Stir the Wallaby Stew

DESCRIPTION: Dad's in jail, Mother unfaithful, the sheep are dead, the farm's for sale. Dad gets out, sees this, and goes back to jail. Chorus: "So stir the wallaby stew, Make soup of the kangaroo tail, I tell you things is pretty tough Since Dad got put in jail."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1957
KEYWORDS: work unemployment poverty hardtimes prison family mother father infidelity humorous
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Hodgart-FaberBookOfBallads, p. 234, "Stir the Wallaby Stew" (1 text)
Ward-PenguinBookOfAustralianBallads, pp. 134-135, "Wallaby Stew" (1 text)
Stewart/Keesing-FavoriteAustralianBallads, p. 36, "Stir the Wallaby Stew" (1 tet)
Roud #8242
RECORDINGS:
John Greenway, "Wallaby Stew" (on JGreenway01)
NOTES [849 words]: John Greenway writes of this piece, "Australia's Tobacco Roaders (without the sexual propensities of Jeeter Lester's relatives) are the delightful family of Dad and Dave and the other residents of Shingle Hut -- Mother, Mabel, Sal, Dan, Joe, and Cranky Jack. [The latter not a member of the family but a mentally disturbed man they were somewhat afraid of but kept on because he worked so hard and demanded so little. But in the edition I have of fhe book, he appears in just one chapter and is hardly mentioned again. I suspect Greenway did not actually read the book.]
"Originally the creation of the first great Australian humorist, Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis) in his books On Our Selection and Our New Selection, Dad and Dave were the archetype of the hard-working but hard-luck free selectors... but the characters were taken away from him and became progressively more lazy and stupid....
"'Wallaby Stew' is a shameful example of the degeneration of the Rudd family (as the tune is a degeneration of the "Bungaree" melody), but it represents an important area of Australian folklore."
Rudd [1868-1935] wrote the first portion of the story in 1895, and it was published in The Bulletin in that year; the complete book On Our Selection came out in 1899.
I don't know how Rudd lost control of his copyright, but the publication history of his book is an incredible mess. The edition I have of On Our Selection was published in the A&R Classics series in 1953 (mine is the 1973 printing: Steele Rudd, On Our Selection, Angus & Robertson, 1973; ISBN 0207129533). This has a publisher's note which states that "In 1893 Steele Rudd contributed to the Bulletin the first of the series of sketches which later appeared in book form under the title On Our Selection, The book was published in 1899 by the Bulletin Newspaper Company, which in 1903 published Our New Selection. The copyright was purchased by the N.S.W. Bookstall Company, which in 1909 brought out new editions of both books, On Our Selection containing only chapters 1-16 of the original volume, chapters 17-26 and 7 additional chapters being issued under the title Stocking Our Selection in the same year."
Curiously, A&R apparently used this abbreviated form of On Our Selection while seemingly using the full text of Our New Selection.
That same publisher's note says that 250,000 copies of On Our Selection had been published by 1940. This in a country that had about seven million people at the time.
Graham Seal, Encyclopedia of Folk Heroes, ABC Clio, 2001, p. 55, claims that "The books were best-sellers and appear to have inspired the numerous humorous folktales and jokes told about Dad and Dave. These concentrate on portraying Dad, Dave, and the family as country hicks."
Gwenda Beed Davey and Graham Seal, A Guide to Australian Folklore, Kangaroo Press, 2003, p. 83, write of the folk evolution of the characters, "Dad and Dave yarns portray Dave as a harmless simpleton, very much in the tradition of the widely distributed 'numb skull' folk stories."
But it's not clear to me that Greenway's and Seal's connection of Dad and Dave with Rudd is correct. I have seen no direct evidence of it. Ron Edwards doesn't even mention Rudd in his notes on this song, which he had from A. L. Lloyd, who claimed to have it from Old Bush Songs. But this does not appear to be a reference to Banjo Paterson's book but to a later volume with the same name. Stewart/Keesing-FavoriteAustralianBallads have no notes on it at all.
If Dad and Dave really are based on Rudd's characters, the degradation described by Greenway took place in a movie and radio show which came out in Rudd's lifetime but in which he had no part; indeed, Wikipedia says he despised the result.
I would add that Greenway is right that this song doesn't sound like Rudd's characters. In the book, Dad is perhaps unwise and stubborn, and frequently angry, but he is a hard worker who does the best for his family; he's not the sort to go to prison. The ninth story, "Dave's Snake-bite," in the eleventh paragraph in fact refers to Dad's "great presence of mind and ability." The third chapter in Our New Selection says that the family had had six straight years of good harvests and was was so prosperous that they were able to sell Shingle Hut for £400 and move off to new property.
The song talks about a "big brother Luke," but I haven't met a Luke; the brothers who are most active in the book are Dave and Joe.
And the Rudd family was already large at the very beginning of On Our Selection, and one daughter married and a son had gone roving early in the book. While Mother might have had "A shearer bloke forever within hail," is it likely that she is young enough that "the family will have grown a bit" after Dad gets out of jail?
On the other hand, the song is right in saying calling the mother "Mother," not "Mum," and the Rudds did have a neighbor named "Brown."
If I had to guess, I'd guess this isn't based on Rudd's characters, at least not as they appear in the book. But I won't claim to be certain. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: Hodg234

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