G'day again Mark,

While I was copying the 1891 Trove / Bacchus Marsh Express / CC - Eynesbury (... to drop that one as the top of the pile in the "Click Go" file ...) I noticed a few other (~) possible or actual errors in their transcription of the verses.

The missing "i" in "Bare BellIed Ewe is the obvious one ... and might mean that the typesetter was not only cross-eyed but also not a shearer ... or sheep station owner.

Down in the third stanza, he also misses the doubled 's' in connoisSeur ... and ...

... more to my point, I suspect that he has missed / misread the last word of stanza 6 ... where we have 'tar' inexplicably rhymed with 'board' ... when the aim of the tar boy is, indeed, the old ewe's "scar".

To me, that stanza works far better as:

"Tar on the back, Jack; Tar, boy, tar."
Tar from the middle to the both ends of the SCAR.".
Jack jumps around, for he has no time to sleep,
And tars the shearer's backs as well as the sheep."

It is also interesting that, in the chorus,"blow" at the end of the third line ... allegedly rhymes with "ewe" ... suggesting that, to the sheep man who wrote these words, those two words did rhyme! Possibly that was an assumption on the part of the author ... but not shared with the typesetter!

Regards,

BobB