Australian 12 Days Of Christmas Lyrics

The Australian Twist on a Classic

The 12 Days of Christmas is one of those songs everyone knows, at least the first few lines. Partridge in a pear tree, turtle doves, French hens. It rolls off the tongue because it's repetitive and easy to memorize. The Australian version changes the scenery. Instead of a English manor house setting, the gifts get swapped for things that actually exist down under, or at least things that Australians find recognizable.

Australian 12 Days Of Christmas Lyrics

Most Australians who encounter this song first see it in school textbooks, family Christmas cards, or local community pageants. The lyrics vary depending on who wrote them. There isn't one single authoritative version the way the traditional English carol has been codified over centuries. That's the first thing to understand before you go searching for a definitive text. The most common adaptations replace the partridge and pear tree with an emu and a gum tree. The turtle doves become kookaburras or cockatoos. Piping birds turn into kookaburras again, which is a bit repetitive but nobody complains because kookaburras are funny. Golden rings become honey or boomerangs. Calling birds stay calling birds or become lorikeets. Geese a-laying become kangaroos or emus. Swans a-swimming become something more local like platypuses or just keep the swans since Australia has swans too. The rest of the verses follow similar logic. I spent years working with educational publishers putting together Christmas resources for primary schools. One of the more frustrating edge cases I ran into was when a teacher in Queensland wanted a version that reflected their local fauna specifically, but another teacher in Perth was unhappy because their version had different animals. The solution was straightforward: create a modular lyric sheet where schools could swap individual gifts without restructuring the whole song. It took about three hours of layout work that saved the publisher from getting fifty separate email requests over the same problem.

If you are looking for downloadable lyrics, your best bet is searching educational resource sites like Twinkl Australia, Education.com's Australian section, or local state education department websites. Some community churches and Australian children's music groups also publish their own versions. Avoid the big generic lyric sites because they almost never carry the Australian variants. They have the English original and maybe a few American ones, but the Australian adaptations are too niche for those databases. Here is a practical approach if you need the lyrics for a performance or recording: pick the version that matches your audience. If you are performing for kids who have never left their suburb, a version with kangaroos and koalas lands better than one that keeps the French hens. If you are performing in a multicultural setting, the traditional version might be the safer choice because more people know it. The metric is simple — comfort and recognition in the room you are singing to. I also learned the hard way that timing matters when you perform the Australian version with a group. Some of the substituted animal names take longer to sing than the originals. "Ten lords a-leaping" flows faster than "ten roos a-hopping" if you force it. You need to adjust your tempo slightly on those lines or add a rest, otherwise the verse drags and sounds clumsy. A good workaround is to practice with a metronome set to the original tempo and mark which bars need breathing room. This usually takes about twenty minutes of adjustment per verse.

One thing many people miss when adapting the song is the rhyme scheme. The original relies on simple end rhymes and a clear rhythmic pattern that makes the cumulative structure work. When you swap in Australian words, sometimes the rhymes break. "Gum tree" doesn't rhyme with anything obvious in the original structure. The workaround most adapters use is to restructure the line rather than force a rhyme. It sounds more natural and doesn't draw attention to the change. Another pitfall is the animal count. The original twelve gifts build cumulatively, and each number has a fixed animal associated with it. In some Australian versions, writers accidentally double up on the same animal across different days. You end up with two references to kookaburras or three references to kangaroos. It isn't wrong per se, but it weakens the cumulative effect that makes the song memorable. Double-check your version before you print or perform it. For those who want the full lyrics, here is a widely circulated Australian adaptation:

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me:
A partridge in a pear tree. On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me:
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree. The verses continue through all twelve days, with the substitutions I described above. The full text runs long, which is always the joke of this song, and the Australian version is no shorter. The cumulative structure means by the twelfth day you are singing through the entire list, which is why live performances often cut it down to eight or ten days unless the audience is prepared for the full ordeal.

If you are creating your own version, keep the structure intact and only swap the nouns and their descriptors. Don't rewrite the rhythm or the cumulative mechanic, because that is what makes it the 12 Days of Christmas in the first place. Change those and you haven't adapted the song, you've written something else entirely.