Ladies Of Brisbane: A Song History
"Brisbane Ladies," also known as "Ladies of Brisbane," "The Drover's Song" and "Augathella Station," is an Australian bush song (Roud 687) that parodies the English sea song "Spanish Ladies" and is sung to its melody.[1][2][3] The sea song's voyage becomes a journey overland, as the singer bids Brisbane goodbye on the way to a cattle station and sings the praises of life in the bush.[1] Its earliest known printing is in The Boomerang of 28 February 1891, where, according to John Manifold, it was titled "The Drover's Song."[1][2] AustLit notes that several sources, Ron Edwards among them, name Saul Mendelsohn as the author, but accounts of him differ: Manifold, going by what he recalled of a conversation with Mendelsohn's son, placed him jackarooing at Nanango in about 1890, while Danny Spooner and Martyn Wyndham-Read report that the song is said to be the work of a Nanango storekeeper, spelled Mendelson, who died in 1897.[1][2][3] The Ballad Index lists him only tentatively, and its editors observe that oral tradition has changed his text so much that whether it can still be called his is a matter of opinion.[1]
Charles Parsons, Clipper Ship "Red Jacket" – In the Ice off Cape Horn, on Her Passage from Australia, to Liverpool, August 1854, hand-colored lithograph, 1855. A clipper on the Australia run in the 1850s, shown for the sea song the bush song parodies; it has no connection to either song.
In the mid-twentieth century the song reached the songbooks: Ron Edwards included it as "The Drover" in his Overlander Songbook (1956), Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing put it in Old Bush Songs and Rhymes of Colonial Times (1957), and Manifold's Penguin Australian Song Book (1964) titled it "Ladies of Brisbane."[2] Edwards returned to it in 1982 with a Rams Skull Press publication titled Brisbane Ladies, which gathers several versions and reproduces an early one whose musical score is credited to S. Mendelsohn of Nanango.[2] A. L. Lloyd, whose own version differs considerably from the early texts, suggested that someone, perhaps a former sailor, made the parody in the second half of the nineteenth century, and he called the borrowed melody "an uncommonly handsome one."[2][3] Lloyd recorded it on Australian Bush Songs (Riverside, 1956) and The Banks of the Condamine (Wattle, 1957), later reissued by Topic as Outback Ballads, and Spooner and Wyndham-Read sang it on All Around Down Under (1989).[3]
Under the title "Ladies Of Brisbane," a melody version is the last song listed in Pixie Wright's Folk Songs For Dulcimer From The USA To Australia, a DAD-tuning collection in standard notation and tablature whose songs are labeled by country of origin, many of them with harmony or bass parts for ensemble playing.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Brisbane Ladies".
- AustLit: "Augathella Station".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Brisbane Ladies".
- Pixie Wright: "Folk Songs For Dulcimer From The USA To Australia".
- Image: Charles Parsons, Clipper Ship "Red Jacket" – In the Ice off Cape Horn, on Her Passage from Australia, to Liverpool, August 1854, hand-colored lithograph, 1855. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.