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DO NOT PUBLISH: Australian Christmas Bush and Bells - Meta Maclean
Title:
DO NOT PUBLISH: Australian Christmas Bush and Bells - Meta Maclean
NFSA ID
797758
Year
1940
'Young Jackie wrote to Santa Claus, "We long to hear those bells of yours. Please hurry, bring your jingle bells to where the real Australian dwells. And you'll be met at Woolloomooloo by a happy hopper kangaroo, and he will bring his brother too, then you'll have two roos helping you".
Our Christmas bush and Christmas bells will mingle well with jingle bells. A Merry Christmas it will be, with Santa at our Christmas tree.'
Meta Maclean was an Australian-born songwriter, author, broadcaster and entertainer. In 1947, she urged the Australian government to rescue 'young people from the criminal exploitation, not only practised since the first world war through bad types of imported songs but, by 1947, being practised at a rapidly increasing rate through bad radio serials and paper comics for the young, and threatening to engulf the mental life and national vitality of the continent.'
Read more about Meta Maclean in Mary Johnson's 1954 document To Save a Nation, available online via the State Library of Victoria.
This track is Included in Children's Songs with Meta Maclean (Prestophone Collection No. 138).
Image: A.W.A. Radio Electric Works (Ashfield) Children's Christmas Party, 1939.
NFSA Title No: 466197
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.