Explore "They Wait on the Wharf in Black" by Henry Lawson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulate the heaviest swags of trouble in this world. " -- Steelman. Told by Mitchell's Mate.
We were coming back from West Australia, steerage -- Mitchell, the Oracle, and I. I had gone over saloon, with a few pounds in my pocket. Mitchell said this was a great mistake -- I should have gone over steerage with nothing but the clothes I stood upright in, and come back saloon with a pile. He said it was a very common mistake that men made, but, as far as his experience went, there always seemed to be a deep-rooted popular prejudice in favour of going away from home with a few pounds in one's pocket and coming back stumped; at least amongst rovers and vagabonds like ourselves -- it wasn't so generally popular or admired at home, or in the places we came back to, as it was in the places we went to.