subs. (Australian).—See quots. and OVERLANDMAN.
1880. G. N. OAKLEY, Victoria in 1880, 114. THE SUNDOWNER [Title of poem].
1888. D. MACDONALD, Gum Boughs and Wattle Bloom, 32. When the real ‘SUNDOWNER’ haunts these banks for a season, he is content with a black pannikin, a clasp knife, and a platter ‘whittled’ out of primeval bark.
1890. Argus, 20 Sept., 13. 5. SUNDOWNERS are still the plague of squatocracy, their petition for ‘rashons’ and a bed amounting to a demand.
1891. F. ADAMS, John Webb’s End, 34. ‘Swagsmen’ too, genuine, or only ‘SUNDOWNERS,’—men who loaf about till sunset, and then come in with the demand for the unrefusable ‘rations.’
1892. SIDNEY DICKINSON, Station Life in Australia, in Scribner’s Magazine, xi. Feb., 143. They swell the noble army of ‘swagmen’ or ‘SUNDOWNERS,’ who are chiefly the fearful human wrecks which the ebbing tide of mining enterprise has left stranded in Australia. [This writer does not differentiate between SWAGMAN (q.v.) and SUNDOWNER.]
1893. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 Aug., 8. 7. Numbers of men who came to be known by the class name of SUNDOWNERS, from their habit of straggling up at fall of evening with the stereotyped appeal for work; and work being at that hour impossible, they were sent to the travellers’ hut for shelter and to the storekeeper or cook for the pannikin of flour, the bit of mutton, the sufficiency of tea for a brew, which made up a ration.
1896. JOHN HYDE, An Afternoon with Guy Boothby, in The Windsor Magazine, Dec., 132. “A ‘SUNDOWNER?’” I queried. “Yes; the lowest class of nomad…. They approach a station only at sunset, hence the name.”
