Kookaburra (song)

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"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 troupe.

"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 World Scouting 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Cultural references

The song plays an important role in the 2006 Doctor Who episode "Fear Her".
Interestingly, "Kookaburra" is sung to the same tune as the Welsh folk song "Wele tu yn esteidd 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 famous tunes, it was adapted to fit the tune Kookaburra in the 1960s as a result of the syllables in the Welsh poem being almost identical in pattern to those in Kookaburra.