page_title: Bush ballad
section_title: Bush balladeers
hierarchical_section_title: Bush ballad / Bush balladeers
caption_attribution_description: Australian poet Banjo Patterson
context_page_description: The bush ballad, bush song or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music that depicts the life, character and scenery of the Australian bush. The typical bush ballad employs a straightforward rhyme structure to narrate a story, often one of action and adventure, and uses language that is colourful, colloquial and idiomatically Australian. Bush ballads range in tone from humorous to melancholic, and many explore themes of Australian folklore, including bushranging, droving, droughts, floods, life on the frontier, and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
  The tradition dates back to the beginnings of European settlement when colonists, mostly British and Irish, brought with them the folk music of their homelands. Many early bush poems originated in Australia's convict system, and were transmitted orally rather than in print. It evolved into a unique style over the ensuing decades, attaining widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when it was thought by many Australians to convey "an authentic expression of the national spirit".
context_section_description: Lex Banning (1921–1965)
  Barbara Baynton (1857–1929)
  Barcroft Boake (1866–1892)
  David Campbell (1915-1979)
  Stan Coster (1930–1997)
  C. J. Dennis (1876–1938)
  Slim Dusty (1927–2003)
  Edward Dyson (1865–1931)
  Warren Fahey (b. 1946)
  John Farrell (1851–1904)
  Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870)
  Edward Harrington (1896–1966)
  Clive James (1939–2019)
  Henry Kendall (1839–1882)
  Henry Lawson (1867–1922)
  Geoffrey Lehmann (b. 1940)
  James McAuley (1917-1976)
  Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968)
  Francis 'Frank the Poet' MacNamara (1810-1862)
  Harry 'Breaker' Morant (1864–1902)
  John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942)
  Will H. Ogilvie (1869–1963)
  Jack O'Hagan (1898–1987)
  Gordon Parsons (1926-1990)
  Banjo Paterson (1864–1941)
  Dean Perrett
  Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971)
  Charles Robert Thatcher (1830–1878)
  Shirley Thoms (1925-1999)
  Francis Webb (1925–1973)
  Buddy Williams (1918-1986)
  Lionel Long (1939 – 1 January 1998)
  Gary Shearston (1939 – 2013)
  John Williamson (b. 1945)
caption: Paterson
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