Australian country splits into three broad layers: Slim Dusty's 1950s bush ballads (narrative country songs about outback life), Keith Urban's post-1992 Nashville-oriented commercial country, and Kasey Chambers' alt-country bridging the two. Standard instrumentation is acoustic guitar, slide guitar, pedal steel, bass, drums, harmonica, and fiddle. What separates it from American country is the wildness of the outback lyric imagery and the retention of Australian slang — mate, cobber, drover — that a Nashville producer would file off. Tempos run 60 to 120 BPM, chord movements are the standard I-IV-V with blues undertones, Slim Dusty's vocal is talking-blues-adjacent, and Kasey Chambers uses a Nashville belt that is nonetheless roughened by weathering rather than by studio grit.

Slim Dusty (1927–2003, born David Gordon Kilpatrick in Kempsey, NSW) collected the song 'A Pub With No Beer' in the mid-1950s from an English original by Dan O'Connor and rewrote it into an Australian setting. His 1957 recording became the first Australian gold record ever released internationally — a comic bush ballad about a country pub run out of beer. He released over 100 albums, sang 'Waltzing Matilda' at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and by then was the country's default paternal figure. In the late 1990s Kasey Chambers stepped out of her family's Dead Ringer Band, released The Captain (1999) and Barricades & Brickwalls (2001) with 'Not Pretty Enough,' and crossed alt-country into the international market. Meanwhile Keith Urban had moved to Nashville in 1992 and, by 2004's Days Go By, was scoring US country number ones.

In 'A Pub With No Beer' Slim Dusty's voice slips constantly between singing and speaking — the accompaniment is spare, guitar and harmonica, and the vocal is placed close to spoken pitch, ornamented minimally. That plain-speech vocal is the bush-ballad signature. Kasey Chambers' 'Not Pretty Enough' uses a Nashville high-belt but with a weathered edge that reads as outback exposure rather than as studio effect. Keith Urban's 'Blue Ain't Your Color' shows his guitar architecture at full extension — one of very few Australian-born players operating at the highest level of American commercial country.

Slim Dusty 'A Pub With No Beer' (1957) is the origin. Kasey Chambers 'Not Pretty Enough' (2001) for the alt-country. Keith Urban 'Days Go By' (2004) for the fully realised Nashville-Australian form. Late afternoon, with a beer to hand.

'A Pub With No Beer' was originally an English song by Dan O'Connor from 1943, but Slim Dusty rewrote it thoroughly into Australian landscape. On release it sold 300,000 copies in Australia and reached number seven in the UK — the first Australian record to become an international hit. Kasey Chambers grew up in a kangaroo-hunting family on the Nullarbor Plain, spending much of her childhood in a caravan; that upbringing is the direct source of her songwriting.