A SWAG OF YARNS
Including a review of
Warren Fahey's Classic Bush Yarns,
published by Harper Collins
I am not sure quite what got me so interested in story-telling and yarn spinning. Of course the narrative has a large part to play as does humour  and these are often best seen in bush verse and ballads as well as in yarns. Though, when talking about humour, there's not much humour in the typical traditional folk song and even less in most modern folk songs really. No, not even in the deliberately humourous songs. Well, come on, how many supposedly funny folk songs do you still laugh at? Jasper Carrott's “12 days of Xmas”? Bernard Bolan's “Basingstoke”? What else?
Well let's do that for the next article? Let's take a look at humourous folk songs and let's look at what still stands as funny and which one's do we still really laugh at? Your contributions please!
For this article I thought I might write about some of the on-going popular yarns and some of the books that have been published on the subject of yarn and I am going to try and be as accurate as possible when talking about yarns. This means that I am not going to count in some of the really great yarns which were written in ballad form. A pity, because this discounts the very popular Paterson yarn, “Saltbush Bill”. The story of a drover, who deliberately pick a fight with a Jackaroo and plays the fight all day long until his sheep have had a very good feed on a lush grassy run that was off the track and on the property where the Jackaroo was employed. As the ballad reads ….
The new chum made it a rushing fight, though never a blow got home,
Till the sun rode high in the cloudless sky and glared on the brick red loam,
Till the sheep drew in to the shelter trees and settled them down to rest,
Then the drover said he would fight no more and he gave his opponent best.
So the new chum rode to the homestead straight and he told them a story grand,
Of the desperate fight that he fought that day with the King of the Overland.
And the tale went home to the public schools of the pluck of the English swell,
How the drover fought for his very life, but blood in the end must tell.
But the travelling sheep and the Wilga sheep were boxed on the Old Man Plain.
T'was a full week's work 'ere they drafted out and hunted them off again,
With a week's good grass in their wretched hides, with a curse and a stock whip's crack,
They hunted them off on the road once more to starve on the half-mile track.
And Saltbush Bill, on the Overland, will many a time recite,
How the best day's work that ever he did was the day he lost the fight.
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Cunning by half don't you think!?
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