Robert Henderson Croll “Along the Track”

Bob Croll published “Along the track” in 1930. Its a memoir of travels in the Victorian Bush per boot. The Order commends this essay to you. File it under nostalgia.

You can read other essays from the book here.

“Bed in the bush with stars to see.”

-R.L.S

A bed in the tree-tops sounds absurd, outside of Peter Pan. And even Barrie’s genius cannot carry it off to grown-ups; they tolerate it with a smile as a pretty fancy and evade the sharp questions of youth. But I for one have known it, and it was in no Land of Make Believe, but in this sober State of Victoria.

He who travels much with the swag knows strange beds. And as the specialist greatly develops by use the particular sense he most requires, so the swagman gains the camp eye. With the day drawing to a close he is constantly on the watch for the suitable sleeping-place, so constantly that the effort becomes sub-conscious. Water is the first essential of a camp; given that, he looks for a few feet of level for his blankets or sleeping-bag, and a bit of shelter if weather threatens. On this evening we had come across an old well in the tea-trees which bordered the long beach, and we had filled the billies in passing. Sand hummocks rose high on our left with every now and then a gully opening through as though a creek had once run there to the sea.

Up one of these we tried. Its sides were soft drift, of the kind that feels so comfortable in the hand, and becomes so hard when you sleep on it. We knew it well, and admired it not at all. Moreover, the angle was too great; by morning we should have been feet lower than where we started. On the crest of the rise was too breezy, at the bottom was a certain dampness. Then came the vision. Half-way up were the broad, leafy heads of a group of tea-trees, buried to their necks in the shifty hummock. No trunks appeared, only some three feet of the topmost branches. It was easy to step off the higher slopes of the sand on to these natural mattresses, so tightly packed as to be almost solid, and there, under a wonderful sky of stars, we spread our beds and slept more softly than on any couch the bush had yielded to that date or has yielded since.

Not that the swagman is, in modern parlance, “fussy” as a general thing about where he sleeps. I speak of the amateur swagman, of course. The fresh air of the open, the relaxing muscles after a long day’s tramp, the soothing murmur of a near-by creek—these induce sleep, however hard the bones of Mother Earth may be beneath him. But he grows cunning with experience, and it is not long before he sleeps, because, maybe, of those other things, but also because he is comfortable. He learns the value of the judicious hip-hole and how to line it to advantage; he finds that ten minutes’ cutting of bracken will yield a more satisfactory return than the most elaborate bed of such trash as dogwood. He will learn, too, that gum-tops spell peace and sweet slumbers, while the wattles generally are better left to decorate the spring. On the coast the elastic scrub known as cushion-bush will be always chosen after one experience. With cushion-bush beneath him, a low break-wind on the right quarter, a clear night and a singing sea, the swag-man, like Emerson, “envies not the luxury of kings.”

Untoward happenings occur at times, as when a dingo (or a fox, it was hard to tell which by the tracks he left), put an inquisitive nose into the hood of a sleeping-bag while the owner slept the sleep of the first night out, on the delta of a Gippsland river. But that was unusual, and the number of night disturbances, other than those occasioned by such small deer as mosquitoes or fleas, suffered in the camps incidental to over 1,000 miles of tramping in Victoria during the past fifteen years, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Snakes are a bogey, and, just like bogies, they are rarely seen. More rarely still is a reptile met with at night. Only one really effective snake scare have I had after dark. It was near the Bringenbrong Bridge, on the Murray, and as we sat round the camp-fire under the drooping willows a frog shrieked near by in an unusual and tragic sort of way. “Snake!” said Charlie, the guide, and the talk at once turned to that topic, which has been popular with mankind ever since the expulsion from Eden. Each story was more “creepy” than the last. Then we went to our beds, spread out on the high bank above the water. How long afterwards it was no one knows, but two horrific yells, the yell of genuine fright, came out of the darkness, “A snake! A snake!” and as one man the camp sat up and demanded matches. Through the babel rose a sudden sound of beating; a cautious camper was whacking the ground all round him with a fern frond. “Hullo, here’s a frog!” called another, and the original disturber of the peace began to realize what had really happened. He had been lying in the warm night with his chest bare, and a wandering frog had leaped plump on to his naked throat. A frog is a cold and clammy thing; the snake stories had done the rest.

Only when you lie on unyielding substances do you realize what an awkward shape man possesses. To repose on your side with any ease means that two outstanding protuberances, the shoulder and the hip, must be conciliated. A high pillow (usually a log or a stone covered with some article of clothing) will ease the strain on the shoulder, and a small hole to fit the hip will keep the other from troubling. But on the floor of a lighthouse where once I slept, or on rocky surfaces, the hiphole is impossible. The veteran will then lie on his back, but even he will feel the pressure on his bony frame. It is recorded of a party of lads, that they camped in an old hut for two nights to escape some rough weather. The floor was of boards, which had been put down when green. Their edges had turned up, and proved sharp enough to mark the youngsters’ bodies through their thin blankets. It was hard to find ease in any position. “The first night,” said the chronicler, “we lay north and south, the second we tried east and west, the third day we played draughts on one another!”

Two nights out of doors I recall because of their bitter cold. They were clear and almost windless. One was spent on the beach at Dromana, the other on the flat crest of Mount Howitt’s 5,700 feet. Each was at Christmas-time, and in both cases the usually comfortable enough swag was found ridiculously inadequate. Of the two, the seaside cold was the more searching, mainly because it had not been properly provided against. On Howitt we knew no liberties could be taken, so boughs of that poorly foliaged tree the snow-gum, the only growth available at that height, were put under and over the sleeping-bag, and a waterproof sheet covered all. In the morning a layer of ice made the sheet look like glass, and just like glass it crackled and broke as it was lifted. A night on Freeze-out, near Mount St. Bernard, was also rather more than “fresh.” It suggested indeed that Freeze-out was well named. But for sheer discomfort, however, a recent camp on Kosciusko must take the palm. Rain, fog, wind, and a sodden scrub were bad enough, but we were also above the timber line, with all that that implies in the way of temperature, and not a stick could be had that would hold up a shelter. Wet all night, with an outlook limited by the mists to a few yards even in the daylight, can it be wondered that we gave three hearty cheers for the sun when he struggled through next morning. Camp Misery, we named that unhallowed spot.

Against those failures (not really failures, any of them, in retrospect, whatever they seemed at the time) stands the record of numberless golden nights in which it was good to be alive, in which nothing could go wrong, and one felt that civilization is a stupidity and man a degenerate since those days

“When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”

We lean too much towards softness and the stale air of bedrooms. A glowing camp-fire in the open, a bed of bracken, stars tangled in the tops of the tall green timber that towers above you, a mopoke far enough away for his melancholy vespers to be wholly soothing, a mate close by sucking his pipe, and saying just those things that fit such a time and place, the happy crooning of a creek in the ferns at the foot of the rise—what better things are there in life? If these cannot content you, you must keep to the cities: the bush is not for you.