Grant McLennan said of the song:

I wrote (the song) to please my mother. She hasn’t heard it yet because my mother and stepfather live (on a cattle station) and they can’t get 240 volts electricity there, so I have to sing it over the phone to her. I don’t like the word nostalgic; to me, it’s a sloppy yearning for the past, and I’m not trying to do that in that song. I’m just trying to put three vignettes of a person, who’s a lot like myself, growing up in Queensland, and just juxtaposing that against how I am now.

As The Canberra Times described the song’s structure:

The three verses by McLennan cover three phases of his life to date in a series of images – the primary schoolboy scrambling through cane fields, the adolescent in boarding school losing his late father’s watch in the showers, the young man at university discovering a bigger brighter world – and then the fourth phase of his life: Robert Forster, playing himself.