Southerly Busters

Many of these Scraps were originally contributed by the Author to The Town and Country Journal, Sydney Punch, The Illustrated Sydney News, and other Australian newspapers and magazines.


CONTENTS

a. Billy, a tin pot for making tea in.
b. Young gentlemen getting their colonial experience in the bush are called jackeroos by the station-hands. The term is seldom heard except in the remote back-blocks of the interior.
c. It was formerly the practice of squatters to give a ration of flour, mutton, and, occasionally, tea and sugar, to all persons travelling ostensibly in search of work. The custom, however, as might have been expected, became frightfully abused by loafers, and has of late fallen into disuse, to the intense disgust of the tramping fraternity in general.
d. The Yanko is a noted sheep-station in the Murrumbidge district (the Paradise of loafers), where travellers were, and, I believe, still are, feasted at the expense of the owners, on a scale of great magnificence, and somewhat mistaken liberality.
e. The utterly refined and unsophisticated reader is informed that to whip the cat signifies, in nautical parlance, to weep or lament.

I AM assured that something in the way of an apologetic preface is always expected from a new-chum author who has had the hardihood to jump his Pegasus over the paddock fence (so to speak), and drop, uninvited, into the field of letters; and so, having induced a publisher, in a moment of weakness, to bring me before the public, it behoves me to conciliate that long-suffering body by conforming to all established rules. I am aware that my excuse for inflicting this work on mankind is somewhat thin but, such as it is, I will proceed to state it, as a plea in bar against all active and offensive expressions of indignation on the part of outraged humanity.