The Colonial Roots and Folk: The Song that Built a Nation (1788–1960)

And among the convicts and soldiers came their songs as well.

The musical traditions that arrived in Australia on those early ships were mainly Anglo-Celtic: the ballads of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales that the settlers carried in their memory as the lightest and most indelible luggage. Songs of sailors, tavern songs, work songs, songs of love and war. These songs — adapted to the extraordinary landscape and the radically different living conditions of the new continent — became the Australian white folklore.

The Convicts and Their Songs

The history of Australian colonization is inseparable from the history of penal deportation: between 1788 and 1868, Britain deported to Australia more than 160,000 convicts convicted of crimes that today we would consider minor — the theft of a loaf of bread, the burning of a barn, cattle theft.

Those convicts brought with them a tradition of protest and resistance songs that found fertile ground in Australia. "Bound for Botany Bay" narrates the journey of British convicts to Sydney, "The Wild Colonial Boy" evokes the spirit of the bushrangers.

"Botany Bay" — the song that convicts sang when embarking at English ports — is the origin point of Australian white folklore: the farewell to England, the uncertainty of the journey, the fear of the unknown, and the resignation of those who have no choice. It was the Australian "Lamento Borincano" — the song of those who leave without wanting to go.

The bushrangers — the outlaws of the Australian interior, often escaped convicts who robbed wealthy landowners — became folk heroes in 19th-century songs with the same logic that Robin Hood was a hero in medieval English ballads: the poor challenging the powerful with the only weapon available.

Ned Kelly — the most famous bushranger of Australia, executed in Melbourne in 1880 — was the protagonist of dozens of popular songs that transformed him into a symbol of the poor worker's resistance against the landowning establishment. The iron armor he built for his last battle against the police became the most recognizable icon of Australian art and popular imagination.

The Life of the Bush: Click Go the Shears

The bush — the rural interior of Australia, with its sheep stations, migrant workers, droughts, and floods — was the landscape that defined the Australian national identity in the 19th century. A nation of coastal cities that imagined itself as a country of inland men: stoic, independent, loyal to each other, distrustful of authority.

That image — largely mythological, partly real — found its most direct expression in the bush ballads: "Click Go the Shears" speaks of the life of Australian shearers.

The shearers — the workers who traveled from station to station following the shearing cycle — were Australia's itinerant working class. Their working conditions were harsh, their wages were low, and their union organization in the 1890s produced the most important strikes in early Australian history.

"Click Go the Shears" describes the shearer's work with the precision of someone who has lived it: the sound of the shears, the smell of the wool, the competition among workers to shear the most sheep in the shortest time. It is the quintessential Australian work song — the equivalent of the field chants of the American Mississippi, without the history of slavery but with the same function of making repetitive work bearable with the rhythm of the song.

Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson: The Bush Poets

The tradition of the bush ballad had its literati: poets who took the themes and language of rural folklore and turned them into literature that the Anglo-Saxon world could read.

Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson (1864-1941) and Henry Lawson (1867-1922) were the two great poets of the Australian bush — and the two represented opposing visions of the same landscape. Paterson was romantic: the bush as a space of freedom and adventure, the bushman as a stoic hero. Lawson was realistic: the bush as a space of loneliness and hardship, the bushman as a man trapped by circumstances.

Many bush ballads are based on the works of the national poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.

Waltzing Matilda: The Anthem That Could Not Be

The lyrics of Australia's most famous folk song, "Waltzing Matilda," were written by bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. This song remains popular and is considered the unofficial national anthem of the nation.

Waltzing Matilda tells the story of a wanderer who camps one night by a billabong, while having tea. A sheep approaches to drink water, and the wanderer steals it to feed himself. The landowner notices and calls three policemen to arrest the wanderer. Before being arrested for the sheep theft, he chooses to jump into the water and drown.

It is said that the story is based on the attack on Dagworth Station, although there is much folklore surrounding "Waltzing Matilda" and the creation behind it.

The song is subversive in ways that its universal popularity often obscures: the protagonist is a sheep thief who chooses death over submitting to the landowner's law. It is a protest song that celebrates the defiance of the poor against the dominance of the rich and criticizes a capitalist state that protects the powerful against the dispossessed.

"Waltzing Matilda" is a quintessentially Australian song, influenced more by Celtic folk ballads than by American country and western music.

When Australia voted in 1977 on what should be its official national anthem, "Waltzing Matilda" came second — behind "Advance Australia Fair," which became the official anthem. Many Australians still consider that the wrong anthem was chosen.

Slim Dusty: The Voice of the Outback

If Banjo Paterson was the poet of the bush, Slim Dusty — born David Gordon Kirkpatrick in Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1927 — was its singer. During a sixty-year career, he recorded more than 100 albums and became the best-selling Australian country artist in history.

His most famous song "A Pub with No Beer" (1957) — was the first Australian single to sell more than a million copies: the story of a pub that has run out of beer, narrated with the specifically Australian humor that does not complain directly but describes the situation with a slightly ridiculous melancholy.

Slim Dusty represented the bush tradition in the 20th century: the music of the outback, of the truck drivers and the shearers and the Australian cowboys, which the music industry of Sydney and Melbourne considered too rustic and too local to export. And yet it was the music that most directly connected with the idea Australians had of themselves.

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda: The Protest Folk

Australian folklore also produced, in the 20th century, its version of the political protest song. Eric Bogle, whose 1972 song "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" is a mournful lament to the battle of Gallipoli and a protest against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War.

"And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" is Australia's most important anti-war song: a soldier who loses his legs in Gallipoli and returns home to see the veterans' parade getting shorter each year until he is the only one left. It is the Australian "Blowin' in the Wind" — without Dylan's hope, but with the same conviction that war is a lie sold with songs.

Editorial note: "Waltzing Matilda" was first performed in April 1895 at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton, Queensland — a hotel in the interior of the continent, before an audience of farmers and migrant workers. That same year it was published as sheet music. One hundred and thirty years later, Rod Stewart sings it at his Australian concerts, Kylie Minogue recorded it for the opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and Bon Jovi included it in their Australian tour. The song of a vagabond who steals a sheep and drowns before submitting to the law became the most beloved symbol of the national identity of one of the richest countries in the world. That paradox is also the story of Australia: a country that imagines itself as rebellious and marginal while being perfectly prosperous and perfectly integrated into the international order. The song tells the truth that the official anthem cannot say.