Hello, I'm David Mulhallen and may I welcome you once again to “Songs and Stories of Australia”. You've had the ABC Radio programs and the book, plus the cassettes and CDs and now here is my regular e-magazine column written especially and exclusively for Simply Australia.

For each issue, I am offering you some thoughts on the various and numerous aspects of Australia's folk heritage, centred around topics presented in many of those radio programs, “Sunday Folk”, “Songs And Stories of Australia” and “A Swag Of Yarns” to name just three. I've subtitled the series of articles “A Swag of Yarns”, because quite a few of the articles are based around the topic of yarn-spinning and story-telling and come from recordings of concert performances, workshops and interviews as well as special thematic programs that I have produced for radio.

For my first article, I talked about how the radio program 'A Swag of Yarns' came into being and how I developed the concept of the program into an idea for live shows. The first was a special live show as part of the 1994 Mudjimba Folk Festival, presented by the Queensland Folk Federation. For the article, I went back to look at what three well-known and respected yarn spinners and collectors had to say about that thorny old question of “What is a yarn?” Ron Edwards, Warren Fahey and Laurie Muller debated the issue at the festival and came up with some very amusing examples of yarns as well as jokes.

Following the success of the “Swag Of Yarns” shows at the Mudjimba Festival, I went on to a number of other folk festivals to encourage more people to tell their yarns, both folk performers and folk audiences. All of them turned out to be just as successful with some great stories and lots of participation.