TWO SONGS OF HARRY PECKMAN,
THE BLUE MOUNTAINS POET

One day while I was visiting the Mount Victoria & District Historical Society's museum in the old refreshment rooms at Mount Victoria Railway Station, their research officer brought out an 'original' Peckman broadside to show me. Not only was the fact that it was an 'original' and not a copy exciting but it was one I had not come across before. As soon as I saw the title I knew I'd made one of those small discoveries that drive folklorists on. The ten-verse plus chorus song was headed Tambaroora Gold / By Harry Peckman, Hartley, and that title certainly rang a bell.

Fragments of this song were published in 1961 in Singabout (Vol.4, No.3), the magazine of the Bush Music Club, and the least fragmentary of these had been obtained by Russell Ward from 70 year-old Harry Holder of Lionsville on the NSW north coast. This version was later 'completed' by John Manifold and published in 1964 in his The Penguin Australian Song Book.⁴ Not surprisingly, it differed markedly from the Peckman broadside. Names of people had changed, for example, and there was no longer a chorus.

The other fragments published in Singabout were collected by John Meredith. One came from Muriel Whalan of Katoomba who remembered learning her version, again substantially changed, from her mother during her childhood at Sunny Corner, west of Lithgow. This fragment was later included by John Meredith and Hugh Anderson in their Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them5. Meredith also collected fragments from Tom Byrnes, who had grown up in the Springside – Springhill district of NSW, and from the famous 'Duke' Tritton. It was the chorus that stuck in their memory.

Harry Peckman is on the left with his brother John and family

Is Harry Peckman's broadside version the original? Though, of course, one can never be absolutely certain with folk song, even when authorship is claimed, I'm inclined to think it is. There is no printing date on the broadside but Peckman went to Hartley in the early 1860s as a very young man to work for local hotelkeeper John Louis Meads. He was living in the Hartley - Mount Victoria district when Tambaroora, just north of Bathurst NSW, was still a prosperous gold mining town (along with its better known neighbour Hill End) and news and gossip from the gold fields was travelling regularly down the Western Road.

Harry Peckman

It would seem that the young bush poet was performing his songs and poems and peddling his broadsides quite widely during the 1860s and 1870s. In some of his reminiscences, recorded by local journalists, he mentioned the lively sessions of song and recitation he participated in during his youth, particularly at 'Kelly's in the Glen' halfway to Jenolan Caves. Some of his work attained for him what is possibly the highest accolade a popular audience can bestow, a passage into the anonymous oral or 'folk' tradition that carried it to places far removed from the Blue Mountains. While we have Peckman's complete text for 'Tambaroora Gold' we don't know what tune he used when he originally sang the song in the 1860s. However, John Meredith collected two fragmentary tunes from his informants and these were later adapted by John Manifold who suggested that both be used, one after the other. The band Franklyn B. Paverty, who included the song on their 1987 album Songs from the Australian Goldrush (LRF 173), set it to the tune 'Sweets of May'.