Dougie Young
Australian musician (1933–1991)

Dougie Young (30 August 1933 – 1 April 1991) was a singer and songwriter from South West Queensland. Young had a white father (Frank Young) and a Gurnu mother (Olive Kathleen née McCarthy).
Earlier in his life he worked as a stockman, during which he learnt the guitar and started writing songs. He married Christina Johnson on 11 December 1955 at St Therese's Catholic Mission Church at Wilcannia. A riding accident in 1957 ended his working as a stockman. In 1963 or 1964 Jeremy Beckett, an anthropologist made field recordings of Young, many of which were released in 1965 as an EP called Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards (Wattle). The title track has since been covered by Gary Shearston, Athol McCoy, Chad Morgan and Roger Knox. He was recorded twice more, first in Walgett in 1969 and then in Sydney in 1979 (soon after a report of his death). Songs from these three recordings were released by AIATSIS in 1993 as The Songs of Dougie Young.
Young sang "Cut A Rug", a drinking song from his troubadour days in Wilcannia in the 1950s and 1960s, in both the SBS documentary and accompanying CD, Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music.
“Dougie Young” enters the record as australian musician (1933–1991). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dougie, Young and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Dougie Young” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dougie, Young and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5301139. VIAF identifies the subject as 93295675. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1991, 1955 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dougie Young” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.