A couple of days ago I said
> BTW I noted that the version quoted by Steve 03 Jan 18 - 05:06 PM refers to the maid's "lily-white limbs". That goes against a suggestion that I recall reading somewhere that she was black.

Although the version quoted by Steve refers to black ringlets, at least one other version says only that the maid's hair was curly. A maid who was a "native" of Australia in the mid 1800s could have been a daughter of European (e.g. Irish) parents and had both curly black hair and lily white limbs, but it doesn't seem very likely. It seems much more likely that the story (whether true, a pure fantasy or a mixture) concerns an Aboriginal girl and that the "lily white" was a bit of boiler-plate text from a broadside writer -- which in turn indicates that the whole song was probably made by someone whose business was writing songs, wherever the story came from.