G'day Murray and all ...

Of course the question of import / export gets interesting in the case of Oxford's Australian National Dictionary. The authority and standardisation of the Macquarie version of Australian English is a great asset, even if I keep buying copies of the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary - precisely because I like to have derivations for all entries. This should, however, be seen against the background view of four (admittedly short) bookshelves filled with dictionaries and dictionary-format references!

The expression “on the wallaby” is a typically Australian contraction of the slightly longer phrase “on the wallaby track”. The first citation in the Australian National Dictionary is from 1846; ‘Stephen’s Adelaide Miscellany’, 4 Oct. “The police themselves are usually well-treated in the bush ... they make a ‘round’ through the district, and get a meal at every hut, and one man from every said hut (besides those mobs on the ‘wallaby track’) stops for a night at the police station in return.”

There follow citations from 1861, 1871, 1887, 1900 &c. The term seems to have always applied to the “swaggie” - the itinerant labourer of no fixed abode. As you can see, the phrase was in print at least 21 years before Henry Lawson was born - and some 19 years before E. J. Overbury published his poem “On the wallaby track” in ‘Bush Poems’, in 1865. This poem, of course, was trimmed down by the folk process, acquired a tune and became the widely-collected song “Oh, the springtime it brings on the shearing”, which includes the line “... the hills and the plains are well-trodden by the men on the wallaby track”.

The song ‘Australia’s on the wallaby’ was collected by A.V. Vennard (‘Bill Bowyang’) around 1932, printed in his ‘Old Bush Recitations’ and was picked up in Stewart & Keesing’s 1957 expansion of A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ‘Old Bush Songs’. The lines of the first verse indicate that the version collected dates from around the ‘big bust’, the depression of the 1890s. If there was an earlier form of the song, it has been submerged in the depression theme.

Henry Lawson’s “Freedom on the wallaby” has a number of similarities and direct echoes of the other song and the poem has been collected sung to the same tune. It was also a product of the economic woes of the 1890s, - published in the ‘Worker’, 16 May, 1891. The Queensland government felt Lawson should be jailed for sedition ... but why should he be any different from everyone else?

Regards,

Bob Bolton