Bill Scott is well known and highly regarded as a leading authority on Australian folklore. He's also and a great exponent of both the Australian yarn and the Urban Myth. Indeed, he's probably Australia's most knowledgeable expert of the Urban Myth and shares his studies with such other enthusiasts as Kel Watkins and Graham Seal and has written several books on the subject.

It has been my privilege to meet Bill Scott on a number of occasions, including at his house in Warwick in Queensland when I was working on the idea of “A Swag Of Yarns”. Not surprisingly, I spent quite some time with Bill, talking about yarns and discussing their forms and various types. And some of you may recall, in turn Bill recorded a selection of the yarns he's collected and that we had chosen from his book “The Long and The Short and The Tall” for broadcast in the radio program.

At one point, Bill and I were talking about the typical Australian yarn as we imagine them told around drovers' campfires and I raised the subject of Edward Dyson's story of “The Golden Shanty”. It's a great yarn about a hotel that is built near a stream where people have been panning for gold. One day, the publican finds that some Chinese gold diggers are stealing the bricks from his very building. It turns out that they believe the bricks might have gold in them as the bricks were made from clay near the stream. In my humble opinion it's a good example of the classic all –Australian yarn. However, Bill brought me down to earth, when he said that he thought it was an urban myth! Still, either way, it's well worth a read. You can still find the book, which is a selection of Dyson's short stories, in most good second hand book shops.

Of course, yarns and jokes along with bush verse were being performed at Poets' Breakfasts long before I thought of the new radio program and Folk Festivals have had Yarn-Spinning Competitions for many, many years. For me, this meant that in some cases, I was able to link up with such events without having to explain everything to everyone from “Whoa” to Go!” You know – “What is a yarn?” “What the program “A Swag Of Yarns” would be about.” “Why I wanted to hold some sessions as part of a festival and so on.

So, armed with a growing list of stories and inspired by the enthusiasm for the idea of the program, especially when I went to the Glenn Innes Bush Music Festival, I hastened to the 1995 Illawarra Folk Festival at Jamberoo in NSW.

There were two parts to the programming of events at Jamberoo in '95. There were the evening concerts and the daytime performances, which for my shows, I turned into workshops, inviting a number of performers to join me around an imaginary campfire, along with the audience. Ted Egan came to one and Jim Haynes did a couple and it was at the first show that Jim Haynes posed the questions “Is there such a thing as the universal folk yarn, joke or urban myth? And is there such a thing as an exclusively Australian yarn or joke?

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