Hash House Harriers may differ from the definition following but generally they are groups of people (originally blokes) who get together regularly for a cross country run followed by conviviality and libations. Originally it was an expat British thing but there are outbreaks all over the place.

Now, back to Dick's interpretation of Manifold and his suggestion I was being selective. Given the size of the text I regarded my summarization of the main body preceding Dick's 'quote' as an adequate saving of space while conveying the message. DIck is correct about the Lawson and Paterson texts entering the tradition and I was surprised to hear an example come back to me (a Lawson text which was published in 1891 and collected more than half a century later from someone who'd heard it sung in 1893 in the backblocks of west Qld; I cobbled a modification, sang it in the Singer's Club in 1977 and heard my effort from a bloke who introduced it as an Irish version. C'est la vie.)

While Manifold's words were replicated in Dick's post I thought his idisyncratic expression did a disservice to both Manifold's argument and Dick's proposition so I thought it best to put both into the context that would allow Manifold's argument to be properly understood and thus properly debated. It's the academic training, I know.

I suspect (but don't "know") that what was really getting up Manifold's nose when he wrote the words that Dick presented was the steady gentrification of music that certainly was not (in his view and despite contributions from both Paterson and Lawson) music of the "working class", hence the disparaging of teachers and Eisteddfods in the one breath.

So it's with some irony that most of the current population that owns his books, sings the songs and argues about their attributes (real or imagined) is much more gentrified and "middle class" than the milieu Manifold preserved. Australian shearers these days don't sing these songs and neither do Australian miners, unless they're performing in a bush band. And I think I've exemplified the gentrification of the Oz folk scene elsewhere on Mudcat.

I think the point Dick might have been trying to elevate for debate is worth discussing but he could have done it without (what in Oz politics is known as) the 'dog whistle'.

Cheers, Rowan