[1][2] Marion Sinclair was a music teacher at Toorak College, a girls' school in Melbourne she had attended as a boarder.
The song was performed for the first time in 1934 at the annual Jamboree in Frankston, Victoria, at which the Baden-Powells, founders of the Scouting and Guiding movements, were present.
[5] On 30 July 2009, Justice Peter Jacobson of the Federal Court of Australia made a preliminary ruling that Larrikin did own copyright on the song, but the issue of whether or not songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert had plagiarised the riff would be determined at a later date.
[6][7] On 4 February 2010, Justice Jacobson delivered his judgement that Men at Work had infringed Larrikin's copyright, and that both recordings submitted to the court "...reproduce a substantial part of Kookaburra".
[10] On 31 March 2011, an appeal by record company EMI was dismissed by Justices Arthur Emmett, Jayne Jagot and John Nicholas, who concluded there had been an infringement of copyright of the tune "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree".