Australian folk music

Australian folk music is a term which may be applied to traditional music from the large variety of immigrant cultures and those of the original Australian inhabitants.

Celtic, English, German and Scandinavian folk traditions predominated in the first wave of European immigrant music. The Australian tradition is, in this sense, related to the traditions of other countries with similar ethnic, historical and political origins, such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

For much of its history, Australia's bush music belonged to an oral and folkloric tradition, and was only later published in print in volumes such as Banjo Paterson's Old Bush Songs, in the 1890s. More than 70 of Banjo Paterson's poems have been set to music by Wallis & Matilda since 1980. The distinctive themes and origins of Australia's "bush music" or "bush band music" can be traced to the sea shanties of 18th and 19th century Europe and other songs sung by the convicts who were sent to Australia during the early period of the British colonisation, beginning in 1788. Early Australian ballads sing of the harsh ways of life of the epoch and of such people and events as bushrangers, swagmen, drovers, and shearers. Convict and bushranger verses often railed against government tyranny. Classic bush songs on such themes include: The Wild Colonial Boy, Click Go The Shears, The Eumeralla Shore, The Drover's Dream, The Queensland Drover, The Dying Stockman and Moreton Bay.

Later themes which endure to the present include the experiences of war, of droughts and flooding rains, of Aboriginality and of the railways and trucking routes which link Australia's vast distances. Isolation and loneliness of life in the Australian bush has been another theme.

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