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She told me, in after years, when she’d grown up to be a grandmother, that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing “Madeline” that day.

I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a frightfully bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and thereafter we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice, lest we should go and do what the digger did.

. . . . .

I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days, more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being from another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:

Out in the cold world–out in the street–
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!

That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened by women sobbing (and one or two great grown-up diggers also) that night in that circus.

“Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now”, was a sacred song then, not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar “business” for fourth-rate clowns and corner-men. Then there was “The Prairie Flower”. “Out on the Prairie, in an Early Day”–I can hear the digger’s wife yet: she was the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly and crept into camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up with gold-dishes, shovels, etc., etc., and gave them a real good tinkettling in the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start housekeeping on. She had a very sweet voice.

Fair as a lily, joyous and free,
Light of the prairie home was she.

She’s a “granny” now, no doubt–or dead.

And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife, wearing a black eye mostly, and singing “Love Amongst the Roses” at her work. And they sang the “Blue Tail Fly”, and all the first and best coon songs–in the days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.

. . . . .

The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews’ “Redclay Inn”. A fresh back-log thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully. Company settled down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.

Flash Jack–red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing in it, glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack volunteers, without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his nose:

Hoh!–
There was a wild kerlonial youth,
John Dowlin was his name!
He bountied on his parients,
Who lived in Castlemaine!

and so on to–

He took a pistol from his breast
And waved that lit–tle toy–

“Little toy” with an enthusiastic flourish and great unction on Flash Jack’s part–

“I’ll fight, but I won’t surrender!” said
The wild Kerlonial Boy.

Even this fails to rouse the company’s enthusiasm. “Give us a song, Abe! Give us the ‘Lowlands’!” Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying on the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his head–his favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing. He had a strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and through, from hair to toenails, as a child.

They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it behind his head on the end of the stool:

The ship was built in Glasgow;
‘Twas the “Golden Vanitee”–

Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone between–

And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!

The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen, as all do within hearing, when Abe sings.

“Now then, boys:

And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!

“Now, all together!

The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!”