Or so we’re told.

Maybe it’s a product of growing up revering Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never Never and the untamed bush which so shocked the city woman out on Elsey Station, which started the myth.

The stockmen surviving for weeks during mustering on beef, damper and billy tea before rolling into their swag for the night, a last drag on their fag and then rising refreshed with a cheery greeting for the dew of the pre-dawn.

Well this outback type spent a few days in the swag waiting for his nice, soft bed to arrive in the furniture truck last week and was a bit worse for wear.

A scrounge around town soon dug up an air mattress but even that on the floor was enough assurance that my mustering days were over before they began.

And I’m a farm boy, from what we call a broadacre grain farm in the Victorian Mallee, although a thousand hectares hardly compares with a thousand square kilometres.

My swag (it has been some time since I unrolled it) still has my name branded on it by a woolclasser mate in the farm-nerdy style of the time.

I once boasted it was so comfortable I could have a great night’s rest on bitumen – people can say the silliest things.

Now my only problem is burrowing my way through the forest of pillows that seems to be the modern fashion adornment for any mattress, we still only have one head.

It rained a bit last week, okay it rained a lot.

Sunday night, down she came (which is rain always feminine, dunno), my first big tropical storm and what a beaut.

I didn’t have a bed but I had a rain gauge, no farm boy is complete without  one, I wanted to Facebook the people back south telling them how many metres of rain we’d had the night before.

Of course they are all under water themselves, and don’t care.

The wet is followed by the dry, and that’s followed by the build-up, then the wet and so on.

So why did we have people running around with such relief last week saying we’re saved, the wet is early this year.

It got so I thought there’d be an impromptu street party.

But then again, perhaps this is all about the “going troppo” I’d been warned about.