AustLit

'Ron Edwards (1930—2008) had a passion for recording and safeguarding for future generations Australia’s unique folk heritage. In 1950, at a time when popular wisdom had it that Australia had few folk songs, Edwards and poet John Manifold produced the Bandicoot Ballads, trailblazing broadsheets which marked the beginning of Australia’s folk music revival. He also published the first book of Australian folk songs with music. Moving to far North Queensland he made his living painting nudes, horses and bush landscapes. Discovering tradition-bearers all around him he became an irrepressible field collector making Cairns the folk song, yarnspinning and bush craft capital of Australia. He also documented meticulously a wealth of ancient Aboriginal rock art.

'A passionately independent free spirit and sole proprietor of his Rams Skull Press for over fifty years, Edwards published over three hundred titles, mostly on Australian folklore and traditional craft, the overwhelming majority of which he wrote and illustrated himself. Over forty years on, his pivotal publications The Big Book of Australian Folk Song, The Australian Yarn and Traditional Australian Bush Crafts remain standard references. His monumental twelve volume Index of Australian Folk Song warrants recognition as a national treasure.

'Ron Edwards is a towering figure in the field of Australian folklore.'(Publication summary)

'John Meredith (1920-2001) was for decades the leading warrior in the fight to preserve and celebrate Australia’s unique folk heritage. Between 1953 and 1994 he recorded from ordinary Australians thousands of songs, tunes, recitations, folk medicines, superstitions, sayings and yarns, documenting a rich canon of traditional lore which at the time few believed – and many denied – existed. He was also a key pioneer in folk song performance, establishing in 1952 the original Bushwhackers Band and performing in the landmark Australian musical Reedy River. A political radical throughout the Cold War years, he fought all his life against poverty, cultural toadyism and official indifference.

'Writing or co-authoring many books on Australian tradition and history including the classic Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them, still easily the most important single volume in the field, he achieved official recognition late in life, his original field recordings becoming an acknowledged national treasure. Unlike however the great song collectors in other English-speaking countries he did not have the benefit of a good education let alone formal musical training for he was forced by poverty to leave school at age fourteen at the height of the Great Depression. In 1944, having neither qualifications nor prospects, he mounted his pushbike and left the New South Wales township of Holbrook where he was born and rode into the sunrise, determined to make his fortune. This is his story.' (Publisher's abstract)

'This unique songbook draws from a well so much part of Australia's everyday landscape it was overlooked by our early folk song collectors. These are not songs about shearing, goldfields or bushrangers but rather they are songs actually sung by shearers, gold-miners and, in all probability, bushrangers like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall.

There are songs here about love and betrayal, family life, volunteer rifle brigades established during the Crimean War to repel the feared Russian invasion of Melbourne, and of brave Aussie boys going off to fight mother England's wars. There's Sweet Mary of Kilmore, Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake and Mrs McSorley's Twins, as song of the Blessed Zulu War, one of a wife gone off to be a Mormonite, and another referred to by Rudyard Kipling, for which scholars have searched in vain for over 100 years. They're all here, reconstructed from fragments published in the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in 1940, drawn from the memories of the paper's readers. These are Australia's lost folk songs and it is time they were heard.' (Publisher's Blurb)