The Old Bush Songs

These are the songs Australians actually sang, not the polished verses of drawing rooms but the rough, wit-sharpened ballads of the shearers' camps, the stock routes, and the goldfields. Collected at the turn of the twentieth century, The Old Bush Songs preserves the voices of ordinary people telling their own stories - of love found and lost on the road, of clever bushrangers, of drought and flood and the hard dignity of survival. Banjo Paterson, in his preface, admits these songs are often unrefined, even crude. That roughness is the point. These are the original Australian folk songs, passed down by ear before anyone thought to write them down, and they carry the authentic music of a young nation's wild years. Whether you're drawn to the nostalgia, the political edge, or simply the pleasure of a good tune made new, this collection offers something increasingly rare: a direct line to how people once made their own entertainment, their own history, their own mythology.