Documenting a folk tradition

Cover of one edition of Russel Ward's The Australian Legend: Arguably the first major work on the Australian folk tradition since Banjo Paterson’s 1905 Old Bush Songs.This is the third in a series on the New England folk tradition

In 1956, the application of Australian historian Russel Ward for a lecturing position at the newly renamed University of NSW was rejected. He had been blackballed for his political beliefs, including his membership of the Communist Party.

"Ward had, UNSW Vice Chancellor J. P. Baxter told council, been 'active in seditious circles in Canberra'."

Ward had, UNSW Vice Chancellor J P Baxter told Council, been “active in seditious circles in Canberra”. The decision to not appoint Ward despite the unanimous recommendation of the selection committee created controversy.

Max Hartwell had been a member of the selection committee. Born at Red Range near Glen Innes where his father was school teacher, Hartwell had studied at the New England University College where he was a member of the first Rugby Union side in 1939.

Hartwell was now Professor of Economic History at UNSW. His political views were diametrically opposed to Ward’s Marxist world view, but he liked and respected Ward and was outraged by the decision. The result was a very public spat culminating in Hatwell’s resignation from UNSW and, subsequently, his move to Oxford.

In 1957, to Ward’s surprise, he received a telegram offering him a lectureship at the University of New England. He would spend the rest of his academic life at UNE.

Ward’s PhD thesis, his THING as he described it in his autobiography, was on “The Ethos and Influence of the Australian pastoral Worker”. In writing, Ward drew very heavily from Australian folk songs and ballads. He did not believe that they were in themselves accurate history, rather that they captured ethos and sprit.

Ward’s research drew him into the nascent folk revival that was taking place especially in Sydney with its musical, literary and political threads. Then, in 1958, Ward published the Australian Legend, arguably the first major work on the Australian folk tradition since Banjo Paterson’s 1905 Old Bush Songs.

The Australian Legend had a major impact and remains in print today. Among other things, it popularized the Australian folk tradition, if with a very particular focus.

Ward retained his interest in Australian folk music and folk traditions. However, changes were also taking place that would blunt both his influence and the Australian folk revival.

One change was the broader nature of the folk revival itself, including overseas influences such as Peter. Paul and Mary. A second change was the emergence of new popular musical forms including rock and roll, the Beatles and the rise of American influenced country music. There were shifts as well in the study of history itself as new topics and fashions emerged.

Russel’s influence did continue. We now come to a new stage in the story, one in which New England researchers and performers take centre stage. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 20 November 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018. 

Folk ballads hit the right spot

Read all about it: Sometimes racist and xenophobic, always nationalistic, the Bulletin magazine played a major role in promoting Australian bush ballads. This is the second in a new series on the New England folk tradition

Folk music is an integral part of the folk tradition.

Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had their music that was passed down through the generations. The European settlers brought their folk music with them, music that changed with circumstance and time. Later, these traditions would cross-pollinate.

Song, music and dance are all closely aligned. They feed each other.

The convicts brought the remembered songs from home, changing titles and words to suit their circumstances. Moreton Bay with its tale of convict suffering was fitted to the tune of the Irish song Boolavogue.

As European settlement spread, the convict tradition transformed into the bush ballads popular among itinerant agricultural workers. This was predominantly a male society.

Many worked alone in isolated locations, others traveled for work or came together for particular activities such as mustering. When they gathered together they told yarns or sang songs and sometimes danced around the camp fire, entertaining each other.

Many in this period were illiterate or semi-literate. Songs were learned by listening and practicing and then passed on in an evolving oral tradition.

Overseas influences could still be important. Botany Bay, one of Australia’s most famous folk songs with its opening line “Farewell to old England for ever”, is apparently based an a musical burlesque Little Jack Sheppard. This was staged at The Gaiety Theatre, London, in 1885 and then repeated in Melbourne the following year.

While overseas influences remained important, the bush ballad had become an Australian tradition with many local variants. This tradition reached its peak in the 1890s, partly driven by Sydney’s Bulletin magazine with its focus on Australia, Australian nationalism and Australian rural life.

Collapse followed as the spread of recordings, of cinema and radio, supplanted the previous oral tradition. Australian folk songs were replaced by US offerings.

By the 1930s, New England Country Party politician Mick Bruxner, a cousin of Australian film maker Charles Chauvel, was complaining bitterly about US cultural dominance in film and language.

Not all was lost, however. A new wave was about to emerge, one that would see something of a resurgence in Australian folk music including folk songs, a rediscovery in which New England would play an important part.

Next week I will tell you how and why. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 13 November 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here  2018

Folk culture lost in the past

 The band played on: Miners and families, Lower Hunter, 1888. By 1888, brass bands were a central feature of life in many communities. This is the first in a new series on the New England folk tradition

The European settlers who came to Australia after 1788 brought their own popular or folk traditions with them, traditions that were then modified by local conditions.

These traditions were not uniform across England, let alone Great Britain or the European continent. Because the composition and timing of European settlement was not uniform across Australia, the ethnic and cultural mix across the country was far more varied than we realise today. 

Bush dancing: The European settlers brought a number of dance forms with them. In a male dominated society with few women, dancing was individual, competitive 

These regional variations are poorly understood, partly because regional as opposed to local history has suffered from neglect over many decades. This neglect compounds a bigger problem, one inherent in the nature of folk traditions themselves. 

Today we live in a world saturated with recording devices of all types, with media of all types, with multiple forms of entertainment. There is constant competition to get just a slice of our eyeballs, just a bit of our ears, just a bit of our already overcrowded hours.

The folk tradition is very different because it is an oral and demonstration tradition, one in which knowledge and skills in things such as song, dance, music or children’s games pass directly from person to person.

This makes it hard for folk traditions to grow or even survive. Around the world languages are in decline, entire cultures are being lost. In Australia, much of the detail and texture of folk traditions, European as well as Aboriginal, has been lost because no one wrote it down, no-one saw it as important. By the time importance was recognised, it was too late. 

In the US with its many states and longer colonial history, regional variations in culture and folk tradition are well recognised. In Australia, they are not.

The popular Australian bluegrass festivals such the Byron Bay Bluesfest sit there like blobs upon the landscape with almost no interconnection with the surrounding area beyond the economic.

I am not knocking them I value their contribution, they are part of modern New England. But I do wonder listening to the many Radio National programs about these festivals why it is that I now know more about the music of Northern Appalachia than I do about any Australian region?!

I have obviously opened up a very large topic. It is also one that I am especially ill-equipped to deal with given that I am not musical, while my attempts at dancing can best be described as catastrophic. In fact, I make British Prime Minister May look positively professional!

Still, over the next few columns I thought that I might share with you a little about New England’s folk culture just to open the topic up. You might be surprised at just how much there is.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 6 November 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018

The folk tradition in Australia's New England - a methodological note

New England folk group, The Horton River band, 1997. Dave Game, Mark Rummery, Chris Sullivan, Lionel O'Keefe. Photo: Bob Bolton

My current series of columns in the Armidale Express is a preliminary exploration of New England's folk traditions. I wandered into this area almost by accident. I had been picking up references to various elements in the folk tradition. Then while I was reading Russel Ward's autobiography, A Radical Life (Macmillan, South Melbourne 1988), I came across the story of champion clog dancer Harry Macklin Shaw. I knew of Russel's interest in Australian folk songs, he taught me, but had never heard of Shaw. My attention was caught, and I decided to try to pull together some material on folk traditions with a special focus on New England.

I did so with some caution. I am not especially musical, I am a very bad dancer and also knew enough to know that the area was something of a mine field. Still, I pushed ahead and now find that all my reservations had substance! Just understanding different forms of dance is itself itself a significant challenge.To help me, I decided to do a methodological note to supplement the columns.

The note itself is a work in progress, a placeholder for recording material, ideas and issues as I go along. So I will post some initial stuff now and then update it on a weekly basis as I go along. Later when I bring the necessarily short columns up on the blog, this post will provide supplementary information.

Coverage

My columns have a special but not exclusive focus on the Northern Tableands. However, my broader focus remains on the broader New England, the tablelands and the surrounding river valleys.

At this point, I am focusing on the post European settlement period,  The deep and extensive Aboriginal folk tradition is a different story, although there are later interlinks between the two.

Definition

As normally understood, the folk tradition is an oral and demonstration tradition, one in which knowledge and skills in things such as song, dance, music or children’s games pass directly from person to person. This simple definition includes a number of problems.

To begin with, who are the folk?  Wikipedia, for example, defines a folk museum as "a museum that deals with folk culture and heritage. Such museums cover local life in rural communities. A folk museum typically displays historical objects that were used as part of the people's everyday lives."  So rural and local, excluding urban communities. This narrow definition is reflected to some degree in the discussion on folk traditions where the folk are thought of in terms of working and especially rural people as compared to those in the middle and upper classes and especially those who live in metropolitan areas.    

However, Wikipedia also defines folklore in a way that is much broader:

Folklore is the expressive body of culture shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. These include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging from traditional building styles to handmade toys common to the group. Folklore also includes customary lore, the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas and weddings, folk dances and initiation rites. Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore is not something one can typically gain in a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts. Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another either through verbal instruction or demonstration.

This broader group based definition includes urban as well as rural groups. It allows for transmission between groups and between generations. It tries to specify the scope of folklore. However, it retains a focus on oral instruction or demonstration, where traditions are passed along informally. Here we come to another set of problems.

Non-literate societies use both formal and informal learning to pass on lore, knowledge and various forms of expression. We can see this in traditional Aboriginal societies where certain lore was passed on in a highly structured way through formal learning, while other skills and knowledge were acquired less formally. In the Celtic bardic tradition, bards were trained in a variety of skills to entertain and pass lore on. So in both cases, we actually have a mix of formal and informal learning.

The emphasis on oral instruction or demonstration raises different issues. Does a tradition cease to be a folk tradition if is is written down and passed on partially in that form? Some folk song purists have seemed to argue something close to that. They have also argued that new songs composed and then spread are not folk songs.

Neither position strikes me as especially sensible. Not only do transmission mechanisms vary, but I find it hard to think of Mike McClellan's Saturday Dance, his There is a Place or Gary Shearston's Shopping On A Saturday as other than New England folk songs. To my mind, the critical issues are neither source nor transmission but tradition, the extent to which folk traditions broadly defined are carried down through the generations.

to be continued
  





   

Curley Brydon flies to new heights

No. 78 Squadron members: Squadron Leader "Curley" Brydon, Jack Gibbons, probably Corporal Alfred John Gibbons, and Arthur Jones. Photo: Australian War Memorial.

After so many history columns, I am sometimes asked how I can still find things to write about. Part of the answer is that I am a bower bird, constantly looking for new sticks or trinkets to add to my ever growing nest!

In today’s case, it was the Tamworth Aviation Facebook page that informed me that on 25 October 1944, Squadron Leader Adam Howie “Curley” Brydon was awarded a Bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross. Attention caught, I started digging.

Adam Howie Brydon was born in Armidale on April 14, 1921, to Dr Adam Gibson Brydon and Marjorie (nee Mallam) Brydon. The couple were well liked and very active in community activities, while Dr Brydon was also The Armidale School (TAS) doctor.

I do not know where Curley went to primary school, but he enrolled at TAS in June 1931. There he was involved in the model aero club, was in the swimming team and played in the TAS 2^nd Fifteen.

Curley left TAS in 1939. When War broke out in September, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), completing flying training at Point Cook.

The Air Force suited Curley who seems to have had a love of fast planes and fast cars.

The Armidalian records that just after the War he decided on impulse at 9pm that he must visit Armidale. Leaving at 3am in his black MG, he arrived in Armidale for breakfast. The next year, the magazine records that he had come second in the Bathurst road race for the second time!

Curley served first in Number 8 Squadron and then in number 78 Squadron. Number 8 which flew Hudson light bombers took heavy casualties during the Japanese invasion of Malaya and then the Netherlands East Indies. forcing retreat to Australia for retraining and re-equipment.  

Number 78 Squadron was formed in July 1943 as one of the new squadrons being equipped with Kittyhawk fighters and took an active role in the fighting over New Guinea.

By October 1944 when Curley received the Bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross, he was Squadron Leader in charge of Number 78, the youngest Squadron Leader in the RAAF.

The citation for the award read in part: “Squadron-Leader Brydon displayed outstanding courage, keenness and initiative in carrying out extremely hazardous operations which have proved of inestimable value”.

At the end of the war, Curley joined the Fleet Air Arm before moving to the private sector. After establishing Diners Club in Australia, he joined News Limited holding multiple senior executive positions first in Australia and then the United States.

Curley died in September 1986. It had been a long and varied journey from the quiet streets of the Armidale streets of his birth in 1921.

Update 10 November 2018

In comments on the Armidale Families Facebook page, Ken Williams wrote "Howie made fame by setting a new record for road travel from Sydney to Armidale in his MG TC, just after the end of WWII. My recollection was that he made the trip in 6 ½ hours. Not impressed? Remember - hardly any bitumen then!"

Reading Ken's comment, I was taken back into my past when I spent a lot of time driving on dirt roads. I could imagine him pointing the car and drifting round the corner! Susie Dunn who knew him well remembered him flying spitfires as well. I hadn't picked this up from the squadron material.

Another commenter said that Dr Brydon was the doctor when she was born.    

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 31 October 2018. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018.

The families of the New England University College

Workmen, Booloominbah 1938. There was great pressure to get the College open quickly. Alterations were still underway as the first staff and students arrived.  

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the foundation of the New England University College in 1938, the first university institution in Australia outside the capital cities. As part of the anniversary, over October 2018 I ran a short series of columns on the families of the College.

Institutional histories focus on the institution. That's understandable. However, the NEUC could not have survived without the sacrifices made by the wives. For most, they were far removed from family support and had to manage with uncertainty and sometimes primitive conditions. The children of the NEUC families, the siblings, grew up in an amalgam world that was intensely local while also being global. Sydney was remote, more remote in fact than Oxford or Cambridge or Manchester.

This post gathers the family columns together so that you can follow the story through. Many things are left out, suppressed in order to fit within tight newspaper word limits, but they will give you a taste of a small but unique part of Australia's history. I have also included some links to earlier pieces that tell a little of the history of the NEUC, as well as a short UNE video made to celebrate the College's anniversary.

The family series is:

• New England University College: building an academic institution 
• Armidale's university family grows 
• Dedicated beginnings to New England's college
• University college 'siblings' experience a rich life

Earlier in 2018, I completed the first part of a series of columns on the Pacific Belshaws. This includes a number of columns on the early days of the NEUC.

• The Pacific Belshaws 5 - Belshaw appointed to Armidale 
• The Pacific Belshaws 6 - Brothers immersed in Depression economics
• The Pacific Belshaws 7: Fast-paced start for uni college
• Intense first days for new College
• New England University College fights to stay open.
• University college ‘starved'
• Building university into a regional power house
• 1954: University of New England finally achieves autonomy

On 1 November 2018, the University held a morning tea for the alumni of the NEUC This is the short video prepared for the occasion. I note one error. In redoing a short grab I said that my mother, Edna Belshaw, was David Drummond's grandaughter. She was, in fact, his daughter. Felt a bit silly when I spotted it later!

The Spanish Flue Epidemic in New England - a note

Spanish Flue Quarantine Camp Wallangarra 1919

I have come across glancing references to the impact of the Spanish Flue epidemic across New England, but hadn't really focused on it. This short note is by way of a placeholder.

Its genesis lies in my discovery that over 2018–19, the Royal Australian Historical Society is encouraging local, special interest and family history organisations to research the historical impact of the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic of 1918–19.

As part of this project, Dr Peter Hobbins has been running a small series of workshops across NSW to encourage community interest and to energise local research. Two of these were held in the broader New England, one at Port Macquarie, a second at Tenterfield (and here also in the Tenterfield Star). For those on Twitter, the hash tag is #anintimatepandemic.

The project strikes me as a worthwhile one.

The National Museum of Australia has a very useful short summary on the pandemic. A PhD thesis by Patrick Hodgson looks at the Queensland experience while this is a general list of some Trove newspaper articles.

Update

Regular commenter JohnB pointed me to this piece in The Conversation by Richard Gunderman, The ‘greatest pandemic in history’ was 100 years ago – but many of us still get the basic facts wrong