Greetings Captain. I regard your response as disingenuous.
However, leaving my pedantic notions of spelling and punctuation aside I offer the following as relevant context in which to posit your quote, which is from the "Introduction" to "The Penguin Australian Song Book" compiled and with notes by John Manifold, published by Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, in 1964. The Introduction, written in 1962, has a total length of 43.4 column-centimetres and the quoted part (3.7 column-centimetres long) occurs after 34.0 column centimetres of discussion of the various geographical, temporal, social, economic and historic contexts of the material, both individual items and genres.

The quote offered by Dick is immediately followed by (in 3.7cm);

"I sometimes wish, in vain, that we could keep up the strict etiquette that was observed by the real bush singers. A young man used to learn his songs from the acknowledged singer of the district, and might eventually earn permission to sing them to the limited 'public' of the bush wherever or whenever the acknowledged singer was not present. Some few songs were common property; others, 'songs from the books', were rather contemptuously exempted from the rule; but in the main this apprenticeship system prevailed, at least among men. When the public performer of a 'treason song' might earn a stretch in jail, it was a point of honour to perform it properly.

"Today I suppose all songs are 'songs from books', and the songs from this book lose their old status accordingly. It would be nice to think that this demotion might be temporary, and that they might walk off the page back into oral circulation again over a wider stretch of country than the old method could cover.

"That this has often been done, can be seen by many of the notes to the individual songs, where I have set out to give the source and background of many oral performances which have led to the inclusion of the songs in this book."

It would appear, from what I have remembered of some of Dick's postings, that John's wish "that they might walk off the page back into oral circulation again over a wider stretch of country than the old method could cover" has been granted, as Dick appears to have sung at least some of them in Britain and Ireland.

1962 in Oz was a time before our participation in much of the feminist revolution of the mid-late 60s and there were precious few singers of what all of us might accept as traditional songs; at the time I was singing songs I'd learned from the oral tradition but, outside the domestic circle, that tradition was centred on singing as done in bushwalking circles which greatly resembled (in character if not material) the rugby singing mentioned in the posts above. The apprenticeship system described by Manifold still operated in such circles and I had to earn my right to sing particular songs and wouldn't lead them when their 'owner/s' were present.

As a collection, Manifold's book was most influential in getting the songs out to a wider public; its shape made it easy to stick in a bushwalking pack and I've lost count of the number I've sent to friends overseas who want a snapshot of where some of the tradition was and came from. I may well have got the last of Angus and Robertson's stock to send to a friend in Columbia SC.

Contrary to what some have inferred from Dick's original posting. I saw that quote as a rather early warning of the dangers that other Mudcatters have also noticed; the likelihood of fossilisation of a dynamic tradition when aspects of it get caught in the aspic of the bound book or the CD and stay fossilised. And I suspect Dick and I agree on that.

Cheers, Rowan