Australian country music is a part of the music of Australia. There is a broad range of styles, from bluegrass, to yodeling to folk to the more popular. The genre has been influenced by Celtic and English folk music, the Australian bush ballad tradition, as well as by popular American country music. Themes include: outback life, the lives of stockmen, truckers and outlaws, songs of romance and of political protest; and songs about the "beauty and the terror" of the Australian bush.
A bush band is a group of musicians that play Australian bush ballads. A similar bush band tradition is also found in New Zealand.
"Down Under" is a song recorded by Australian rock band Men at Work. It was originally released in 1981 as the B-side to their first local single, "Keypunch Operator", released before the band signed with Columbia Records. Both early songs were written by the group's co-founders, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert. The early version of "Down Under" has a slightly different tempo and arrangement from the later Columbia release. The best-known version was then released on Columbia in 1981 as the second single from Men at Work's debut album Business as Usual (1981).
Australian folklore refers to the folklore and urban legends that have evolved in Australia from Aboriginal Australian myths to colonial and contemporary folklore including people, places and events, that have played part in shaping the culture, image and traditions that are seen in contemporary Old Australia.
Bruce Morrisby Watson is an Australian singer-songwriter, satirist, and children's entertainer. Watson's satires are often political in nature. His style is generally contemporary folk music, he also writes and performs children's songs, conventional folk–country music and political songs. He has issued seven solo albums Politics, Religion and Sex (1990), Real World: Songs of Life, Love & Laughter (1994), Out My Window (1999), Are We There Yet? (2004), A Moving Feast (2004), Balance (2010) and Mosaic (2017).
William Neville Scott OAM was an Australian author, folklorist, songwriter, poet, and collector of bush ballads and Australian folk history. He has published anthologies of Australian bush songs, including the best selling book The Complete Book of Australian Folklore published in 1976. He was awarded the Order of Australia in 1992 for his contributions to folklore, folk music, and Australian literature. He was considered a living treasure, and his anthologies of songs and his donated collections continue his legacy.
"Kookaburra" is an Australian nursery rhyme and round about the laughing kookaburra. It was written by Marion Sinclair in 1932.
Declan James Affley was an Australian folk singer and musician.
Gregory Norman Ham was an Australian musician, best known as a member of the 1980s band Men at Work. He played saxophone, flute, organ, piano, and synthesizer.
Jon Boden is a singer, composer and musician, best known as lead singer and main arranger of Bellowhead. His first instrument is the fiddle and he is a proponent of "English traditional fiddle style" and also of "fiddle singing", both of which he employed in Bellowhead, in the duo Spiers & Boden, and previously as a member of Eliza Carthy’s Ratcatchers.
The Bushwackers Band, often simply the Bushwackers, are an Australian folk and country music band or bush band founded in 1970. Their cover version of "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" (1976) was listed in the APRA Top 30 Australian songs in 2001, alongside its writer Eric Bogle's 1980 rendition. Their top 60 studio albums on the Australian Kent Music Report are Bushfire (1978), Dance Album (1980), Faces in the Street and Beneath the Southern Cross.
John Stanley Raymond Meredith OAM was an Australian pioneer folklorist from Holbrook, New South Wales whose work influenced the Australian folk music revival of the 1950s, in particular as a founding member of the Australia's first revivalist bush band The Bushwhackers. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1986 for service to Australian folklore and music, and became a Member of the Order of Australia in 1992 for service to the Arts, particularly in the collection and preservation of Australian folklore.
Larrikin Records is a record company founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey. Larrikin started as an independent label and was sold in 1995 to Festival Records.
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.
Alexander Stewart Ferguson "Alex" Hood is an Australian folk singer, writer, actor, children's entertainer/educator and folklorist.
Jim Haynes OAM is an Australian writer, entertainer, broadcaster, humorist, songwriter and historian. In 2016 he received a Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the performing arts.
Mike Jackson OAM is an Australian children's entertainer, recording artist, songwriter, radio show host, and author. He is perhaps best known for his version of Bananas in Pyjamas and appearances on ABC Television.
Marian Henderson was an Australian folk and jazz singer later referred to as "the queen of the (Australian) 1960s folk revival". She worked extensively in Australian folk and jazz clubs during the 1960s and 1970s and appeared on television and a number of Australian folk music recordings, though recorded only one album under her own name.
Sally Sloane was possibly the most important Australian "source musician" to have been recorded during the Australian folk music revival of the 1950s and onwards; a number of her songs and tunes were passed down via her mother from her Irish grandmother, who emigrated to Australia in 1838. A resident of Lithgow, New South Wales and in her 60s at the time of her "discovery" by Australian folklorist John Meredith in 1954, she was an accomplished player of button accordion, fiddle and mouth organ as well as a singer. On a number of visits over the period 1954–1960, Meredith recorded over 150 items from her; these recordings are now in the collection of the National Library of Australia, and transcriptions of almost 40 of them were included, with accompanying notes, in his seminal 1967 book "Folk Songs of Australia; And the Men and Women Who Sang Them". She was also visited and recorded by other collectors and at least one LP recording of her singing, "A Garland For Sally", was released, by Warren Fahey's Larrikin Records.
Sydney's Bush Music Club is the oldest and longest running folk music performance and education organisation in Australia, and is believed to be the second oldest such club still in existence in the English speaking world. Founded in 1954, and still extant as at 2022, it exists to further "the collection and research of folklore traditions and folk music and to encourage the performance of traditional bush music, song and dance, spoken word, bush poetry and yarns". It hosts regular events and has published a range of folklore related materials, including the magazine "Singabout" from 1956 to 1967, which continues as a section within a subsequent publication "Mulga Wire" (1977-current).
