'Embarrassingly bad' was indeed the phrase I used to describe 'The Bush of Australia'. Pardon was fond of songs like this: in what I think is his earliest interview he focusses on this and other examples including Cock a Doodle Doo. The interviewers ask him what the women thought when songs like this were sung and he says they never paid any attention to it. The Bush of Australia is about a white colonialist leaving a dark-skinned native alone with his baby. It seems to me some kind of fantasy which at best highlights the irresponsible attitudes of the colonialist, though Pardon (and his interlocutors) seems just to have relished these. Some versions omit the reference to the dark skin of the woman; for whatever reason Pardon's version does not.

I note that you refer to Bronson as Bronson. Can you not show some courtesy to this scholar? And this is just me, but I don't think you are in a position to give people on Mudcat lessons in manners. More or less your first post to the Harker thread called the people on it 'poodles' and contained the f*** word. NB This post has since been deleted, but I think the one where you followed it up with 'nodding dogs' is still there.

May I remind you that it was you yourself who quoted from Bronson. If you are now claiming that he was referring to a different version, then you have simply undermined your own 'analysis' of this song. You also have to convince me that both Fowler and the Fresno web site are wrong about Bronson and you are correct and fully represent what he said. I know whose version my money is on.

It is interesting that you follow Pops in assuming that the story is about fratricide: I am wondering what textual evidence there is for this in the various versions. Some commentators say it is the father he has killed; others state that it is either the father or the brother.

Nobody is denying that stories of men killing their brothers crop up from time to time. I think it likely that such murders did take place relatively often, families being what they are, and that more than one story about such an event will have been written.

Blithely asserting that all these stories can be linked together and regarded as a continuing tradition back through the centuries strikes me as wishful thinking, an example of 'mediation', perhaps?

The account provided by your information is interesting, but I don't see that it should affect my perceptions of this question of the song's origins. That said, I don't suppose you are actually suggesting that source singers have any particular expertise in such matters?

I'll leave it to you to follow up on The Yellow Rose of Texas.