The Mad Shed Rep - Pat Nightingale
Channel: Rob Willis
Date: 2015-03-26

The collection of folklore can sometimes be a protracted affair. In 1958, on a field-collecting trip at Tumbarumba in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, folklorist John Meredith found references to a song about the death of a shearing shed union representative. He was given Pat Nightingale’s name as being a possible source of the song. Years later when Meredith learned that John Harpley and I were undertaking a field trip to Queensland he supplied us with contact details for Pat in the hope that we might be able to collect this song entitled ‘The Death of the Shed Rep’. Pat Nightingale was subsequently recorded in June 1996 at Keppel Sands near Rockhampton, Queensland
Pat learned the  song while working at a shearing shed at a place called Banket just North of Lightning Ridge in about 1933. “I used to get the guitar out and we’d all sing different songs, you know, and I’d play. A couple of them sang those ones so I wrote them down so I wouldn’t forget ‘em”.