This probably would feel a lot more relevant if Mudcat hadn't gone down, I don't know, about sixteen seconds before I finished writing it. :-)

Realize that I'm not arguing for or against anything here. I do not claim that "Wellerman" is or is not traditional, nor any of the other songs discussed. I'm just arguing possibilities. At this point, we cannot know its history; Colquhoun is several years dead, and had memory problems before that; unless another version turns up, the trail is cold beyond recovery. (And if a new version did turn up today, we'd have to worry about it being tainted.)

Incidentally, if anyone thinks I'm new to this discussion, look at who contributed "Wellerman" to the Digital Tradition, decades ago. :-) And I learned the song orally, not from a recording, and from someone who had learned it orally, in New Zealand in the Seventies, although he had Song of a Young Country to refer to and probably took the words from it. Granted, I didn't know much about the song then, as the DT notes will show....

But to make a position statement: having probably studied New Zealand songs more than anyone alive outside the nation itself, there is only one New Zealand song that I am certain is traditional -- "Bright Fine Gold" -- and even it has some non-traditional verses floating around.

Some background is useful here, perhaps. When the New Zealand Folklore Society was getting organized in the Sixties, it was being built by people like Bailey and Roth and Colquhoun and Garland and Frank Fyte. None of them were folklorists, and only Fyte seems to have been much of a scholar. They didn't have much in the way of models; sure, there were good folklore societies elsewhere in the world, but it was expensive to import people -- or even books.

As a result, they seem to have operated largely on the "It must be a folk song, I've never heard a horse singing it" model. (Garland in particular seems to have had trouble distinguishing traditional from merely non-commercial.)

I would add that I do not consider the fact that "Wellerman" at some points seems to be almost a pastiche can be counted against it -- if anything, it's an argument for traditional status; that's how a lot of songs get started!

Some additional things to point to:

I've already said that I think we have to treat "Davy Lowston" and "Wellerman" together, and I stand by it. That's of some significance, because if Colquhoun (or Garland, or anyone else) wrote "Davy Lowston" and didn't claim it, it was expensive for him. Unlike "Wellerman," "Davy" doesn't suffer any issues about using a commercial tune; if it's based on anything, it's a modified version of "Sam Hall." And it was recorded by Graham Wilson on his album "Billy on the Boil."

Which matters. When my parents travelled to New Zealand in the early Eighties, they were (at my request) seeking to bring back New Zealand folk recordings. They came back with the "Song of a Young Country" LPs, an unremarkable disc of the Canterbury Bush Orchestra, and the Wilson recording. This was not an obvious choice, since "Davy" is the only (allegedly) traditional song on it. But all the New Zealand folkies said they had to have that album. (They were right, too -- great album. "The Gin and Raspberry," "Down a Country Road I Know," and "The Stable Lad" are classics of New Zealand pop folk.) From what I can tell, it's still considered the standard New Zealand pop folk collection. If Colquhoun had been able to put in a claim to authorship of "Davy," he would have earned non-trivial royalties. (Not huge, but non-trivial.) But he didn't.

Another thought: Remember the collection data on "Wellerman." 1969-1970, in Wairoa. We're not talking about some small island off Antarctica that you can only get to once a month, and only in summer. It's a couple of hours' drive from Auckland. Anybody could go and check up on Frank Woods any time they wanted to. Indeed, there must have been a temptation to see if they could get anything else out of him! If I'm going to make up an informant, I'd make up a Leebrick, not a Woods -- Woods was too easy to check on!

None of which is proof of anything, of course. Which is why I don't have an opinion. All I have is a long list of doubts. :-)