Can we track down the earliest bush ballad?
This characteristic genre of Australian folksong evolved alongside the colonial pastoral industries of New South Wales, southern Queensland and Victoria. Basically, these are songs about white blokes in the bush with sheep, horses and bullocks, often set to American popular tunes of the times, in four-line stanzas, mostly with a chorus. They quickly became established as characteristic expressions of the Australian pioneering experience.
But which was the first? ‘
The pastoral industry didn’t get underway until after the Blue Mountains were crossed and the western plains opened up and as settlers began moving north to what is now Queensland and south to what is now Victoria. So, the earliest isn’t likely to be until the 1830s, allowing a decade or two for the lifestyle, values and attitudes implicit in the bush ballad to evolve. Around this time we have a possible precursor in the form of ‘Bold Jack Donohoe’, the convict bushranger killed in 1830. It is not a bush ballad itself but is based on the British broadside ballad model, a form which also fed into the bush ballad.
Russel Ward, a historian and so having an occupational imperative for establishing dates, implied (though that’s all) that ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ is from the 1840s (in his Penguin Book of Australian Ballads).
The classic ‘Click Go the shears’ is set to an American Civil War tune, suggesting the mid-1860s as a date, though it could be later. By this time the bush ballad was in full flower.
But by the late 1880s-early 1890s, ‘Banjo’ Paterson was collecting them, fearing they were in danger of disappearing. He eventually published his Old Bush Songs, by which time the bush ballad, at least as a song, was a bit of an artefact (though the style lived on in the reams of verse published by squadrons of bush rhymesters in local newspapers and some reciters, etc. up to World War 2 and even a little after).
So, I’m going for the 1840s as the rough date of the first sung bush ballad. Any advance on that?
GS