favourable to ballad-making. The curious upheavals of
Australian life had set the Oxford graduate carrying his swag
and cadging for food at the prosperous homestead of one
who could scarcely write his name; the digger, peeping out
of his hole—like a rabbit out of his burrow—at the license
hunters, had, perhaps, in another clime charmed cultivated
audiences by his singing and improvisation; the bush was
full of ne’er-do-wells—singers and professional entertainers
and so on—who had “come to grief” and had to take to hard
work to earn a crust to carry them on until they could
“strike a new patch.” No wonder that, with all this talent
to hand, songs and ballads of a rough sort were plentiful
enough.

Most of these songs, even in the few years that they have
been extant, have developed three or four different readings,
and not only have the ballads been altered, but many of them
have been forgotten altogether. Only one very imperfect
song has come to hand dealing directly with the convict days,
but there must have been many ballads composed and sung
by the prisoners—ballads in which the horrors of Port
Arthur in Tasmania, the grim, grey prisons of Norfolk
Island, the curse of official tyranny, and the humours of the
rum traffic had their share. Possibly some lost singer of
convictdom poured out his regrets in words straight from the
soul, and produced a song worthy to rank as a classic: but
all the songs of that day have been mercifully allowed to
drift into oblivion; and their singers, with their grey clothes
and their fetters, have gone clanking down to the limbo of
forgotten things.