The Old Bush Songs — Themes and Context

Voices of the Shearing Sheds and Diggings

The songs in this collection rarely mention home or domestic affections, as Paterson himself observes. Instead, they focus on work: shearing, droving, digging, and mustering. In “The Murrumbidgee Shearers,” the chorus celebrates “the sound of the shears” and the “click of the blades.” The language is practical and direct, with terms like “bald-faced steer,” “greenhide fall,” and “bucking brumbie” anchoring the verses in specific tasks. The diggings appear in songs like “Bold Jack Donahoo,” where the bushranger’s exploits are recounted with a mix of admiration and caution. These are not polished ballads but working songs, meant to be sung around campfires or in shearing sheds.

Death and the Bushman’s Afterlife

Several songs treat death with a blend of sentiment and dark humor. In “The Dying Stockman,” the speaker asks to be buried “where the dingoes and crows can’t molest me, / In the shade where the coolibahs grow.” The stockman’s last request includes a cross carved with “stockwhip, and saddle.” “My Mate Bill” imagines heaven as a cattle station where Bill, a skilled stockman, might “yard ’em all in the Jasper Lake.” The poem questions whether an angelic existence suits a man who “could sit on a bucking brumbie / Like a nob in an easy chair.” These songs do not romanticize death; they reframe it in the familiar terms of bush labor.

The Catalog’s Limits: What the Songs Actually Show

The catalog subjects classify this as “Australian poetry” and “Songs, English — Australia,” but the excerpts resist easy categorization. Many songs are not strictly English in origin—some, like “Paddy Malone in Australia,” use Irish dialect and references. The “Two Aboriginal Songs” listed in the contents are not included in the excerpts, so their content remains unknown. Paterson’s preface acknowledges that the songs were “collected from all parts of Australia,” yet the excerpts show a strong bias toward the southeastern colonies: New South Wales, the Murrumbidgee, the Maranoa. The catalog does not capture the unevenness of the collection or the gaps in representation.

Readers should approach this collection as a historical document rather than a polished anthology. The songs are uneven in quality and authenticity, but their roughness is part of their value. Paterson’s editorial hand is light, preserving dialect, irregular metre, and local references. For those interested in the vernacular culture of 19th-century Australia, these songs offer a direct, unvarnished record—provided one reads with attention to what is included and what is left out.

I finished The Old Bush Songs and found myself thinking about how those rough-hewn verses carry a whole world of quiet endurance, the way a campfire song can hold loneliness and mateship at once. It reminded me of something similar in A Book of German Lyrics — Context and Discussion—how another people’s tunes hold their own kind of ache. Some lines just stay with you.