It had been a hot, close night, and it ended in a suffocating sunrise.
The free portion of the male population were in the habit of taking
their blankets and sleeping out in "the Park," or town square, in
hot weather; the wives and daughters of the town slept, or tried to
sleep, with bedroom windows and doors open, while husbands lay outside
on the verandas. I camped in a corner of the park that night, and the
sun woke me.

As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty
road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran
across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren,
broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol. I knew
that swagman's walk. It was John Merrick (Jack Moonlight), one-time
Shearers' Union secretary at Coonamble, and generally "Rep"
(shearers' representative) in any shed where he sheared. He was a
"better-class shearer," one of those quiet, thoughtful men of whom
there are generally two or three in the roughest of rough sheds, who
have great influence, and give the shed a good name from a Union point
of view. Not quiet with the resentful or snobbish reserve of the
educated Englishman, but with a sad or subdued sort of quietness that
has force in it--as if they fully realized that their intelligence is
much higher than the average, that they have suffered more real
trouble and heartbreak than the majority of their mates, and that
their mates couldn't possibly understand them if they spoke as they
felt and couldn't see things as they do--yet men who understand and
are intensely sympathetic in their loneliness and sensitive reserve.

I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in Sydney,
and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him