A little more time now:
"The song itself is very much based on the broadside ballad 'Van Diemen's Land'."
There you go again - how do you know this and how do you know that Van Diemen's Land originated on a broadside - don't you think it concievable that transportees expressed themselves and their conditions in verse - their situation bore a great resemblence to bothy workers who you concceded made their own songs - isolated, worked to the point of slavery....
It seems you are basing a great deal on tracong the earliest printed versions of songs - where is your evidence beyond this?
What exactly are you saying about Banks of Newfoundland - that the realistic sounding ones were orally composed and the others were made by the hacks.
What are your grounds for claiming that it was not taken from oral tradition?
"For the period we are talking about, early 19thc not all were illiterate."
We've discussed the complications of literacy - at least I've explained my take on it and you have ignored it. Our oral traditions go back much further than the 19th century - our knowledge of it to any (extremely limited) extent dates from the beginingof the 20th, when it was in very great decline.
Jim Carroll