> another common method for spreading poems was to have them printed in newspapers

The earliest ref. I can find at the moment to "WCB" is just a note in the Bacchus Marsh Express, July 20, 1878 mentioning it was sung at an entertainment at the State School by "Mr. E. Burns."

The following year, another paper mentioned that the WCB had been "immortalised" in song, and that "Jack Dowling was his name." (St, George Standard, July 20, 1879).

Newspaper reports of 1880-81 specifically relate the WCB of the song to Ned Kelly. Sorry, no texts given.

A partial text from The Australasian (Melbourne) Oct. 24, 1891:


At the early age of fifteen years
He left his father's home,
And through Australia's sunny climes
Bushranging for to roam.
He robbed the lordly squatters,
And their flocks he did destroy,
And a terror to Australia
Was the Wild Colonial Boy.

. . .

"Surrender now, Jack Dowling:
You see there's three to one.
Surrender in the queen's name,
You outlawed plundering son."
Jack drew a pistol from his belt
And waved the little a toy,
"I fight, but not surrender,"
Cried the Wild Colonial Boy.

He fired at Trooper Kelly,
And brought him to the ground,
Receiving one from Davis,
Which caused a fatal wound.
And bathing in his crimson
And fighting with FitzRoy,
That was the way they captured
The Wild Colonial Boy.

"Literature" (London, Oct. 28, 1899) says that the song goes to a "melancholy tune," and offers one stanza :

Then come all you brave lads that roam the mountains wide,
Together we will plunder, together we will ride;
We'll rob the wealthy squatters, their flocks we will destroy,
And we'll make the peelers dread us, says the Wild Colonial Boy.

The first stanza only appears in "The Warrigal's Well," by Donald MacDonald and John F. Edgar (1901):

“Oh it’s of a wild colonial boy,
Jack Dowlan was his name,
Of poor but honest parients [sic].
Brung up in Castlemaine.”

The oldest full text available seems to be the one in Banjo Patterson's "Old Bush Songs" (1905).

From https://www.bluemountainshistory.com/historyinsong.html :

"The Australian Dictionary of Biography has biographies of Jack Donahoe and Jack Doolan. Doolan was born in Castlemaine Victoria in 1856 and became a minor bushranger. Jack Donahoe was born in Dublin. Neither could have commenced their wild career in 1861."

There seems to have been a broadside publication of "WCB" in the 1880s, but I haven't found it online.