Bound For South Australia: A Song History

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"Bound for South Australia" is a sailors' work song, also called simply "South Australia" or "Rolling King," and listed in the Roud index as number 325.[1] Collectors of shanties printed it repeatedly, among them Colcord, Harlow, Doerflinger and Stan Hugill, whose Shanties from the Seven Seas gives three texts.[1] According to A. L. Lloyd, it first reached print in Laura Smith's The Music of the Waters (1888), which drew on a version she took down from a seaman at the Sailors' Home in Newcastle upon Tyne.[2] Its verses, tune and storyline overlap heavily with "Cape Cod Girls," and the Traditional Ballad Index keeps the two as separate entries while acknowledging that some versions fall between them.[1]

Three-masted clipper ship under full sail on a rough, dark sea at night, with another ship in the distance

Charles Parsons, Clipper Ship "Dreadnought" off Tuskar Light, 12 1/2 Days from New York on her Celebrated Passage into Dock of Liverpool in 13 Days 11 Hours, December 1854, hand-colored lithograph, 1856. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An American clipper on the Atlantic, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Lloyd placed it at the capstan, when a ship was weighing anchor to leave port, and said it later turned into a forebitter, a recreational song for the crew's free time.[2] A sleeve note citing Hugill calls it probably a pump shanty, and Louis Killen reported that the crew of the Hudson River sloop Clearwater hauled on a halyard to it.[2] Lloyd regarded the competing origin stories, wool clippers versus emigrant ships, as unproven, observing that the song was no more at home on the Australian route than on Western Ocean ships.[2]

Lloyd recorded it on Blow Boys Blow, his 1957 album with Ewan MacColl, and again in 1958 for Across the Western Plains on the Wattle label.[2] Hugill himself recorded it for Folkways in 1980, and singers and shanty crews from Louis Killen to Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends have kept it in circulation.[2] Australian songbooks, including The Penguin Australian Songbook and Fahey's Pint Pot and Billy, print it under the title "Bound for South Australia."[1]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "South Australia (I)".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "South Australia".