G'day the button,

It's interesting ... If you reproduce local accent / 'dialect' phonetically - half your audience lambast you for as a snob. Then you decide to stick to 'standard English" spellings - and let the singers sort out their own rendition ... and, for that, someone else condemns you to Hull (or, at least, Hell or Halifax)!

More broadly, I'm sure the Australian version (various pronounced with a wide range of 'Australian' accents) is clearly descended from a "sailors' version" of the song ... a 'forebitter', rather than a 'shanty'. The version Joe Offer quoted is probably an American version which was picked up in the same way ... and, once on shore lost some of its refrain's note of needing to go back to sea to earn more money before the clothes and hat can be replaced.

Every settler in Australia's colonial era had to get here by sea and it's not surprising that those who travelled steerage would pick up something from the crew. A great number of the songs of sailing vast tracts of the world's oceans transmogrified, here, into songs about crossing vast areas of largely uncharted land ... often driving vast herds of cattle into newly opened grazing lands ... or back to the markets of the coastal cities (where most Australians lived - and, to a greater extend, still do today.

Regards,

Bob (two hours walk from the Pacific Ocean in the east ... and some 4,500 km from the Indian Ocean ... with some of the driest areas in the world in between!)