Old Bark Hut, The

DESCRIPTION: The singer, whose name varies, relates, "I once was well to do, but now I am stumped up, And I'm forced to go on rations in an old bark hut." There follows a list of the ways the singer makes do or tolerates the poor conditions
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1905 (Paterson's _Old Bush Songs_)
KEYWORDS: poverty hardtimes
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Meredith/Anderson-FolkSongsOfAustralia, pp. 105-106, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text, 1 tune)
Anderson-StoryOfAustralianFolksong, pp. 151-154, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text, 1 tune)
Fahey-Eureka-SongsThatMadeAustralia, pp. 126-127, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text, 1 tune)
Paterson/Fahey/Seal-OldBushSongs-CentenaryEdition, pp. 298-302, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text)
Manifold-PenguinAustralianSongbook, pp. 87-89, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text, 2 tunes)
Meredith/Covell/Brown-FolkSongsOfAustraliaVol2, pp. 133-134, 290-291, "The Old Bark Hut" (2 texts, 2 tunes)
Stewart/Keesing-FavoriteAustralianBallads, pp. 22-24, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Bill Beatty, _A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales & Traditions_, 1960 (I use the 1969 Walkabout Paperbacks edition), pp. 288-291, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text)
Matthew Richardson, _Once a Jolly Swagman: The Ballad of Waltzing Matilda_, Melbourne University Press, 2006, pp. 34-35, "The Old Bark Hut" (1 text)
Roud #22662
NOTES [190 words]: This is sort of the Australian version of "The Old Chisholm Trail," with nearly infinite verses. Henry Lawson reports riding on a train from Bourke to Sydney with a band of shearers, who sang the song the whole time without repeating a verse.
Manifold, p. 94, following Hugh Anderson, says that the "parent version" was written by William Perrie, and observes that several versions use London thieves' jargon, implying an origin among transportees.
Morris, p. 207, defines "Hut" as follows: "a cottage of a shepherd or a miner. The word is English but is especially common in Australia, and does not there connote squalor or meanness. The "Men's Hut' on a station is the building occupied by the male employees."
A "Bark Hut" was less exalted: "A [gold] digger's dwelling place constructed from bark. [The term was applied from the 1790s to a temporary shelter constructed by Aborigines; it was applied as well to a dwelling in which the walls and roof were made of bark. Such dwellings were common on the goldfields.]" (Moore, pp 6-7). Since most diggers had poor luck, a bark hut was thus a place where little comfort was to be expected. - RBW
Bibliography

Manifold: John S. Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads? Notes on Australian Folksong, Australasian Book Society, 1964
Moore: Bruce Moore, Gold! Gold! Gold! A Dictionary of the Nineteenth-century Australian Gold Rushes, Oxford University Press, 2000
Morris: Edward E. Morris, A Dictionary of Austral English, 1898 (I use the 1972 Sydney University Press with a new foreword but no new content)

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File: MA105

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