A song not often heard, but a goodun nonetheless.

On the Road with Liddy

William Miller, 1934

I'm on the road with Liddy with five hundred head of fats.
We string' em on the stony ground and wheel 'em on the flats,
And when the evenin' stars come out, with laughter and with song,
We round the cattle up, and camp by some quiet billabong.

Our cook's a ball of muscles when he's rustling up a feed,
And Bob Delany's home and dried when steadying the lead,
And if the cattle run at night, there's one chap out in front
Striking matches on the bullock's horns, a chap named Georgie Hunt.

And when we get to Wyndham, there's Tom Cole with his whip
To steer the lead across the hill and put 'em on the ship.
And when the mob is all on board, we'll have some blasted fun,
We'll get Jack Roberts with his car to take us for a run.

We'll try and dig Bob Cooper up, then to that bag of tricks,
The pub that's kept by Teddy Clark they call the Double-Six.
We'll sing again them drovin' songs we sang along the track,
Have a show on the screen for an hour or two, then off again out-back.


Sung here by A.L. Lloyd : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_PN6XMFQXw

He notes on the afore-mentioned LP “The Great Australian Legend :
“They used to say that the heart of Australian nation was the nomad tribe - the teamsters, shearers, drovers—always on the move across the continent. Men with plenty of resourcefulness and few responsibilities. At the head of the nomad tribe were the drovers, the overlanders, who shifted herds and flocks across the plains to distant stations or sale-yards. With the spread of railways, the need for the long drives diminished, but they haven't quite disappeared yet. The old forms of bush life have lasted best in the remote country of the Northern Territories and the northern part of West Australia. Mateship is a basic necessity in such empty country; a free and easy hospitability makes up for a life that is otherwise monotonous, repetitious, terribly short of event. Slowness, a certain melancholy, and eager snatch at chance for diversion characterises the existence of the cattlemen of the far outback, even today. The relatively recent North-west drover's song, On the Road with Liddy, shows it all.

This unusual lyric was made, presumably in the 1920s, by a Northern Territory cattle-hand named William Miller. Tommy Liddy was a well-known drover and horseman of the time. The narrative concerns a cattle-drive to the north-west Australian port of Wyndham. I've not seen this one in print.”

All that info was pulled from the excellent Mainly Norfolk website: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/ontheroadwithliddy.html

The info following is from the also excellent Folkstream.com website by Mark Gregory :
See also the original published version from the Darwin Newspaper the Northern Standard The Droving Days in this collection
From the singing of A.L.Lloyd. Printed in Australian Tradition , Oct 1971
Wyndham - port town in northern WA   / Lloyd describes Liddy as a well known drover of the area and Liddy's is also known as a bottle tree near Cockatoo Bore, the other side of Kununurra / Fats - road bullocks / Tom Cole - contract musterer and station manager who settled in Wyndham in 1924 / Georgie Hunt - drover on the VRD, Victoria River Downs in the Northern Territory / Teddy Clark's wife ran a pub called the Six Mile in about 1923 / Filmshows were put on at the meatworks in Wyndham in those days.


My previous hearing of this song was an a cappella group harmony version, but just by whom, has now been lost to me!


Cheers, R-J