Ant-bed

1912, Fred King, "Born to Floods and Drought" in Marion Houldsworth, ed. Barefoot Through the Bindies, Salisbury, QLD: Boolarong Press, 2012, p. 112, https://books.google.ca/books?id=IEgexYAnkFAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false The meat house had an ant-bed floor and the old blackboy and I dug that ant-bed out, carted it away about fifty yards and shovelled it into a gully. And then we built another ant-bed floor.

Gaudy fungi sprouted from the bark walls of the humpies, which were furred with green slime. The roofs, shrunk by the long dry season, and the green beams which supported them swelled and twisted and leaked at every joint, and the ant-bed floor came up in clods of grey mud on the men's boots.

The floor was of ant-bed, the stuff of the termites' or white-ants' nests, which when crushed and wetted and beaten hard makes serviceable cement.

Mum said Dad told her he would fix the problem. "We'll put down an ant-bed floor," he suggested. We collected ant-hills from the paddocks, crushed them, mixed the powder to a smooth paste with water, and then spread a thick layer over the dirt floor." Mum told me, adding, "The ant-bed dried hard enough to sweep with a broom. I dragged an old pair of trousers dipped in water over it to keep it hard."