Bush ballads by the river

What a bush ballad is

A bush ballad, bush song or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music about the life, characters and landscape of the Australian bush. It uses a plain rhyme scheme to tell a story, often one of action and adventure, in colourful, colloquial and very Australian language. The tone runs from comic to mournful. The subjects are the stuff of outback life: droving and shearing, droughts and floods, bushrangers, wandering workers, the divide between city and country, and the meeting of Indigenous and European Australians.

Where it came from

The tradition began with the folk songs that British and Irish convicts and settlers brought with them, many passed on by ear rather than in print. Over the following decades it grew into a style of its own and reached its widest audience late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, when magazines such as The Bulletin used bush verse to celebrate mateship and the battler. Drovers, stockmen and shearers were its heroes, and many of its best-known songs are about them.

Lawson, Paterson and a Queensland song

Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson are the writers most associated with the form, and both are counted among the giants of Australian literature. Paterson wrote the words of Waltzing Matilda in 1895, and the song is among the most famous bush ballads of all; Winton, another Central West Queensland town, has a museum devoted to it, the Waltzing Matilda Centre. Paterson’s collection Old Bush Songs also helped carry a tradition that had lived mostly by ear into print.

Where it lives now

Bush ballads are less popular than they once were, but the tradition has not gone away. Clubs and festivals for bush poetry meet around the country, and the style carries on in Australian country music, which blended it over the twentieth century with American country, rock and roll and other influences. A performer at an outback dinner who mixes a story, a comic poem and a song with a chorus is working squarely inside that line.

What to expect at the dinner

Resident performers take the river stage after the meal with outback songs and stories. The operator chooses who is on and the line-up changes, so this guide does not name performers or promise songs. What you can count on is the style: stories told for laughs as much as for history, songs about the land and the people who worked it, and an audience at tables under the open sky. If you enjoy a recitation as much as a tune, you will be in the right place.

Read next: Outback dinner show: worth it?

Listening for the themes

You do not need to know the old songs to enjoy the night, but a few themes are worth listening for, because they turn up again and again in bush verse. Droving, the long walk of cattle across the country, is the classic subject, and Longreach itself grew up on stock routes. Floods and droughts follow close behind, and in a town on a river that can be a chain of billabongs one year and kilometres wide the next, they are not abstract. Then there is the gap between town and bush, usually played for laughs, with the bushman getting the last word.

Who this isn’t for

If you want a concert by a named artist, a printed running order or a full theatre production, this is not that night. It is a small outdoor stage at a dinner, with one or more resident performers and a crowd that has just eaten. Visitors after something more staged can look at the paddlewheeler night, which adds bush poetry and a sound-and-light show on the riverbank, or simply enjoy the stage here for what it is.