McCracken’s A. K. ‘At Eleven’, City Brewery Melbourne

In the 19^th century, Australian bush poetry grew in popularity alongside an emerging sense of Australian nationalism. The swagman was venerated in poetry and literature as symbolic of Australian nationalistic and egalitarian ideals.

Coinciding with trends in 19^th century Australian literature, swagmen were popular subjects of contemporary painters and illustrators. Drawings of swagmen, itinerant bush workers, rural nomads and other men ‘on the wallaby’ were prevalent in newspapers and picturesque atlases. S.T. Gill and James Alfred Turner popularised the open-air life of the swagman. By the 1880s, swagmen featured in the works of Tom Roberts, Walter Withers, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, and other artists associated with the Melbourne’s Heidelberg School, which is customarily held to be the first distinctly Australian movement in Western art and the ‘golden age of national idealism’ in Australian painting.

It isn’t that surprising when we see the subject matter of two swagmen taking a break under a gum tree and ‘cracking’ a beer in this great poster for McCracken’s Brewery. ‘Cracking’ a beer was literally that — breaking the top off the champagne beer bottle! The O’Shea Hotel in the background was one of the last pubs you would see on your way out of Melbourne on the Ballarat Road, Footscray.