spare boots and poetry all lumped together.
I tried carrying a load on my head, and got a crick in my neck and spine
for days. I've carried a load on my mind that should have been shared
by editors and publishers. I've helped hump luggage and furniture up to,
and down from, a top flat in London. And I've carried swag for months
out back in Australia--and it was life, in spite of its "squalidness"
and meanness and wretchedness and hardship, and in spite of the fact
that the world would have regarded us as "tramps"--and a free life
amongst _men_ from all the world!

The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land--of the
Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of
self-reliance, and never-give-in, and help-your-mate. The grave of many
of the world's tragedies and comedies--royal and otherwise. The land
where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and
take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the Gulf, or never
be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the
mounted police, or never found and never buried--what does it matter?

The land I love above all others--not because it was kind to me, but
because I was born on Australian soil, and because of the foreign father
who died at his work in the ranks of Australian pioneers, and because
of many things. Australia! My country! Her very name is music to me. God
bless Australia! for the sake of the great hearts of the heart of her!
God keep her clear of the old-world shams and social lies and mockery,
and callous commercialism, and sordid shame! And heaven send that, if
ever in my time her sons are called upon to fight for her young life and
honour, I die with the first rank of them and be buried in Australian
ground.

But this will probably be called false, forced or "maudlin sentiment"
here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the music-halls, and the
popular applause it receives, is enough to make a healthy man sick, and
is only equalled by music-hall vulgarity. So I'll get on.

In the old digging days the knapsack, or straps-across-the chest
fashion, was tried, but the load pressed on a man's chest and impeded
his breathing, and a man needs to have his bellows free on long tracks
in hot, stirless weather. Then the "horse-collar," or rolled military
overcoat style--swag over one shoulder and under the other arm--was
tried, but it was found to be too hot for the Australian cli