An industrious Australian poet some years ago made a collection of Old Bush Songs, in which he brought together for the first time in book form many of the quaint ditties of the backblocks, past and present, the songs chorused in drovers and bush-men's and diggers' camps and familiarly known to the men of the open air from the Blue Mountains to Coolgardis. and from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Great Australian Bight. Some of these chants of the great out-of-doors seem to have been sailors' chanties originally, adapted and localised; others as obviously could only have been written by men whose lives were spent on big sheep and cattle runs and in "the ragged penury of shade" of the Australian bush. The old bush songs, handed down from one generation to another by word of mouth, are in their small degree an index to the life and ways of the men who sing them, or who used to sing them. They serve in the new land to fill the place of the venerable folk-songs of Old World countries.
So far no New Zealander has attempted to record the unprinted old “home-made” songs afloat in bush arid backblocks communities in New Zealand, songs which though roughhewn as to rhyme and metre, sound well enough when chanted by strong lungs at a “sing-song” around a camp-fire. Perhaps few readers of the“ Lyttelton Times ” are aware that such songs are in existence.

There are not nearly so many as in Australia, certainly, but still the doggerel rhymester is not unknown in the New Zealand bush and in the little sailing coasters that ply from bay to market port and back again. The city man naturally never hears these songs, but the gumdiggers' camp. the bushfellers' shanty, the sawmill-hands and flax-mill hands' camps know them well enough, at any rate in the North Island. Of the current "chanties" of the southern plains and hills I cannot speak from personal knowledge.

I know this of the north, that some of the choruses bellowed around the camp fire or in the snug "whare" after "kai," or out in boat or canoe, date back at least fifty years. If they have no other value they have this, that they memorise more or less historic events of the troubled old days which might otherwise be forgotten. Others are to a considerable extent cryptic to the outsider, because they require for full appreciation a local knowledge of men and places; others again are a pidgin-English jumble of the Maori and pakeha tongues, such as the "Maori Joe" ditty which used to be a favourite one around Rotorua end the Bay of Plenty.

Here, by way of example, are some lines from "Maori Joe," the singer was supposed to a young Maori M.H.R (Government MP):-

The final line, be it known means:-"This is the talk of a very good man, his name is Maori Joe."

The stuff loses its effect in print, but the six or seven verses, all descriptive of some diverting exploit on the part of the new-fledged member of Parliament, went very well in a social gathering "away back," where most of the people had a smattering of Maori. and the reference to Mr *****, a well-known and unpopular Native land agent, never failed to "bring down the house."

Here is an old unwritten song, and: one of a different type, dating back to the old military settler days in Taranaki. I first heard it from my old friend, Mr J. P. Ward, himself an old colonial hand and one of Von Tempsky's Forest Rangers. "Paddy Doyle's Lament" it is titled, and this is how it goes:-
                                                   (sung to tune of Black Velvet Band)

The author of this dolorous ballad of the colonial soldiers' camps is unknown to fame and likely to remain so, but his "Lament" remains to help us picture the tribulations of a raw "Mick" from the Otago diggings under the stern authority of some martinet of an Imperial drill-sergeant.

To the celebrated Dick Thatcher, the versatile entertainer of fifty years ago, who wrote his topical hits in verse and then sang them in public. to the vast delight of the big "digger" camps and the principal towns, we owe some of the catchy songs which have survived to this day, in the form of camp-songs, here and there, effusions which the nimble Thatcher often set to the music of some familiar Christy Minstrel song.
                               (sung to tune of Swanee River) This is a ditty which commemorates the troubles of a certain noted chief Isaac, or Ihaka, arrested in 1863 because of his suspected leanings towards the rebel Kingites, though he was ostensibly friendly. It went to the tune of "Massas in the Cold, Cold Ground." Not so long back I heard the skipper of a New Zealand steamer humming this old "waiata" as he walked his deck one night, and he told me he heard it first at a bush-men's camp in the far North of Auckland.

Another of Thatcher's songs that is still remembered is a smart bit of doggerel, sung to the old-fashioned tune of "Nellie May." It is an historic jeu-d'-esprit, for it was composed and sung in an Auckland theatre just after the escape of the Waikato Maori prisoners of war from Kawau Island, close on fifty years ago, Sir George Grey had the prisoners, who were at first confined in a hulk in Auckland Harbour, removed to his island-home, the Kawau, for safe keeping. They promptly "cut their sticks" from the Governor's isle and boated across to the mainland, and eventually reached their friends. There were some unkind people who hinted that "Hori Kerei" had even connived at their escape. Whereupon Thatcher arose and sang-

        "Oh, Ka Kino Hori Grey, for you let us get away,
        And you never see your Maoris any more.
        Much obliged to you we are, And you'll find us in a pa
        Rifle-pitted on the Taranaki shore!"
                                                     (all verses, and original Maggie May)

I believe that Thatcher published a number of his topical songs in a little paper-covered book, but although some of my acquaintances have seen the publication none have preserved it, and I doubt whether there is one in existence now- unless possibly in the Hocken Library in Dunedin. But old gold-diggers as well as old soldiers and settlers remember the ready-witted Dick's compositions, such as the song about the Wakamarina gold rush in the sixties.

        "I'm off to that golden location, The Wakamarina for me!"
              (all verses, 1864, Twig of Shannon score, T. of Shannon verses)
                                     

And their sons and grandsons have learned them, and so in course of time  these homely rhymes turned out to catch the popular taste in theatre or digging-town music-hall, have become bush-camp classics.

The real sailorman is always a singing-man no matter how roughened his throat may be by years of salt winds, whom you could and the sailormen whom you could have found by the score a few years ago on every large kauri gumfield in the North were often splendid "chanty-singers." There are plenty of them there still; many others, too, in the big kauri-milling camps North of Auckland and on the East Coast of Auckland province.

They brought with them their fine old working songs, the real sea-songs, and there in their "whares" or at the out-of-doors sing-song you could hear, "A-Roving, a-Roving, I'll Go No More a-Roving with you. Fair Maid," roared ont in truo fo'c's'l-shanty style, and "Rio" and "Shenandoah" and many other good deep-sea chornses, some of them of much wild, yet mournful beauty.

But they are not bush-songs. However, the gum-digger and the timber-feller turned some of their chanties into New Zealand ditties by "local touches," and a sample of one of these songs of the seven seas which you may hear warbled full sweetly by some bush vocalist today. I give one verse by way of conclusion to this article:

"I've traded with the Maoris,
Brazilians and Chinese,
I've courted half-caste beauties
Beneath the kauri trees;
I've traveled along with laugh and song
In the land where they grow "mate"
Around the Horn and home again,
For that is the sailor's way."

Chorus.
I've crossed the Line, the Gulf Stream,
I've been in Table Bay;
Around the Horn and Home again,
For that is the sailor's way!"

And I have heard this verse on coastal vessels in the Auckland region.

                        (Across the Line webpage, The  Flying Cloud source tune)

Now that song, which goes to a fine lilting tune, is really adapted from an old sea-poem written by William Allingham; I came across it in a collection of olden ocean-poems the other day. In just the same way the well-known "Ten Thousand Miles Away," sung in the Australian bush, with its abundant “local colour,” is founded upon the old sailor-song of the same title.