bush balladry

noun

bush ballads, collectively.

Meanings

nounbush balladry (uncountable)

alternative bush-balladry

  1. uncountablebush ballads, collectively.

    Country music first arrived in Central Australia in the late 1920s when travelling nonindigenous showmen introduced American hillbilly and cowboy song music and Australian bush balladry.

    2016, Diane Pecknold, Kristine M. McCusker, Country Boys and Redneck Women
    2 more examples

    Lawson, embittered by personal hardship, concentrated on the harsher aspects of the bush, and the democratic feeling evident in much of the bush balladry became in his verse an emphasis on social injustice which, however warranted, was not on the whole a characteristic of life outback.

    1957, Frederick Thomas Bennett Macartney, A Historical Outline of Australian Literature, page 17

    Side by side with the romantic strain, however, has run a notable variety of realistic poetry, expressing itself in three distinct forms: the bush balladry, both folk and literary; humour and satire; and modern intellectualist realism.

    1971, Tom Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, page 128

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

bush balladry. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bush%20balladry

MLA

“bush balladry.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bush%20balladry. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “bush balladry,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bush%20balladry.

Source: bush balladry on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.