Sorry folks. I must be getting senile in my dotage, or dotty in my senility, but the reality penetrated some time after my previous posting.

It is that the number of Child ballads collected in any particular region simply reflects the extent of folk song collection in that region, and the numbers of folksongs collected. IE., compared to most other parts of the English speaking world, Australia was hardly collected at all until after the second world war, and then only by a small group of amateurs. (There is no derision intended in the use of the word amateur by the way. But you try competing with the likes of Lomax, Kennedy or Henderson when you need to fit your collecting activity around your day job.)

In other words, the more folksongs are collected generally, the greater will be the number of Child ballads turned up.

That is not the only factor of course. I've already mentioned the fact that the bulk of Australian songs were not collected until after the second world war, at a time when the Child ballad would presumably have been at least as moribund as it was becoming elsewhere.

Also, as Brian Peters has pointed out, the fact that emigration to Australia started much later than emigration to America probably meant that there were fewer ballads to collect.

Also, the motives of the collectors needs to be taken into account. In America, many collectors placed Child ballads at the top of their wish list. Therefore, they may have skewed the haul by making a point of asking for songs with talking parrots or milk white horses or house carpenters in them. Plus it's probably true to say that British and Irish collectors also prized ballads, and used similar memory joggers.

By comparison, it's possible that the Aussies were more pragmatic about what they collected, and took whatever they were given. If so, they may have just missed whatever gems may have been lurking in the backs of singers' minds.

And no. I don't think the piece posted from the Riverina Recorder is anything to do with The Cruel Mother.