GUEST.CJB wrote: Or is this a muddying the waters of subsequent research?

More a case of it not really being the issue. There is some detail in that article that isn't in either the second or third edition of Song of a Young Country, but it looks rather speculative. The information about shore whaling is not really relevant. We know what "Soon May the Wellerman Come" is: it's a Flying Dutchman motif applied to shore whaling. It has some shore whaling terminology, but nothing that couldn't be written by an informed person ashore. There is no particular reason to locate it in New Zealand as opposed to Australia.

What interests me, at least, is its age and origin, and whether it is truly traditional. I want to find the book that supposedly contained it; I'm also interested in the source of Colquhoun's tune, since we know that he sometimes "reconstructed" tunes.

So I want to see the book that had the text, and I want to know the source of the version in the book -- and I want to see how it compares to the version in Song of a Young Country.

I have sources on shore whaling. :-)