The swag

‘A man out of employment’

In ‘The Romance of the Swag’, in Children of the Bush (1902), Henry Lawson, who had carried swag himself ‘for months out back’, called Australia ‘the land where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and take the track’. He explains how to roll one: a tent fly or calico, blankets ‘blue by custom’ (hence ‘bluey’), spare clothes in the core, three or four straps. The word is older than his essay: by the 1830s Australians used ‘swag’ for a bushman’s belongings, and ‘swagman’ dates from the gold rushes of the 1850s.

‘Kind sir, I want a job!’

Swagmen walked from station to station, usually looking for work as shearers or farm hands, and they were especially common in the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s. In ‘The Squatter’s Man’, one of the songs Banjo Paterson gathered in The Old Bush Songs (1905), a newcomer walks up to a station owner ‘With my swag and billy-can’ and says, ‘Kind sir, I want a job!’

To verify: When The Old Bush Songs first came out: Wikipedia gives 1905, but the copy we read is the second impression of 1906

Waltzing Matilda

A swag was nicknamed ‘Matilda’, so walking with one was ‘waltzing Matilda’. In Banjo Paterson’s song of 1895 a swagman camps by a billabong, takes a stray sheep and drowns there rather than be taken; it has been called Australia’s ‘unofficial national anthem’. Campers still sleep in swags. Wishlore note: we draw the swag as the bedroll of someone walking on in hope of work, not as a charm.