TEESSIDE
FOLK * SONG

Out to Otago
Graeme Miles 1960s

List of NZ folk songs - Home

"Teessider Graeme Miles had always wanted to go to Australia, a place he felt was quite exotic, and he decided to write a song about the place. Then the 'exotic' place name of Otago came to his attention after he received a letter from a friend there, and so this song germinated." - Phil Garland

I worked with Sam, I knew him well
He was handy with a shovel
Never known to shirk his work,
Never out of trouble.
And when the gaffer called him names
They would nigh on come to blows
But now old Sammy's gone away
Out to Otago

He said to me he'd been to sea,
Some years ago when younger
New Zealand was the place for him,
When on the shore he'd wander
And through the islands up and down
He would ramble, he would roam
And always said that he'd return
Someday to Otago

He'd laugh away the greyest day
He found everything quite funny
He'd give away most of his pay
Always out of money
He'd drag his woodbine, 'n sup his ale
With no thoughts about tomorrow
But still old Sammy found a way
to go back to Otago

A letter I received from him
The only one he wrote me
Said "Beer out here is no great guns,
But the climate really suits me.
I've met a lass of Maori blood,
She'll be good for me, I know
I guess I'll wed and settle down
Somewhere in Otago."

The winter time is coming on
And the wind blows cold 'n bitter
And grey as slate the sky above
Never known such rough weather
I often think of Sam the Lad
Far from the sleet and snow
I'll bet he's lying in the sun
Somewhere in Otago

If I should live a hundred years
I'll not forget old Sammy
There never was a kinder man
Nor one half so happy
I don't what became of him
And I guess I'll never know
But I bet he's still the same old Sam
And he's out there in Otago - Yes
He's out there in Otago

from the singing of Danny Spooner


Lying in the sun, somewhere in Otago

For folksingers in New Zealand, the image of Otago is the misery of the 1860s goldrush.

Many folksongs they sing about Otago have phrases like these;
"Oh but it's hard, cruel and cold, searching Otago for nuggets of gold..."
"I'm weary of Otago, I'm weary of the cold..."
"I've hunted Otago for gold, in the wind and the rain and the cold..."

But for those left behind during the 1960s jobrush, Otago would have been a Shangri La, an El Dorado, a Paradiso. Tens of thousands of their friends had fled the bleak tenaments of postwar northern Britain for Australia and New Zealand and had written back to them about their new homelands, uncouth and isolated, but warm and prosperous.

And Central Otago with its sheltered mountain valleys is very hot in summer, and sunny all year round. Hundreds of postwar British emigrants found jobs there building hydro-electric dams, servicing tourist hotels and working in orchards. Or they found service jobs like that of rural postman and folkie Martin Curtis, of Cardrona.

A Long journey for sevenpence

77,000 women, children and men came from Great Britain to New Zealand between 1947 and 1975 under the assisted immigration scheme.

Vera Donoghue, who emigrated to New Zealand in 1966, recalls her interview.

"They asked you, more or less, why you wanted to come to New Zealand. I said for a different lifestyle.

"I think because I was single, that was another reason I got out easy.'

"And my health. that was what they were most interested in, you weren't going to take any dreaded disease over to New Zealand -TB, polio or any chest complaints.

"And that you were going to be a hard worker."

An Immigrant

John Logan writes, "I came to New Zealand in 1964 under similar conditions to Sam.

"I'd been coming in and out of NZ for two or three years in the British Merchant Navy before meeting a girl here during my last trip (though I didn't realise it at the time).

"We kept in touch, and she and her sister came to England about a year later. We married in England in early 1963 and my son was born there.

"We came to live in New Zealand when he was about 4 months old. I often wonder at the elements of chance or fate, call it what you will, that life throws up -- a chance meeting that was to take me to live on the other side of the world.

"Unlike Graeme Miles, I don't have the talent to write a song to describe the romance of this episode in my life. But I continually feel blessed that a chance encounter gave me what has been a wonderful life in New Zealand."

Graeme Miles

Graeme Miles is best known to New Zealand folkies as the composer of this post-war conscripts' lament.
When we get to Germany, how will we find,
Life on a serviceman's pay? ...Sergeant?
Life on a serviceman's pay?

Graeme was born in Greenwich in 1935 and began to take an interest in traditional music whilst still at school, writing his first song "Sea Coal" in 1950.

In the next 22 years, he wrote over 500 hundred songs. He consciously left his work as a museum curator and went working at an iron foundry, dredger and stone breaking quarry in order to give himself a background in local industry and to experience the things he might write about.

As a melodist, Graeme's tunes are equally varied and individual, written in modal, as well as major and minor keys with various time signatures. The songs are generally in a free 'rubato' style and usually unaccompanied or with simple backing arrangements. MORE

Danny Spooner

Danny Spooner brought this song to New Zealand in 1985 and recorded it privately for his hosts, the Garland family in Ch'ch and the Penman family in Dunedin.

The MP3 clip above is a clip from the Penman recording. I have compressed it to save my downloading costs, and consequently the singing quality has been affected. I do apologise for this.

Danny was a a young Thames-side boatman in the 1940s who learnt the old traditional songs about working people. And then in 1962, he migrated out to Australia, where he became a highly respected folk-singer. Biography


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Published on web 25 August 2006
Thanks to Robyn Park for drawing my attention to this song.