The poem relates the experiences of a man from the Bush who visits Sydney and becomes the subject of a practical joke by a mischievous barber.

The barber pretends to cut the bushman's throat by slashing his newly-shaven neck using the back of his cut-throat razor that had been heated in boiling water.

The barber confesses that he was playing a joke, and the bushman, unconvinced, returns to Ironbark, where, due to his accounts of his Sydney experiences, "flowing beards are all the go".

There are obvious echoes in the poem of the urban legend of the murdering barber - fictionalised in the penny dreadful The String of Pearls which featured the notorious Sweeney Todd.

"[4] The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature states: "In ironbark the oft-told story reinforces traditional bush suspicion of the city and leads to a pronounced fashion in beards.