The painting depicts an itinerant family; a woman with her child on her lap and a man boiling a billy for tea.

[1] McCubbin painted the work near his residence in Brighton, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne.

[4] The work is popularly known in Australia due to its use in an advertisement for Kit Kat chocolate bars in the 1980s.

[6] Scottish-Australian poet and bush balladeer Will H. Ogilvie (1869–1963) wrote the poem 'The wallaby track' which was printed in The Bulletin on 6 June 1896, the same year as McCubbin's painting.

The poem was later included in Ogilvie's inaugural anthology Fair girls and gray horses.