Perhaps it's just me, but I don't think Maid of Australia is a good example of poetry of any sort. Taken alone, the words are doggerel, and full of exactly the sort of contrived rhymes that people sneer at in broadside poetry. There's also nothing in the song to indicate that the writer had ever been nearer Australia than Norwich. It reads much more like some sort of male wish-fulfilment fantasy than as a record of an actual event.

But in a sense that's the point, because the genius of folk song doesn't lie in its raw materials, whether they be broadsides or glees or whatever. It lies in the process by which crude poetry, moralising parlour songs or florid pleasure-garden compositions get *turned into* great and singable songs; and it lies in the unique style of performance with which singers delivered those songs. It's a red herring to complain that suggesting a broadside origin undermines the role of 'the people', because the origin isn't what does or does not make it good.

To give a slightly off-the-wall analogy, a few years back the Turner Prize was won by an installation called 'shedboatshed'. The artist started with a garden shed, dismantled it, built a boat from the pieces, sailed it down the Rhine to a museum and rebuilt the original shed. You may or may not think that art, but the question of who built the shed in the first place surely doesn't matter.