Maryborough Miner, The

DESCRIPTION: The singer describes all the places where he has been digging. At Fitzroy River the boss calls him a loafer, so he burns his office and left. He tells further tall tales, ending "I'm a Maryborough miner, and I'm one of the good old time."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1934
KEYWORDS: mining work rambling
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Fahey-Eureka-SongsThatMadeAustralia, pp. 78-79, "The Maryborough Miner" (1 text, 1 tune)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Murrumbidgee Shearer" (tune, theme)
NOTES [134 words]: Fahey's version was collected by A.L. Lloyd, and he suspects Lloyd may have retouched it. The notes to Patterson/Fahey/Seal on "The Murrumbidgee Shearer" make this even more explicit: they declare this to be Lloyd's rewrite of that. Similarly Gwenda Beed Davey and Graham Seal, A Guide to Australian Folklore, Kangaroo Press, 2003, pp. 185-186; they note that it describes an improbably long life for one person, and say that it is Lloyd's production, and that it became controversial at Australian folk festivals as a result.
On p. 195, Davey/Seal report, "In the original song, the shearer has had a chequered career of prospecting for gold, burning the sheds of uncooperative squatters and robbing gold escorts. He finishes up by spending 'ten years on Cockatoo,' Sydney's colonial island prison." - RBW
Last updated in version 4.1
File: FaE078

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