G'day again bbc,

I looked through Singabout – Selected Reprints and Mulga Wire/Singabout indexes and came up with a list of some 13 songs and two more poems about animals / birds / fish ... excluding the many about: riding horses, herding cattle, shearing sheep, hunting kangaroos (actually there is a really amusing old one about trying to do that).

I will list them (along with some comments on possible suitability):

The Crocodile - Worldwide sailors' song, with UK and American versions, so I won't bother, unless you want the variant.
Darby Ram - Another with many UK versions
Drover's Dream - Alison has linked a version. I would have the collected version, from Bill Tovey
Little Fish - This is another one well distributed among sailors, worldwide (and even sung by Spencer Tracey in Captains Courageous -
Little Sparrow -This is the one I call The Sparrow and the Emu Egg I will get down the words and tune for you (in MIDItext format ... if you want the "sheet music" I can e-mail a 1-bit GIF of my setting – but I need your e-mail address, not the Mudcat PM).
The Old Bullock Dray -Much more concerned with the wife he intends to pick up at The Factory - The Parramatta Women Convicts' Establishment – than the bullocks, but you may be interested (if it is not on Digitrad already).
The Old Poley Cow - More or less an Australian cattle-musterer's version of The Blue-tailed fly ... interesting, but possibly not what you are after.
The Spider from the Gwydir - In Singabout as a poem, but I first knew it as a song. There is a more complete (and robust) version listed below as the The Moree Spider.
Where The Black Swans Fly - This is a setting, by Claire White, of a poem by Ted Harrington, from his book The Swagless Swaggie.
The Rabbiter Song - I published this as a Western Australian variant of Stan Wakefield's song about trapping rabbits for a living during the Great Depression of 1929 – 1930s. I would give you the straight version, from one Stan's books.

The Bream Of Ansons Bay - A bit of fisherman's tall tale, this one
The Possum Song - A children's song learned from a lady who heard it in the 1930's from an old shearer, now hired to look after her father's orchard. (After a working lifetime stooped over, shearing uncooperative sheep, a stint of reaching upwards to prune fruit trees would be like a spell in Heaven!)
3 Old Crows - One of those songs that have descended from mediæval ballads, through music hall parodies to 'folk song'. Obviously goes back further that European settlement in Australia
2 Black Crows - Another relative of the one above.
He's My Dog - A poetic tribute to "Man's Best Friend" ... winner of our 1989 verse competition (© of course)
Bunyip in the Slack Tub - Another poem, by John Warner, about a bit of creative haunting by Australia's monster of dark waterholes and eerie forests. (John has a later one about a coastal bunyip that eats tourist yachts, Too Roo Dun, but I haven't published it.)
The Moree Spider - Collected later, but probably an older, more accurate and much more robust version. Maybe the other one is better for you purposes?

Anyway, I will scape up versions of Little Sparrow, The Spider from the Gwydir, The Moree Spider, Where The Black Swans Fly , The Possum Song, He's My Dog and Bunyip in the Slack Tub .

Some of these will take a bit of scrounging, but I will get them back to you ... and post them in separate threads for each item.

Regards,

Bob Bolton