SHARING THE HARVEST – THE JAMBEROO RECORDINGS NOW ONLINE

Gay Charmers at Jamberoo

In 2001, the Jamberoo Folk Festival featured two concerts by traditional performers, including Bill Case, Lola Wright, Eileen McCoy and many more. Long sleeping in the National Library’s Oral History and Folklore Collection, the full recordings, together with interviews and talks by Edgar Waters, Mark Cranfield and Robyn Holmes are now available online at

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1664097

Edgar Waters, Mark Cranfield and Robyn Holmes, National Library of Australia

Click on the link above, then click on this logo"

 This will take you to a user agreement, at the bottom of which is a green ‘I accept’ button, click that and it takes you straight to the list of the sessions, starting with the first one. Just click on the arrow at the right-hand side of each item to hear the riches within.

Bill Case and Rob Willis

FORBES AND THE LACHLAN REGION OF NSW THE FOLKLORE CENTRE OF AUSTRALIA!

 Here’s a reply to the Gundagai post, from Rob Willis:

Buried within 25 metres of each other in the Forbes cemetery are the remains of two of Australia’s best known bushranger dynasties, Ben Hall and Kate Kelly, the (in)famous sister of Ned.  Not buried however are the songs, poems and stories of these people along with the other well known bushrangers Frank Gardiner, Johnny Gilbert and of course stories and songs of the famous Escort Gold Robbery, the richest robbery in Australian history.  The Ben Hall  bushranger ballads are recognised as among the best in our folk song tradition. ‘The Streets of Forbes’ is probably Australia’s best known and most sung bushranger ballad. 

The cause of all this bushranging activity was the rich Lachlan (Forbes) diggings and here again we have a large number of songs, yarns and poems reflecting on this 1860’s era.  Thankfully many of these have been preserved in our National Library of Australia (NLA), Folklore collection.

After the gold petered out agricultural enterprise took over.  The poetry and songs of shearers, drovers, and women and men on the land that mention the Lachlan are numerous, what bush band worth its salt has not performed ‘The Lachlan Tigers’. “Hurrah for the Lachlan, “Across the Western Plains” are well known lines from other folk ballads.

From the gold rush to the golden age of wool, the Lachlan inspired the writings of Henry Lawson (whose birth was registered in Forbes), Banjo Paterson, Breaker Morant, Will Ogilvie and Paul Wenz.  Morant, Ogilvie and Wenz actually worked and wrote in the area.

Traditional music and dance – the regional, collected tunes of Harry Schaefer, Colin Charlton, Dave Mathias, Ebb Wren and others are played by musicians inAustralia and even worldwide.

There is also a strong regional dance tradition that has been recorded. 

Thankfully, many of these tunes, stories and dances are also preserved in the NLA collection.

Tales of ‘characters’ from our area have been recounted in books authored by Banjo Paterson and other writers and Graham Seal is on record saying that the Lachlan is a ‘land of legends’

I rest my case.

IS GUNDAGAI THE FOLKLORE CAPITAL OF AUSTRALIA?

 

The tucker box statue before the snappy recent one, photographed in 1926

The small town on the Murrumbidgee River has always been well placed to become a folklore hub. Established from around 1830, it was a natural meeting and stopping place for travelers of all kinds, including bullockies, overlanders, riverboaters, hawkers and people coming and going for whatever reasons.

Aboriginal traditions are strong on the ground, including bunyips, spirit dogs and other ghostly figures. There are lots of bushranger connections, a few gold rushes and lots of floods, including one Australia’s worst natural disasters, the big flood of 1852 that swept the town away and killed more than 70 people. 

The shearing song ‘Lazy Harry’s’, in its numerous versions, is well known, aided by a thumping melody. ‘Flash Jack’ the shearer comes from Gundagai and, of course, Jack O’Hagan’s composition ‘On the Road to Gundagai’ has remained a hit ever since it was composed in the 1920s.

Most familiar, of course, will be the famous dog and whatever it did on or in the tuckerbox at Gundagai, as the bullocky who tells the dismal tale put it:

I can forgive the blinking team I can forgive the rain,

I can forgive the dark and cold and go through it again,

I can forgive my rotten luck but hang me till I die,

I can’t forgive that bloody dog nine miles from Gundagai.

Less well-known is the legend of the ‘Gundagai cat’ that links the town back to the earliest days of convictism …

The Golden Grove was one of the First Fleet store ships, sometimescalled ‘the Noah’s Ark of Australia’ due to the number and variety of livestock she conveyed to Botany Bay, including ‘one bull, four cows, and one calf; one stallion, three mares, and three colts; one ram, eleven sheep, and eight lambs; one billy-goat, four nanny goats, and three kids; one boar, five sows, and a litter of 14 pigs; nine different sorts of dogs; and seven cats’. 

In the 1870s it was said that one of these First Fleet cats was still living in at the amazing age of one hundred years at the New South Wales town of Gundagai. The centenarian moggy was so aloof she would only eat pork sausages. By the 1920s, the feline was said to have reached the even more advanced age of 190 years. This assertion was published in at least one English newspaper and picked up and reprinted in the American and Australian press. While the American’s swallowed the tale whole, the factoid was properly dismissed by Gundagai locals as what in those days was called a ‘mare’s nest’, meaning a grossly inaccurate claim, what we might today call an urban legend or just fake news. 

What a town! Have you got a better contender for Australia's folklore capital?

GAY CHARMERS STILL CHARMING AT LAKE CHARM

Gay Charmers at Yarrawalla, 1989

"You don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to sit down and play a piano or a banjo." That was Stewie Simms, stalwart piano player of the legendary Gay Charmers, the last continuing old time dance band in the country. In April, they celebrated sixty-plus years of playing for dances, deb balls and any other event where toe-tapping tunes were needed. Read all about it right here…, courtesy of the Gannawarra Times.

See also the Peter Ellis archive.

CHEESESLAW - FOODLORE

Broken Hill's famous local delicacy is a classic example of folklore in action. In this case it's a traditional recipe that comes from - who knows where? It has become the signature dish of the town and its people and its name is now officially enshrined in the Macquarie Dictionary. Read all about it here.