I keep clear of bush dancing because men who go to bush dances can actually dance. And dancing is a fearful thing for ordinary blokes. It was not always so. In previous times dancing was as natural and necessary as shaving. Cool young dudes these days have abandoned both. Base guitar player for the Bush Capital Band, Geoff Kell, says Australian men have a real fear of looking foolish. "And so they say they can't dance and they won't. The other problem Australian men have is it is very hard to dance with a beer in one hand. They don't like to put it down."

Kell is not content to leave the matter there. "I think it is a very important social thing, it would be a shame if we lost it." He runs Careys Cave at Wee Jasper, near Yass, and is dead keen to raise the topic there, too. "I say to teenagers on tours, [of the caves], you learn to dance and you will be a chick magnet because girls love a guy who will dance with them." But he fears Australians are turning to a certain extent into a society of observers.

This song-and-dance man is not one of them. He says Australian bush music's particular character fell out of flavour with new influences in the 1900s, and experienced a resurgence in the 1960s from the Bush Music Club in Sydney and Bushwhackers Band. "Bush dancing was only really given that name by the Bushwhackers, " says Kell. Bush dancing is traditional Australian social dancing, as practiced in country towns from the 1800s right through to the 1900s, when people used to have regular dances. "They were the social grease for society, where people met and in the country particularly, people came into one place each month, or even each week, for their social needs," says Kell.

For their fancy balls, the Australian squattocracy wanted the latest dances from Europe as soon as they came out on the boat. "In the ordinary country halls, dancing was more akin to steerage passenger dancing, rather than formal balls, so you had barn dances, heel-and-toe polka and haymakers jig."
Men met their future wives at these dances. He says the cross-generational appeal was another bonus. Kids right through to old folk enjoyed a dance together.

Kell set his sights on that model when he organised the 45th anniversary celebrations of the Monaro Folk Society at Yarralumla Woolshed recently. The society's Irish dancing, contra dancing, bush dancing, and performances musicians were all represented at the anniversary which kicked off with a kids dance. "It was a nine-hour program, we had five different dance sections and about 17 performances, and it was terrific. The only thing that killed us was the weather. We bloody froze," he said.

Social media may be an easier means of meeting people these days, yet a bunch of bush dancers including Kell meet every week with dance callers and get down to the basics, beginning with an invitation to take a partner by the hand, an electric moment no amount of new technology and progress will equal. "It is paying attention to the right way to do things, which is a good foundation," says Kell. These days the muso puts his guitar down and joins the dancers for a while on the floor. "As a musician at a dance you feel like being behind a glass wall," he said. "When you dance with [the crowd], it is like you have gone to visit them in their house."