Kookaburra (song)

"Kookaburra" (also known by its first line: "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree") is a popular Australian nursery rhyme and round about the kookaburra (an Australian bird), written by Marion Sinclair.

Sinclair was a music teacher at Toorak College, a girls' school in Melbourne which she had attended as a boarder. In 1920, she began working with the school's Girl Guides company.

"Kookaburra" was written in 1934 as an entry in a competition run by the Girl Guides Association of Victoria, with the rights of the winning song to be sold to raise money for the purchase of a camping ground. The song was performed for the first time in 1934, at the annual Jamboree in Frankston, Victoria at which the Baden-Powells, founders of the Scouting and Guiding movements were present.

Despite its particular "Australian-ness", the song is well-known and performed around the world, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, where the Girl Guide movements in those countries have adopted it as a traditional song.

Copyright status

Marion Sinclair died in 1988, so the song is still under copyright according to Australian copyright law, and the publishing rights are held by Larrikin Music. In the United States, the rights are administered by Music Sales Corp. in New York City.

Cultural references

* The song is sung frequently on the American children's show "Barney & Friends", particularly in the earliest seasons.
* The song plays an important role in the 2006 "Doctor Who" episode "Fear Her".
* "Kookaburra" is sung to the same tune as the Welsh folk song "Wele ti'n eistedd aderyn du?" (Rough English translation "See you there, that black bird sitting?"). This traditional Welsh nonsense poem is much older than the song "Kookaburra", but, similar to a number of Welsh folk songs that originated from Welsh poems that were later sung to other, more well-known tunes - the most famous of these being "Ble Mae Daniel?" ("Where is Daniel?") sung to the tune of "London's Burning" - the poem was adapted to fit the tune "Kookaburra" in the 1960s by the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth) movement, as the syllables in the Welsh poem are almost identical in pattern to those in "Kookaburra".
* A parody of "Kookaburra" has remained popular in Australian schoolyards for over a decade, beginning with the refrain, "Kookaburra sits on electric wire, jumping up and down with his pants on fire."
* The tune is referenced by the flute part in the popular song "Down Under" by Australian band Men at Work, according to the TV show "Spicks and Specks".

External links

* The Mudcat Cafe: [http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=90351 Forum discussion and details of copyright status] . Retrieved 25 September 2006.
* [http://lyricwiki.org/Barney:Kookaburra Kookaburra lyrics] at LyricWiki
* http://www.anzagl.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=207&Itemid=28