Australian country music link Australia's vast distances. Isolation and loneliness of life in the Australian bush has been another theme. For much of its history, Australia's bush music belonged to an oral and folkloric tradition, and was only later published in print in volumes such as Banjo Paterson's "Old Bush Songs", in the 1890s. Waltzing Matilda, often regarded as Australia's unofficial National anthem, is a quintessential early Australian country song, influenced more by Celtic folk ballads than by American Country and Western music. The lyrics were composed by the poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. This strain of Australian country music, with lyrics focusing
The Carnival Is Over "Myfanwy", by Joseph Parry, written earlier, though the Russian folklore possibly predates them both. The original lyrics of the song, written in 1883 by the poet and Povolzhye region ethnographer Dmitry Sadovnikov to a folk melody, told about an episode of the 1670–1671 Russian Peasant Uprising in which Stepan Razin allegedly killed his captive, a beautiful Persian Princess, by throwing her into the water from his boat. According to the Dutch traveller Jean Jansen Struys (1630—1694), the murder was meant as a sacrifice with which Razin hoped to appease the much loved and feared Volga River. Sadovnikov in his text