Sheepwasher's Lament, The

DESCRIPTION: "Come now, ye sighing washers all, Join in my doleful lay, Mourn for the times none can recall." The singer remembers good days: "The master was a worker then, The servant was a man." But since the sixties, conditions have grown much worse
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1905 (Paterson's _Old Bush Songs_)
KEYWORDS: hardtimes sheep work
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Paterson/Fahey/Seal-OldBushSongs-CentenaryEdition, pp. 204-207, "The Sheepwasher's Lament" (1 text)
Anderson-StoryOfAustralianFolksong, pp. 154-156, "The Sheepwasher's Lament" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Bill Wannan, _The Australians: Yarns, ballads and legends of the Australian tradition_, 1954 (page references are to the 1988 Penguin edition), pp. 179-181, "The Sheep-Washer's Lament" (1 text)
Bill Beatty, _A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales & Traditions_, 1960 (I use the 1969 Walkabout Paperbacks edition), pp. 295-296, "The Sheep Washer's Lament" (1 text)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Bonnie Irish Boy" (tune, according to Beatty)
NOTES [98 words]: John S. Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads? Notes on Australian Folksong, Australasian Book Society, 1964, says that "The vanished trade of sheepwashing has left us one ballad, 'The Sheepwasher's Lamen.' I am pretty certain that it was by reason of its unusually strong political feeling that this one stayed alive. The sheepwashing trade disappeared, but the shearers took up the ballad that suited the temper of the strikers of the '90s." But there seem to be two sheepwashing songs, "The Sheepwasher's Lament" and "The Sheepwasher" -- and the one Manifold prints is "The Sheepwasher." - RBW
Last updated in version 5.2
File: PFS204

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