Free Sheet Music

Australian Traditional Dance Tunes

Dancing, singing and music have been essential to the party spirit as long as we can remember and the European settlers of Australia were no exception.

Dancing, singing, reciting and music for the white settlers became an integral part of the lives, whether it was in a grand Colonial Ball in the city, a celebratory end of sheep shearing season Woolshed Dance or simply a gathering of friends and family for an evening's entertainment in a kitchen or round a campfire.

The songs, dances, poems and music reflect the hopes, humour, disappointments and the perseverance of these pioneers in a distinctive and characteristic Australian manner.

Here's some Australian dance tunes to whet your appetite. They are tunes collected from Australian dance musicians and well worth keeping alive.

David De Santi

These are tunes sourced and transcibed from the National Library of Australia by Jane Brownlee and David De Santi as part of their 2004 National Library of Australia Folk Festival Fellwoship. These tunes form part of a larger collection, Australian Traditional Dance Tunes Volume 2. The book has over 150 tunes.

51 of these tunes have been recorded as A Swag of Treasures, Australian Dance Tunes, Volume 2.

The tunes are arranged into 14 sets. In general they are played 8 times and are 32 bars in length each time. There is music included for reels, jigs, polka, mazurka, schottische, varsoviana and waltz folk dances.