The songs and music that has come from people's experiences of living and surviving in the Australian bush has become known in Australia as 'bush music'. Bush songs have been devised by ordinary everyday people and are a record of the colourful slang of bush life.
The 'bush ballad' is a style of poetry that attained great popularity in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, becoming an important emblem of Australian literary and popular culture. Generally narrating a story - often an exciting action or adventure - and frequently humorous in tone, the bush ballad almost invariably employs a straightforward rhyme structure and depicts the characters and scenery of rural Australia.