Lazy Harry's (Five Miles from Gundagai)

DESCRIPTION: The workers set out for Sydney, but upon reaching Lazy Harry's, stop for a drink. And "the girl who served the poison, she winked at Bill and I, So we camped at Lazy Harry's on the road to Gundagai." The men revel until their money is used up.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1905 (Paterson's _Old Bush Songs_)
KEYWORDS: drink money rambling
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Paterson/Fahey/Seal-OldBushSongs-CentenaryEdition, pp. 253-255, "On the Road to Gundagai" (1 text)
Ward-PenguinBookOfAustralianBallads, pp. 118-119, "Lazy Harry's" (1 text)
Stewart/Keesing-FavoriteAustralianBallads, pp. 58-59, "On the Road to Gundagai" (1 text)
Howson-SongsSunginSuffolk, #97, "Lazy Harry's" (1 text)
DT, GUNDAGI2*
ADDITIONAL: Bill Wannan, _The Australians: Yarns, ballads and legends of the Australian tradition_, 1954 (page references are to the 1988 Penguin edition), pp. 60-61, "On the Road to Gundagie" (1 text)
A. K. MacDougall, _An Anthology of Classic Australian Lore_ (earlier published as _The Big Treasury of Australian Foiklore_), The Five Mile Press, 1990, 2002, p. 304, "On the Road to Gundagai" (1 text)
Bill Beatty, _A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales & Traditions_, 1960 (I use the 1969 Walkabout Paperbacks edition), p. 306, "On the Road to Gundagai" (1 text)
Roud #10726
RECORDINGS:
John Greenway, "Lazy Harry's (Five Miles from Gundagai)" (on JGreenway01)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Jacksons" (plot, lyrics, portions of tune)
cf. "Jog Along Till Shearing" (theme)
NOTES [518 words]: Gundagai was a town of no particular account in itself. Its position at the midpoint of the Sydney-Melbourne road has, however, made it the setting for many folk songs.
This particular song is sufficiently well-known that Davey/Seal included "Lazy Harry" as an entry in their encyclopedia (p. 175), but they do not mention a real "Lazy Harry's." However, Howson-SongsSunginSuffolk cites "Wollitzky's 'Bushwackers Australian Songbook'" (which, it appears, should be The Bushwackers Big Australian Song Book by Dobe Newton, Jan Wositzky of the band The Bushwackers) as saying that "the original site of the pub was flooded by the Snowy River Scheme" -- a hydro power project in New South Wales and Victoria in the third quarter of the twentieth century. This doesn't prove much, though, since the song itself locates Lazy Harry's five miles from Gundagai, probably toward Wagga Wagga since we have no indication in the song that they reached Gundagai. (I see, incidentally, no evidence that the Snowy River Scheme flooded anything near there.)
The same source says that Lazy Harry was an actual person who was "too fat and lazy" to be able to tie his own shoes. But, again, I have no reliable source for this.
According to O'Keeffe, p. 161, "the Yanco" was a mansion in the Riverina owned by a famous pastoralist named Samuel McCaughey, said to have owned more property in New South Wales than anyone in history.
There is some clever use of verbs in the song. In the first verse, the shearers have a cheques that "wanted breaking down." But at the end, their check is not "broken down" but "knocked down." Morris, p. 250, says "Knock-down. v. generally of a cheque. To spend riotously, usually in drink." His first cited usage is from 1869, and every cited instance seems to involve wasteful spending, although not all involve liquor.
A "nobbler," which the girls give the shearers when they have used up their money is defined on p. 321: "Nobbler, n. a glass of spirits; lit. that which nobles or gets hold of you. Nobble is the frequentive form of nab. No doubt there is an allusion to the bad spirits frequently sold at bush public-houses, but if a teetotaler had invented the word he could not have invented one involving stronger condemnation." The first citation is from 1852.
It is noteworthy that the shearers hump their blueys at the beginning, but shoulder their matildas at the end. The term "matilda" was originally rare; elsewhere, swagmen carried swags! The term is sufficiently local that the first Australian dictionary, Morris's, does not even mention it (that's in 1898). This, to me, strongly hints that the song was written only shortly before Banjo Paterson published it -- possibly even influenced by the usage in Paterson's own "Waltzing Matilda," which did much to make the term "matilda" popular.
Incidentally, while almost all versions seem to be close to the Paterson text, that in Howson-SongsSunginSuffolk is very different -- it doesn't have a chorus, and the girls at Lazy Harry's don't just lure the shearers into wasting their cash, it claims the girls actually rob them. - RBW
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File: DTgundag

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