Content provided in partnership with
Traditional Ballad Verse in Australia
Folklore, Oct, 2000 by Bill Scott
The transportees, the earliest European settlers in Australia, numbered among them many Scottish and Irish convicts who had been familiar with ballads from their childhood. Stories of tragedies, comical events, battles and clan history were part of their background; mostly composed in the ancient ballad metre, the "severer" so-called, with four stresses in the first line, three in the second and so through the rest of the tale. Often sung to a traditional tune; sometimes with a chorus or refrain so the listeners could participate in the performance; sometimes as a solo rendition of a shorter piece. Always performed because the need was there for some kind of entertainment in circumstances where no other entertainment was available or possible--in the tween-decks of the hulks, the holds of ships, or the huts of the "iron gangs" when they reached their melancholy destination half a world from their native lands.
Small wonder that, when the time came for the versifiers among these unhappy people to compose their own laments at their conditions or their shouts of defiance at the Authority which governed their lives in their new country, they turned to the old familiar form of the ballad to chronicle their responses to circumstance. And of course some of these spoken effusions reminded them of traditional tunes to fit the new words, and the first truly Australian traditional songs were begun and flourished. These were convict-originated songs--lamentations like "The Plains Of Emu," "The Convict Maid," "The Death Of Captain Logan"; shouts of defiance like "Jim Jones At Botany Bay"; praise for outlaws who defied the system like "Bold Jack Donohue" and "The Wild Colonial Boy'"--simple stories set to verse and traditional tunes. Some became so popular that Authority became worried and actually officially banned the singing of the "Donahue" songs in the taverns of Sydney in the 1820s. This of course did not prevent their wide spread, both the "Donahue" song and "Wild Colonial Boy" reached America and have been collected in the field there, and as "The Wild Keelonian Boy" one travelled to Ireland and became well-known there.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, settlement had spread into the interior across the Dividing Range and there was a large population of freed convicts who had finished their sentences or obtained "tickets-of-leave," mixed with the first of the free settlers and the more well-to-do sheep farmers. These men worked as shearers for the flocks, at building fences, as well-sinkers and so on, while others became timbergetters and sealers on the southern islands. Still, they were bereft of entertainment save for what they could make themselves, and poems and songs continued to originate among these folk. A great change began with the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria, for the enormous influx of folk from many lands who came to the goldfields not only demanded entertainment but also could afford to pay for it. Some of the best theatrical personalities in the world appeared at one time or another to satisfy this demand; but the miners and outback workers continued to create their own kinds of diversions, and the ballad poem flourished. Most of these effusions proved to be ephemeral, but some survived in popular memory, especially the poems and songs about the many gangs of bushrangers who infested the roads and townships at that time, particularly the Hall and Kelly gangs, who seem to have caught the public imagination. Some are still extant in the popular culture. Folk seem to have appreciated the viewpoint of one bushranger in the verse that makes him say:
I never could be found digging nuggets from the ground When the biggest could be picked up in the Bank!
(Incidentally, it was far more dangerous to travel the roads of New South Wales at that time than ever it was in the American so-called Wild West!)
The literary establishment of the time seems to have totally ignored these manifestations of popular culture, or to have denigrated them as being of no interest if by chance they encountered them. The applauded literary works of the period were those which in construction and language most approached European cultural products; this continued even after the Sydney Bulletin was established in the early 1880s and gave an outlet to the products of the amateur versifiers and bards of the backblocks. But the late nineteenth century saw a great revival of the ballad form of verse internationally with the writings of Pret Harte, Charles Leland, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service; and the encouragement offered by the acceptance of these enormously popular writers spurred many imitators among the previously discouraged versifiers using the ballad metre. In fact for the next twenty-odd years most poetry published in Australia had a strong flavour of horses! There were exceptions, of course. The quarry and road worker Shaw Neilson was writing delicate lyric verse; and Christopher Brennan and Victor Daley eschewed the popular ballad to compose their own very individual verse, though Daley writing as "Creeve Roe" did turn out some fine balladry.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »