation. In Australia there is such a thing as a free lunch.
But such joy is short lived. While the belly comes first (one) and morality trails close behind (two), private property and state troopers soon (three) follow: "Whose that jolly jumbuck you've got in your tuckerbag?"
"Whose!" they ask. Whose jolly jumbuck!
Now we are getting down to tin tacks. There's no joy in having morsels taken from your lips by a show of force, for behind each jolly jumbuck musters a body of armed men.
So what? You may ask. My point is this: never let the bastards bluff you. Don't just lie there and take it. Not for you this business of springing unaided into billabongs. Drowned swaggies "living" the legend can be a dime a dozen.