While working, often alone and well away from civilisation in some of the more remote parts of Oz, I've often contemplated these two.

Independence
Nancy Cato
I will think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. — Wordsworth

How the red road stretched before us, mile on mile
narrowing into the distance, straight as though ruled
on yellow paper, away to the lilac hills
low on the horizon. Above them the storm-clouds piled
in a sky blue as though bruised, yet all ahead
was glowing in an unearthly wash of light —
dry roly-poly and saltbush lit to beauty,
the sky a menace, but the wide plains bright.

And there in that lonely place an ancient swagman,
traveller, bagman, sundowner, what you will —
his rolled-up blankets slung aslant his shoulders,
billy dangling, his back to the line of hills
and the coming storm; as mysterious in that place
(with his hat set straight and his grey beard blowing)
as a small ship glimpsed a moment far from land.
Where did he come from? Where could he be going?

I shall never know, for we had to race the rain
that turns the black soil plains to a gluey mud
bogging to the axles. Only a wave of the hand,
but still the imagination glows, the blood
stirs at the memory of that symbolic stranger
glimpsed in a moment of vision, and swiftly gone:
Man and his independent spirit, alone
on the vast plains, with night and rain coming on.

and

The dead swagman
Nancy Cato

His rusted billy left beside the tree;
under a root, most carefully tucked away,
his steel-rimmed glasses folded in their case
of mildewed purple velvet; there he lies
in the sunny afternoon, and takes his ease,
curled like a possum within the hollow trunk.

He came one winter evening when the tree
hunched its broad back against the rain, and made
his camp, and slept, and did not wake again.
Now white-ants make a home within his skull:
his old friend Fire has walked across the hill
and blackened the old tree and the old man
and buried him half in ashes, where he lay.

It might be called a lonely death. The tree
led its own alien life beneath the sun,
yet both belonged to the Bush, and now are one:
the roots and bones lie close among the soil,
and he ascends in leaves towards the sky.

Cheers, Rowan