G'day Bob,
I'm pleased you've surfaced.
The problem of terminology is not particularly helped by "Australian usage" ... it varies considerably state by state.

That's true and, like you, I can only speak for what I actually saw and heard. My first exposure to a button box was a single row black Hohner button accordion in C, at Mawson. We had people from almost every Oz state, a couple of Poms and four Americans from different states. None of us could play it but it was called a button accordion by everyone.

The next one I saw was Dave De Hugard's three-row Corona (he was regarded as a Queenslander at the time) and my recollection is that he called it a button accordion. When I got to Nariel (then and now the home of single row Hohners in C) the locals called the single row black Hohners "button accordions" and the ones with the spoon valves and 'cotton-reel' voices "melodeons". Not long after that I got involved with the South Australians and the Canberrans, who all used the same terminology, as did those who joined us from Sydney.

With the exception of the Nariel locals, all of these were "folk revival" people; as your experienc shows, the older bushies (but not those from Nariel) tended to call anything with buttons a "squeezebox" and "accordion" was used for piano boxes.

Your experience with mouth organs seems a mirror image to mine. Over the years I had tried to get into playing various instruments with no success at all. I couldn't even get a note out of a schoolmate's flute, guitars and I have never been on speaking terms, even Tim Whelan's encouragement on a tine whistle had lamentable effect. While riding my pushbike to uni I'd found a mouth organ (Hohner G with slide) at the side of the road; I cleaned it up and it seemed to be perfectly operable but I couldn't make head nor tail out of it and put it away.

Willem Lankhourst (and his wife Jean) I had known from the very early days of the folk revival in Melbourne and, at one stage, we used to run classes in the same location. On a visit to their house I saw a black single row Hohner (in C, as it turned out) and commented that I had wanted to find a concertina so I could accompany my singing; I'd seen Graeme Smith's and been inspired. Willem took his box down and gave it to me saying, "Take this." When I asked him how much he wanted for it he said "Nothing! Just play me a couple of tunes on it when you've learned how to play it."

Talk about a millstone! All the tunes I had in my head were dance tunes and full of notes at what seemed to be breakneck speed. I gave up trying. Later, when I was in Canberra with Pageant (and thus Mike Jackson, who played mouth organ) and had picked up playing button accordion. Being a sales rep. he travelled widely and, one weekend, I came across an anglo concer he'd acquired. After a half hour's experimentation I thought I could get into this. Knowing he'd see me in a fortnight he suggested I take it back to Steiglitz with me and try it out.

When I got it home I found, after an hour or so, that I had got a tune down reasonably satisfactorily; I was so excited I rang Mike on the STD and played it to him. He commented that the reason he'd been able to get into the buton accordion and the concer so easily was that they used the same 'system' as the mouth organ. Well, when I put the phone down I retrieved the accordion and the mouth organ and, sure enough, I worked out how to play the same tune on them as I had played on the concer.

I've never looked back. I can knock out a tune on most diatonic free reed instruments but I prefer the Anglo (perhaps more properly known as the Anglo-German concertina) and, for their fruity timbre, a couple of old Hohner melodeons (my "Australian usage" again) although I do lust gently after one of Peter Hyde's two-row instruments.

And I did honour Willem's request; I played him a few tunes on both his box and my Anglo and then, according to his wishes, passed the box on to a young beginner. But it took me quite a while to get the hang of singing while playing, because of the difference between the instrument's breathing pattern and my own. It may have helped that, with both Higgins and Flying Pieman, I played while calling dances and, as servicing the dancers' needs always has priority, the instrument's breathing gradually fell into some accommodation with my voice's requirements.

Cheers, Rowan