G'day reggie miles,

" ... have I just inadvertently overlooked those threads? "

Probably! The odds are pretty high that someone has flung the odd lump of ill-considered excrement at every one of the instruments you mentioned.

Because I have a deep interest in the peculiarities of the Australian tradition, I spend a lot of time looking at ... and usually playing ... all sorts of portable, improvised and home-made instruments. In a young country, making its own way (as long as you don't count the original owners ... and they didn't) you didn't find many classical instruments lying around unused, so the colonists made do with anything that could be bent to their ends.

Folk music is impoverished when players get too wrapped in the importance of their best quality factory or hand-crafted instruments. real folk music is accessible and enjoyable for the folk - not a closed virtuoso concert. Some great times have come out of family or group gathering where it is mandatory for everyone to join in ... even if they just shake a coffee tin with some rice grains.

Dare I mention it ... I just acquired, for restoration and occasional playing a real old-fashioned, tin-plated nose flute! My interest had been rekindled by coming across an early photograph of the first "Bush Band" ... that started our Australian "Folk Revival" in the Early 1950s ... The Bushwhackers Band (the 1954 - 1957 Sydney original, not the unrelated 1970s to present Melbourne one). At last i had located a picture of Alan Scott - who later played tin whistle and English concertina - playing, in performance, "the Tin handkerchief" ... the nose flute!

All good fun!

Regards, Bob Bolton