He himself was a subject for folklore. The home he shared with his wife, Anne, for the last 25 years was in the rainforest outside Kuranda, northern Queensland. They built a mud-brick house with swimming pool and workshop, but no running water. A hip bath stood outside the kitchen window; anyone wanting hot water had to light a fire under it; an Asian squat toilet sat in a three-sided shed in the garden.
Edwards, who has died in Cairns, aged 77, after a long illness, liked to assert he was the son of a teamster - a proper background for an Australian folklorist. It is true that his father, Bert, who came from England in 1925, worked briefly in the Victorian Mallee driving horse teams, before retreating to the city. Bert's fiancee, Gwendoline Hughes, came from England to join him and they married.
Young Ron studied commercial art at Swinburne Technical College, Melbourne. His first job was drawing "Jim Stern of the French Foreign Legion" strips for Captain Atom comics.
His involvement with folk song began in 1950, when he met the poet John Manifold in Brisbane. They produced Bandicoot Ballads, a groundbreaking series of musical broadsheets which made available to Australians a folk song heritage few dreamed existed.
Back in Melbourne, Edwards established the Rams Skull Press. In 1955 he published Hugh Anderson's Colonial Ballads, the first book of Australian folk songs with music. His own Overlander Songbook and other folk song titles followed. He was also lead singer on the first 12-inch folk music album recorded in Australia, the Wattle album Australian Goldrush Songs.
Edwards had met Anne Ross, also an art student at Swinburne, and they married in 1953. In 1959, with their daughter, Lee, and son, David, they headed to Cairns. Edwards thought he was leaving folk song behind but, all around him, he found locals who knew old songs. He became a prodigious song collector, fond of recounting folklore historian Wendy Lowenstein's description of him knocking on a door and thrusting a microphone in the occupant's face, demanding: "Sing!"
While Edwards's collecting style was not subtle, it was effective. He collected more than 670 separate items, resurrected the Rams Skull Press and, as editor of the magazine Northern (later National) Folk, published newly collected songs. An expanded 1969 edition of his Overlander Songbook was followed by more collections including, in 1976, the Big Book Of Australian Folk Song, still the largest published collection in its field.
As the old singers died, Edwards turned to bush craft and yarns. His Australian Traditional Bush Crafts (1975) became the first of 10 major bushcraft collections; The Australian Yarn (1977) remains the benchmark in its genre. He made more of his living, however, as an artist, painting naked women, horses and landscapes for tourists.
In 1977 he made the first of 20 trips to remote parts of China, Tibet and Japan, publishing illustrated accounts of his journeys. He grew enthusiastic about Shingon Buddhism, attracted in part by its rejection of celibacy and acceptance of alcohol and merriment.
He rejoiced in inoffensive argument. In 1984 he established the Australian Folklore Society, producing 60 issues of its journal over 23 years. He also founded the Australian Plaiters and Whipmakers Association.
Expecting libraries to buy his 200 Years of Australian Folk Song in the bicentenary year, he was disappointed when only six did so. Undeterred, he used the cartons of unwanted volumes as building blocks for a mud-brick wall and embarked on an even more ambitious indexing project - 12 illustrated volumes, totalling 2860 pages. Lauded overseas as a work of painstaking scholarship, it remains virtually unknown in Australia.
While Edwards delighted in publishing and producing fine books, he had scant interest in the task of selling them. His books were available at the craft shop that Anne ran in Cairns, or through mail order, although those on bushcraft sold well in bookshops.
A visit to Torres Strait in 1999 led him into a new venture as a field collector. Along with Anne, Edwards collected 341 traditional songs and stories from the people of Stephen Island, returning the findings to the communities as songbooks.
Edwards's Rams Skull Press produced more than 350 titles, most written and illustrated by him. Altogether, more than 400,000 copies of his publications were produced. In 1992 Ron Edwards, larrikin, artist, folklorist and workaholic, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia; in 2000, Swinburne University of Technology awarded him an honorary doctorate for eminence in folklore and publishing.
Ron Edwards is survived by Anne and their two children, Lee and David.
Keith McKenry
Reference: http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/determined-to-keep-the-songs-alive/2008/02/06/1202233938364.html downloaded 18 May 2012. (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Feb 2008)
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