On The Wallaby, The Diary of a Queensland Swagman by Edward S. Sorenson

The first night camping out is often the longest remembered by those who go on the wallaby. Some are jolly and eager for the morrow, speculating where that morrow will land them, and what fortune it will bring; others are miserable, and squat like moody aborigines, staring at the glaring coals and weighing the prospects carefully; and there is in both a certain sense of loneliness engendered more by the altered conditions than by the new environment. The novice who has been used to a soft bed discovers as soon as he stretches himself on solid ground what an awkward thing his hip is. He fidgets from side to side, trying to get it into a comfortable position, and that point seems to be more prominent than he ever dreamed of before. Many travellers never get over the hip trouble, for which reason they make an excavation to accommodate the protuberance, or they carry a hipper--a piece of woolly sheepskin, a horsehair pad, or a small bag of feathers. A good many gather leaves or grass to form a mattress. Everything being strange, too, one lies for a long while looking at the stars, gazing into the great, aching silence of space, listening to the myriad sounds on his own dark plane, and thinking of home. He thinks of other things; many scenes of his past life are reviewed, his lost opportunities regretted, just as they are by the man going into exile in a distant land; knowing by the experience of hundreds before him that he may never again know a place that he can call his home.

It was a pleasant place, quiet, with nothing lonely about it; where I spent my first night on the track. Behind me was a sheltering clump of tee-trees, and a little way off in front was the northern road, running as straight as a dart across a green flat to low, wooded hills beyond. My bluey was spread on the grass and cheerfully blazing beside it my little camp-fire gave light enough to read by. I had a late copy of the "Queenslander," but I did not read much. My mind was wandering out west, where I knew a thousand other camp-fires burned to-night, and where I would light many another, marking my stages across the State. There is poetry and tragedy in the traveller's fire, in the early days, when the blacks were bad, diggers and others, striking across country to new fields and new runs, left their fires at sundown and went on for two or three miles before camping for the night. The blacks, attracted by the blaze, would often gather round the abandoned fires, and, perhaps, throw in a shower of spears.