The free males take their blankets and sleep in the “park;” the women sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on the verandas across the open doors—in case of accidents.
Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses, electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water’s edge with harbour picnic-parties. “A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle Harbour one shilling return!” Strings of tourist trains running over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen—not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush within a stone’s throw of the city, so to speak.
Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.
And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer dress, hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the “blue sea over the white sand rolls,” racing in and out with the rollers, playing with the glorious Pacific. Manly—“Our Village”—Manly Beach, where we used to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the world on one side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other. Ferny gullies and “fairy dells” to north and south, and every shady nook its merry party or happy couple.
Manly Beach—I remember five years ago (oh, how the time goes by!)—and two names that were written together in the sand when the tide was coming in. And the boat home in the moonlight, past the Heads, where we felt the roll of the ocean, and the moonlit harbour—and the harbour lights of Sydney—the grandest of them all.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Henry Lawson 17th June 1867 — 2nd September 1922.
These stories were first published as a collection in 1902. Republished as “Send Round the Hat” and “The Romance of the Swag” in 1907.
Notes on Australianisms. Based on my own speech over the years, with some checking in the dictionaries, e.g. “Macquarie Book of Slang” (2000), Oxford English Dictionary. Not all of these are peculiar to Australian slang, but are important in Lawson’s stories, and carry overtones.