G'day Barbara,

I must work out how to locate old threads that one has not 'Traced' ... then I could check out if it was me that supplied a set of words to 'The Woodturner's Love Song' - I suspect it was.

The song was written around 1978 by Phyl Lobl, a Sydney (ex-Melbourne) singer/songwriter. At the time she was trying to do a series a trades songs and had interviewed various people about their trades. When she spoke to Neil Bollingmore, a woodturner, she was impressed with the way that every piece of wood was seen immediately as a potential turned piece ... and perhaps with the fact the Neil was far more eloquent about and through wood than in normanl relationships.

Anyway, the song became a beautiful little love song, using wooden objects as a key to the wooing that didn't come easily off the tongue. Phyl tried the song out on me when I interviewed her for 'Mulga Wire' - a magazine I still edit 20 years later! Phyl valued my opinion as I was an old friend of Neil's. I valued the song even more because my father is a woodturner and can be quite taciturn (English, not US sense) so I could see a lot of Dad in the song.

You ask about the woods mentioned: Phyl has mostly used Australian timbers in the song (particularly in the original that I still have on tape from 1978). Australian timbers are very different from European and American because of aeons of separation. I don't have the scientific names all in my mind but can look them up. I have just completed a long (obsessive?) exercise in using as many apppropriate timbers as possible to make playing 'bones' so I can compare properties. If i look up the tables from that, I will have the species names - almost always different from northern hemisphere.

Australian Cedar is a relative of the Indian Toona and I think it is called 'cedrella toona' but taxonomy keeps changing as new techniques identify relationships in a way that old descriptive techniques could not!

Australian Maple is related to the South American species as we were joined to South America through Antarctica long before we parted company and South America (geologically) recently ran into North America.

In the original song, Phyl said Silky Oak but seems to say Japanese Oak in later versions. I have always sung Silky Oak, which was originally 'Grevillea robusta' from around Sydney but all that is gone and now it is a similar Queensland timber - which sells in US as 'Lacewood'.

Australian 'Coachwood' is 'Ceratopetalum apetalum' (I don't know how they get some of these names: this means "horn leafed - no leaves"!) and was an early local favourite for cabinet work.

I recently organised copies of Phyl's book and record for the wedding of Neil (after many complications over two people's lifetimes) to his childhood sweetheart and am now the intermediary in some cross-deliveries of various bits of lovely woodturning in thanks.

Regards,

Bob Bolton