G'day Wolfgang and all,

I'm still waiting to get my home computer back up and running - trying to find the doublespaced files after adding new drives ... I hope that it will all fall into place when we give the drives their original letters tonight...?

Then I should be able to listen to the midi files I downloaded and see how they compare to the Martyn Wyndham-Read tune, which I transcribed last week.

It is fascinating to see the amount of change (folk processing?) that has occurred in such a short time. I know that a lot of this (in Australia, at least) came from the fact that it was before the common appearance of Xerox copiers. When I researched this song some years back, I found that 1960s singers had hand-written copies of this song and this must have led to variations; e.g. Gary Shearston sings "Warm as the summer they've hived winter long" where everyone else sings "... lived...".

I believe that 'hived' is Dorothy's original (poetic) word and most people have mis-read hand-written copies as the more prosaic "lived" and this is just one example of the changes in this song. Maybe Martyn's writing (or whoever had written down the words) was a bit dodgy ... Could he read "north" for "morning"? The words of the first 2 stanzas, published in 1964 were:

O cock of the morning, with a dream in his hand,
My love has come home to the wonderful land.
He bursts through the door with his eyes like the sun
And his kit-bag crammed full of the treasures he's won.

There's a pearl shell from Broome and a tall Darwin tale,
And coral and clam and the jaws of a whale
And my kitchen is full of the smell of the sea
And the leaping green fishes my love brings to me.
From Australian Tradition, vol. 1, No. 1 page 4, March 1964.

I have not a copy of the full poem - I presume that some singer got a hand-written copy from Dorothy ... or from Merv Lilley. It's all very interesting stuff!

Regards,

Bob Bolton