Cirrus@Austlit

'This unique songbook draws from a well so much part of Australia's everyday landscape it was overlooked by our early folk song collectors. These are not songs about shearing, goldfields or bushrangers but rather they are songs actually sung by shearers, gold-miners and, in all probability, bushrangers like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall.

There are songs here about love and betrayal, family life, volunteer rifle brigades established during the Crimean War to repel the feared Russian invasion of Melbourne, and of brave Aussie boys going off to fight mother England's wars. There's Sweet Mary of Kilmore, Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake and Mrs McSorley's Twins, as song of the Blessed Zulu War, one of a wife gone off to be a Mormonite, and another referred to by Rudyard Kipling, for which scholars have searched in vain for over 100 years. They're all here, reconstructed from fragments published in the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in 1940, drawn from the memories of the paper's readers. These are Australia's lost folk songs and it is time they were heard.' (Publisher's Blurb)