G'day Rowan,

The problem of terminology is not particularly helped by "Australian usage" ... it varies considerably state by state. My main exposures are to New South Wales (my home state) and Tasmania, to which I drifted by attraction ... but found myself back in NSW in order to learn and work in my preferred field.

My first button box was an East German melodeon ... of little worth - even the "cotton reel" stops turned out to be dummies! The Shop clerk, in Sydney, called it a "bush accordion" - and this matches the experience of collector the late John Meredith, brought up in Holbrook (NSW) who said the normal term to him was simply "accordion" - and the new fangle big, keyed, boxes were 'piano accordions'.

I bought a secondhand Erica (red perloid and in G/C) in Hobart, Tasmania in 1966 ... then picked up a black perloid Erica, (C/F) in Queanbeyan while I worked on the Snowy Mts Hydro Scheme. In Tasmania, in the late 1960s, I found many Tasmanians called the old, simple button accordions melodions (typical German / Hohner catalog usage) ... and some extended the term to the 2-rowers.

(I also picked up the rather Tasmanian habit of discarding the thumb-strap and using 2 shoulder straps to control the instrument, leaving my thumb free to operate the semitones at the bottom of the keyboard, which Kurt Jacob told me were standard on the Australian Hohner imports ... because: "... they were dropped off from the Hohner shipments on their way to Argentina ... where they needed the semitones for their music - particularly the Tango".)

To change the (breath?) direction ... I can finally sing to my button accordions (or my Anglos) ... after conquering the involuntary "mouth-relexes" that came from years of playing mouth organs! The fact that button accordions have a "push-pull" in time with the mouth organ's "blow-suck" did it present a problem ... but it would not have if I never played mouth organ. I had to get over it by re-focusing .. in my case I found I couldn't sing songs I already knew on the mouth organ ... but realised I could sight-read new song tunes ... and read / sing new song words. Once that broke the "tie" I don't have problems. (And ... the only person I could blame for playing too loud for my singing ... is me on box ... so I balance the two)!

Regards,

Bob