The Click of the Shears
[Tune: Ring The Bell Watchman]
Work, work, and your home you can keep,
Tending your cattle, or shearing your sheep;
Work is a pleasure when done with good will,
Cheering, assisting, rewarding you still,
Look at the shearer, hard working, and worn,
Turning the sheep in his arms to be shorn;
Pleased with his pipe, he partakes in a joke,
Filling the shed with vanishing smoke.
Chorus:
Click, click, click go the shears;
This is the music the shearer reveres;
Happy at work as a lord he appears,
Humming a song to the click of the shears.
Morn on the gum trees looks bright from the east;
Into the pens go the sheep to be fleeced;
There stand the shearers with faces all bright,
Sharp'ning their shears with an air of delight.
See! woolly backs from the pens rushing in;
Soon as they enter the shearers begin;
Stretched at their length they lie easy enough -
Mark you how quickly the fleeces come off.
Chorus:
Click, click, click go the shears;
This is the music the shearer reveres;
Happy at work as a lord he appears,
Humming a song to the click of the shears.
Notes
From Ron Edwards' Australian Folk Song Index, where Ron comments:
'Although the title and first line of the chorus bear some resemblance to Click Go The
Shears, this is a different song, although the tune, which is not indicated, could well be Ring the Bell,
Watchman.
National Songs of Australia, B. McElhill, 1893, page 61, copy in the Public Library of Victoria. Australian Folklore Society Journal No.22, page 11/431.'
This song like the 1874 song The Shearer in this collection bears some resemblance to Click Go the Shears as Edwards points out.
In 2013 it was discovered that Click Go the Shears was undoubtedly derived from a 1891 song The Bare Belled Ewe. The relationship of these songs is opening up an important discussion that was not possible before the advent of digitised newspapers through the National Library of Australia pioneering TROVE Project.