I cannot remember having warbled ‘Kookaburra’, sitting cross-legged by an improving campfire with a whole lot of robust, smiling, ruddy-cheeked, wattle-dusted children, as Marion Sinclair presumably intended it to be sung when she entered it in a competition run by Girl Guides in 1934. Yet somehow, by the time I was eight, I knew her song well enough to grasp the Hepburn Springs primary school kids’ version as an achingly funny parody: