I was wondering how Fred Whiting leart a traditional Australian song

Fred was a prolific collector of songs himself, and over the years he picked up songs wherever he went, including some from New South Wales where he spent a few years in his late teens.

Do we know how many Australian songs & tunes he learnt & who he learnt them from?


Musical Tradition CD MTCD350 - fiddle tunes
He also spent many years in Australia and picked up tunes there, thus having a broad repertoire beyond the East Anglian material he picked up in his early years.


Fred talking about time in Australia
In the mid-1920s Fred and his father went to New South Wales for work, following in the footsteps of Fred's uncle Jim, who had fled there after being caught poaching from the Duke of Hamilton, who lived at Easton Mansion. According to Fred his Uncle Jimmy, who could 'fight like the devil himself', gave the keeper who caught him a 'terrific hiding' and fled, the penalty for poaching by night being more severe than that for poaching in daylight, and for fear of being charged with assault and battery into the bargain. As Fred explained: "This would have meant four or five moons in the Government Boarding House, so he bought a long railway ticket and sailed for Australia under his mother's maiden name". This he was able to do on the proceeds of poaching, and still had enough to leave £40 for his mother. As Fred - who was no mean poacher himself - pointed out: "With rabbits 6d each, and hares and pheasants 2/6 each, he must have been a busy poacher".

Fred described his time in Australia as follows: "In the '20s things got pretty tough round here; there was no dole or anything. So a lot of the young lads went to Burton" (on Trent) "for the maltings, or joined the militia - and they always came back with a new pair of boots and little else. Well, in 1926 I decided to go to Australia. I was a bricklayer then and worked out there on the railway, building tunnels" (at Lismore in north-east New South Wales). " I was out there eight years" (Fred's measurement of the passage of time is not entirely consistent with the dates he gives). "I took my fiddle out there and in our camp were several Irish navvies - well I reckon two-thirds of Australians are of Irish descent; 3 or 4 of us had violins. And we were in one place where it rained for nine solid bloody months - we only had two fine days and everything got saturated - blankets, clothes, even our matches we had to dip in wax before you could strike them. Well, all these other blokes, their fiddles came unstuck but mine was hung up in an old calico bag and it stuck it out all that while - whoever made that violin knew his job".

"There were some good musicians over there. A guy called Harry Smith played the concertina and Jim Jackson the tin whistle, but the best music I heard, you'll think I'm daft, but it was out in the bush, were three or four old aborigines sitting in a circle blowing through old gum leaves - boy, you've never heard anything like it. I told you I used to play the tin whistle but I could only get about seven notes out of it. Well, I was coming down the road there one night when I heard this Jim Jackson playing Over the Waves and I rumbled what you could do with breath control - you could get far more notes out of it. So I got away on my own somewhere, so I wouldn't be nuisance, and I was playing Annie Laurie - getting on well with it - and a damned green-head ant crawled up my leg and give me such a bite, well, I played a note in Annie Laurie I reckon you could have heard back at Harkie's! Have you ever heard a parrot sing? I used to have one perched on my tent every morning and I taught it to whistle St Patrick's Day in the Morning. It was comical to hear it. If it went wrong it would stop and go through it again until it was right. So for six months I used to be woken up every morning with St Patrick's Day, and then I never saw it again. I reckon an old carpet snake got it".

"I remember one night I had that old fiddle there, it's a copy of an old Stradivari. Anyway, there was some fellas going over the mountain one Saturday night and I knew they were going on the booze and I didn't want to get mixed up in that. So I went down to an Irishman's place and damned if I didn't run straight into it. They asked me to go and get my fiddle, and I know I ended on my back on a fella's bunk playing '100 pipers'. I can still remember what I was playing, but the next morning when I woke up I wished I could have died. Crikey, no more of that for me".

"I came back to Kenton in 1932 and soon got back into playing around the pubs round here - Rishangles Swan, Dennington Bell, Charsfield Horseshoes, Earl Soham Beerhouse - they were all good in their day, it just depended who kept it". In 1936 Fred married Winnie Branton, who was born in 1913, the daughter of John Branton and Gertrude née Bloomfield.