A hugely popular song for many years - and one of the earliest Australian folksongs that I loved and learnt.


Springtime Brings on the Shearing

EJ Overbury / trad

Oh the springtime it brings on the shearing
And it's then you will see them in droves
To the west country stations all steering
A seeking a job off the coves.

Ch.
With a ragged old swag on my shoulder
And a billy quart pot in my hand
I tell you we'll astonish the new chums
To see how we travel the land.

You may talk of your mighty exploring
Of Landsborough McKinley and King
But I feel I should only be boring
On such frivolous subjects to sing.

For discovering mountains and rivers
There's one for a gallon I'd back
Who'd beat all your Stuart's to shivers
It's the men on the Wallaby Track.

From Billabone Murray and Loddon
To the far Tartiara and back
The hills and the plains are well trodden
By the men on the Wallaby Track.

And after the shearing is over
And the wool season's all at an end
It is then that you will see those flash shearers
Making johnny cakes round in the bend.


This clip of Tina Lawton & Marian Henderson singing, is taken from the ABC-TV production "The Restless Years" in 1967, (which is available online…..) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBGopVHd7g

and as the YT channel says : “You can call it dated, you could possibly call it twee - but it's also a rare duo performance by two of Australia's most respected female folk singers of the 1960s. Both were also quite under recorded, and certainly film of either artist is very rare nowadays.”

But the version that was dearest to my teenage heart was this one by Gary Shearston from 1965 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXpNx2bWjnI&list=OLAK5uy_nZIa73rGV7M3pNuDYzwsv37qbQS1e_jXg

Consequently, I think I learnt just about every lyric from his LP “The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing” :)


John Thompson, on his Oz Folksong a Day website, says : “The following notes are from the liner notes for this song from Gary Shearston's CD re-release of earlier recordings "Here and There: Now and Then".

"One of the best known of all Australian folk songs, this was collected in Victoria by Dr. Percy Jones. John Meredith found a rather different version in New South Wales, and most of Dr. Jones' words turn up in some verses called The Wallaby Track, which were published by a bush poet called E.J. Overbury in 1865. Maybe some bush singer read Overbury's words and set some of them to a tune; that was a common habit with bush singers. Maybe Overbury heard a bush song, and took some of the words into one of his own poems; that was a common habit with bush poets.

coves: station managers or owners.

billy quart pot: an indispensable item of the bush nomads' gear; a can, here of quart capacity, in which water could be boiled and food cooked.

new-chums: newly arrived immigrants.

Flash shearers making johnny-cakes round in the bend: a contrast in the lot of the shearer at different seasons of the year is implied; during the shearing season he is fl ash (shows an exaggerated sense of his own importance), because he is earning good wages and respect for his skill; when the shearing season is over, and he is unemployed, he is reduced to camping out in the open by some river bend, and living on a diet consisting mainly of camp-made bread (a johnny cake is, roughly speaking, a kind of small damper).

Note: from the original album notes by Edgar Waters, supplemented by Stuart Heather.”



Now the springtime Down Under means I must get off the 'puter and go and werk!!
Cheers, R-J