Across the decades, on both sides of the Great Divide and at campfires and barbecues, in pubs and public halls and class-rooms, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and C.J. Dennis have been recited, selectively quoted, and parodied. Their most popular works have migrated into Australian folklore; hardly surprising, as what they wrote largely derived from the tradition of bush ballads and bush yarns. Theirs have become our stories, familiar, reassuring of our cultural roots and attitudes. To some extent, they are a kind of comfort literature.

That being the case, what can Jack Thompson do for them, and for us, in this series of recordings from Fine Poets? The question for him is whether to try to make them new or to reinforce what we already know. Thompson, of course, wears the impress of Australia, and I do not mean his rakish, persuasively bashed Akubra. He has become a kind of cultural icon, a marker of popular authenticity, a walking, talking seal of approval. Unlike Bill Hunter, Thompson does not resort to a flat growl to assert his nationality. He takes care with his vowels, and modulates his lines. Unthinkable once, Thompson’s approach amounts to a paradigm shift in the national type; and, more interestingly, an adjustment to this cultural tradition.