Twinkle, Twinkle, Southern Cross THE FORGOTTEN FOLKLORE OF AUSTRALIAN NURSERY RHYMES Robert Holden Twinkle, Twinkle, Southern Cross The Forgotten Folklore of Australian Nursery Rhymes Robert Holden National Library of Australia Canberra 1992 Published with the assistance of the Morris West Trust Fund Cover: 'We fell through the stars' illustration by Edith Alsop from Joice Nankivell, The Cobweb Ladder (1916). First published 1992 © National Library of Australia 1992 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Holden, Robert. Twinkle, twinkle, Southern Cross : the forgotten folklore of Australian nursery rhymes. Bibliography. ISBN 0 642 10560 X. 1. Nursery rhymes, English—History and criticism. 2. Folk poetry, Australian—History and criticism. I. National Library of Australia. II. Title. 398.8 Publications Manager: Margaret Chalker Editor: Carol Miller Designer: Michael Pugh Printed by Globe Press, Melbourne Foreword Through its Australian collections built up over almost one cultural history of Australia. Mr Holden's text is enriched hundred years, the National Library of Australia is a rich and extended by a wide selection of illustrations chosen repository for a diverse range of materials which record and from many rare and ephemeral publications held document Australian life and achievement in many principally in the National Library. different fields. With the generous assistance of the Morris West Trust Robert Holden, Director of the Museum of Australian Fund, the National Library is delighted to publish this book Childhood in Sydney, draws on these collections and those as part of its continuing commitment to share the resources of other specialist Australiana libraries to survey and of its great collections with the people of Australia to whom analyse the development of Australian nursery rhymes both they belong as a major information record and an important as a distinctive form of juvenile entertainment and part of our national heritage. education and as part of a folkloric tradition. In this work, he presents his own interpretation and sets this particular Warren Horton literary genre into the wider context of the social and Director- General iii Contents Foreword iii 5 'Kid Rhymes' 41 Preface vii 'Out across the spinifex, out across the sand' Introduction 1 6 1920s Nursery Versery 55 1 Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Australia 'As I was going ... from Bourke to Gundagai' 5 'Who killed cockatoo?' 7 Nursery Rhymes for a Depressed Australia 65 2 Songs for the Nursery 'I want to be like Captain Cook' 16 'Kookooburra, kookooburra, sitting on a gum tree' 8 Rhymes for the Times 74 3 What Rhymes with 'Bunyip'? 'Twinkle, twinkle, Southern Cross' 23 'When the drought breaks the rabbits will come' Notes 89 4 Folklore Made to Order Select List of Sources Consulted 92 29 'The man from Menindee was counting sheep' Key to Illustrations 98 V vi Preface The study of nursery rhymes is by its very nature Understandably, from its strength in these specific areas, interdisciplinary, requiring some familiarity with folklore, this folklore collection is usually thought of in terms of folk children's and adult literature, popular art and illustration, song, folk music and oral history sources. While not seeking social and publishing history, and the history of education. to diminish their significance or the oral sources of much Although researchers must guard against thin scholarship in folklore investigation, it is these rather exclusive attention- dealing with so many diverse areas of knowledge, they getters which need setting against a broader backdrop of otherwise risk limitations of vision if they believe nursery national folklife in all its manifestations. Equally, it is all too rhymes, and folklore in general, can be valued and evaluated seldom realised and acknowledged that ever since the within a single and narrow discipline. invention of printing, folklore has not relied solely on the oral In this respect, the varying collections of libraries and tradition to further its boundaries. The printed word though particularly those of the National Library of Australia have has not just codified traditional oral material it has also been provided a logical basis for this study of indigenous Australian an originating source in its own right. nursery rhymes. The National Library of Australia's collections From the days of first settlement, Australia added local are inherently interdisciplinary, exhibiting as they do the goal elements to its imported folklore. In terms of Australian of gathering, organising and preserving knowledge of our children's folklore such indigenous elements took many forms. culture and history of all kinds and in many formats. In the Australian experience my previous work, again based on Furthermore, the National Library of Australia is a leading National Library holdings, on 'lost in the bush', explored the institutional custodian of Australian folklore materials: in the interaction and development of this Australian theme from words of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in fact to fiction to folklore in our printed records.2 Australia, it 'has demonstrated a long standing and continuing Equally engrossing are our attempts to produce made-to- interest in folklife matters, and is easily the government order folklore for our children in terms of indigenous nursery institution in Australia with the best record in this area'.1 rhymes. Much of this effort is scattered through a century of vii TWINKLE, TWINKLE, SOUTHERN CROSS ephemeral and frequently forgotten pamphlets of verse. The usually family members. Thus there are play rhymes and National Library of Australia is particularly rich in its holdings chants, children's own folklore, which usually survives by oral of such material, some of which can be found listed in their transmission across generations of children. In contrast, there publication Australian Children's Books to 1980: a Select is the folklore activity of the family in which adults play a Bibliography of the Collection Held in the National Library of leading role and which is frequently codified in printed form Australia.3 as lullabies, folk and fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. However, Our bush ballads, galloping rhymes and our adult even though this secondary form of folklore is imposed it can Australian verse have introduced such folklore figures as 'The be every bit as variable as children's own folklore and vary Man from Snowy River' and 'Clancy of the Overflow'. Surely greatly from family to family. it is time to populate this imaginative landscape still further Although nursery rhymes are the main source of poetry with characters from Australian children's folklore. Such for young children, it is the playground rhymes of children in nursery rhyme figures as 'The Man from Menindie', 'Sandy Australia which have received significant attention rather than the Shearer' and 'Sammy the Swaggie' are as culture specific as any indigenous tradition of nursery rhymes. The following any of our adult folk heroes and warrant an equal place in our work seeks to illuminate previously invisible terrain—the mainstream culture and consciousness. They are indigenous forgotten folklore of Australian nursery rhymes. creations in their own right and should be set within the context of Australian folklore which had its genesis in a written rather than an oral tradition. Robert Holden Children's folklore derives from two major sources: it can Director be self generated or it can be imposed by adults who are Museum of Australian Childhood Acknowledgements Every effort has been made to trace and contact all copyright were endlessly patient, in particular Richard Stone. Louise holders of material used in this book. However, the publishers Anamat and the Manuscripts staff of the State Library of New would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders South Wales and Jock Murphy of the State Library of Victoria inadvertently overlooked. provided valuable assistance. Tim Curnow of Curtis-Brown An overwhelming debt of gratitude is due to Collins/Angus (Aust.) and Robert Croll were most helpful and encouraging. & Robertson publishers and all who kindly allowed their work Finally, the research collection of the National Trust's to be freely reproduced. They are credited in full in the 'Select Museum of Australian Childhood was an indispensable asset List of Sources Consulted' and the 'Key to Illustrations'. I am and supplemented the National Library of Australia's own vast also grateful to the staff of the National Library of Australia who holdings of printed material. viii Introduction How do we define and categorise the light-hearted charm and formulas, baby puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, uncertain ancestry of the nursery rhyme? The most tongue twisters, nursery prayers, and a few singing authoritative guide is surely that provided by Iona and Peter games, the words of which have an independent Opie in their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. According existence in the nursery.5 to the Opies the term 'nursery rhyme' seems to have sprung This categorisation enabled the Opies to draw their up in the third decade of the nineteenth century.4 Before this, nursery rhymes from a considerable variety of sources—from the rhymes had been known as 'Tommy Thumb Songs' or adult as well as juvenile literature, from chapbooks, 'Mother Goose Songs'. Such rhymes, by tacit and universal broadsheets, moral pamphlets, popular songs and verses, and consent, could be either spoken or sung, but however they from play, as well as from oral tradition. While some may feel were delivered their prime object was, and remains, to soothe that the Opies' range was too catholic, it does point up the and amuse an infant audience. It is also generally accepted that extreme difficulty in defining and categorising the nursery many nursery rhymes were not originally conceived for an rhyme genre. It would seem safer not to be too dogmatic and audience of nursery age children at all and certainly were not simply assert that a nursery rhyme is nothing more or less than entirely the product of uneducated nurses and beldames of a verse, from whatever source, that enters into nursery lore or olden times.