Since I've been cited in this thread, I guess it's my duty to add some information. :-) I wish I had noticed it before; it might have saved people some work. This is just a grab bag of notes on things I saw in the thread.

First off, note that although almost all discussion here is of the SECOND edition of Song of a Young Country, there is now a third edition, much expanded -- and with much better source information.

At least, there is USUALLY better information. But that for "Soon May the Wellerman Come," it says only that it was taken from Frank Woods, of Wairoa, 1969-1970. Hence the Ballad Index date.

The song was clearly popular at New Zealand Folk Festivals in the 1970s. Unlike every recording I've ever heard in the 2020s boom, I learned the melody correctly, EXACTLY as found in the book, c. 1982 -- from Larry Carpenter, in Richfield, Minnesota, who had learned it in New Zealand at pop folk events in the mid-1970s. This of course doesn't prove much, except that someone actually studied the sheet music and sang it correctly, and that it passed through two hands (Carpenter's source and Carpenter) without alteration.

Don't make too much of the fact that Neil Colquhoun contributed to Shanties by the Way. It was not his book; he mostly supplied melodies. But it is stuff Bailey and Roth took from old attics, mostly, not field collected material, and it is Bailey and Roth's, not Colquhoun's. Melodies are few and far between. (Actual folk songs are also rare in the book.) "Wellerman" isn't a particularly great song if you omit the tune, and Bailey and Roth didn't look at tunes in choosing items. Hypothetically, if they had had a text of it, they likely wouldn't have printed it -- it's not New Zealand-y enough. Of course, the Frank Wood "collection" was later anyway.

I said in the Ballad Index that Colquhoun usually admitted to the tunes he made up. There is an interesting point here: There are two songs in "Song of a Young Country" that stand out very clearly among the rest as by far the best. One is "Wellerman," the other is "Davy Lowston."

Both are songs that have been found only once. "Davy Lowston" is based on an actual incident, but -- like "Wellerman" -- it was collected only in an unlikely place, from "John Leebrick" in the United States, supposedly in the 1950s. No one has ever managed to locate "Leebrick" -- I even tried census records once, without success (although that may be because he wasn't in the right place at the right time; I could only search a census from much before the alleged collection). The universal failure to locate Leebrick is not proof by any means, but it's indicative.

But here's my interesting question: Why is it that Colquhoun's admitted songs are mostly not very good, but two songs which cannot be traced beyond his collection, "Wellerman" and "Davy Lowston," are quite good? I incline to accept Steve Gardham's comment that Colquhoun was the Bert Lloyd of New Zealand, but if he could produce two such good songs, why didn't he ever do it under his own name?

(Frankly, if I were going to guess that a New Zealand songwriter produced those two, it wouldn't be Colquhoun. It would be Phil Garland, who was also hanging around with Bailey and Roth and that gang, and who, unlike Colquhoun, was a VERY GOOD songwriter. Witness "The Stable Lad" -- as long as you don't witness the Gordon Bok version. :-) Much as I like Bok, he did bad things to that tune. I think Garland could have produced "Wellerman" and "Davy Lowston." Colquhoun -- nah.)

That again isn't proof of anything. It just shows how little we know.

I will comment that I suffered quite a bit going through the New Zealand material in the Ballad Index, and I have all the books involved. There are many mysteries about those books that we haven't gotten into here. I only skimmed this thread, so there may be questions I missed.

Aside: I'll admit that the popularity of "Wellerman" drove me nuts. Forty years I've been singing that song, and nobody cared, and now they all have the tune wrong. :-p