Keep Him My Heart – Returning Music and Sense of Place to Top End Communities
“Polkas, hulas, shakehands, quicksteps – they played them all, the string bands of old Darwin, and tomorrow night, round sunset, on a stage high above the Arafura Sea, a journey through time will be accomplished, and their sweet, sad music will live again…But how to bring the past back, and not make its return seem mere nostalgia? The theme of this year’s Festival is not just a piece of archival scavenging, but something very like a north Australian Buena Vista Social Club – a tale of revival, life, of tunes enduring and rebirth” So wrote Nicholas Rothwell[1] in The Australian newspaper of August 23, 2002. He was talking about the 2002 Festival of Darwin, which had taken as its main focus the wonderful music and culture of Darwin’s pre-war string band and immediate post-war Sunshine Club era.
They called their event String Bands and Shakehands – the Days of Old Darwin, after the presentation I and Darwin’s Mills family and friends gave at the 2002 National Folk Festival. I was both thrilled and humbled by that choice, but apart from sowing the seeds of the 2002 Festival of Darwin (FOD) event , I had little else do, except be there – and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
The local community did it all from go to whoa. It took on a life of its own from day one, with all the old Darwin community’s ‘formidable aunties’ as we termed them, organizing dance classes for the kids and making leis, even before the event was approved by the FOD organizers. But who would, or could deny them – they were on a mission, to re-live - and revive a musical heritage which was almost lost, hanging by a thread, for want of music and musicians – and for want of pride and recognition
I thought of calling this paper “It’s On Again Tonight in Dear Old Darwin”, after Ted Egan’s [2] song. For that’s the way it was, right up until the time of Cyclone Tracy, in one form or another. Whether it was in the unemployment camps or Immigrants’ Hall of pre-war Darwin, the Parap Camp Sunshine Club of post-war Darwin or at house parties all over Darwin throughout this period, the call “it’s on tonight” signaled a time for revelry, catching up with friends and most of all music and dance. As Darwin author Maisie Austin[3] recalls in her lovely little book Quality of Life “it was not unusual to have over 300 people attend a party … Kids were sent around the neighborhood to tell people, who wandered in after dinner and joined in the singing, dancing, or just listened to the music”. And what music it was too - this wonderful admixture of Filipino Rondalla tunes, Malay Indonesian and TI pearling songs, Hawaiian hulas and popular dance music of the day- all forming part of a colorful Kriol string band culture – “part of Darwin’s unrecognized Bohemia” as Nicholas Rothwell [4] described it.
However, I chose instead to call it Keep Him My Heart, after the title of a 1993 musical about Darwin’s Cubillo family – subtitled a Larrakia-Filipino Love Story and written by Darwin’s Gary (Cubillo) Lee[5]. I chose this because it was that play and the events which led to it and flowed from it, which marked the beginning of a revival - a real revival, of interest, awareness and pride in a musical culture that was almost, but not yet lost, to that community and to us.
The title also evokes the feeling for and the relationship that this close knit mixed-race community has, with its music and dance heritage, especially that of the Sunshine Club days. As my good friend Kathy Mills[6] says “it kept people together, kept them strong, kept alive the memories of old times, old ways”. For Kathy’s uncle and pre-war Darwin string band player Val McGinness [7] music was also “a great thing for binding a family and community together”. Indeed it was the cement that bound them together and provided their sense of identity – their sense of place, in what was probably the cradle of multiculturalism in Australia according to former AFL footballer and Darwin resident Bill Dempsey[8] .
This Top End tale is about how an almost accidental collection episode in 1988 contributed unwittingly, in a small but significant way, to this revival. It tracks a 15 year path from initial collection, to Keep Him My Heart, to the National Folk Festival and finally the Festival of Darwin’s Days of Old Darwin event of August 2002. It’s a real tale of folk process and revival, albeit erratic and tenuous at times.
As folklore collectors, we are driven by a range of imperatives, including musicological, anthropological, socio-political, archivist and performance-driven motives. All are valid in my view. Along with these imperatives go perceived outcomes for use of such material – from pure academic research and publication, to preservation for posterity, elucidation of our culture and recycling of material for revival performance. In the historic Euro-Australian setting, that revival performance has often been far removed from its source material in space and time, though there are many notable exceptions to this, as witnessed by the work of John Meredith, Rob Willis, Dave de Hugard, Chris Sullivan and many others in more recent times. Generally speaking, the imperative of returning material, in the first instance to the community from which it came, was not a major issue for earlier Australian collectors. However, for many mixed race and migrant communities, whose hold on their still-living musical or folkloric heritage is becoming tenuous, such material, often held by a very few remaining individuals, can provide a lifeline to cultural identity and sense of place.
In my 30 years living and working in northern Australia I have dabbled in folklore and oral history collection – and dabbling is all it has been, as time and circumstances permitted. As such, my collections are meager and my methodology erratic, compared with many of those mentioned above. Throughout this period, my driving imperative has always been not just the material itself, but what it says about identity and sense of place – the same imperatives that first drew me to the folk revival in the early 1960s. Those of you who have attended workshops I’ve given at national and regional folk festivals over the years would have seen this theme repeated in successive presentations. Throughout my years of living first in the Kimberley, then in the Northern Territory and Queensland have always been intrigued by Bill Scott’s [9] 1980 observation in the then National folk magazine Stringybark and Greenhide that “Whilst we are sitting in our folk clubs, singing our folk songs, the folk are somewhere else, singing something different” (Scott, 1980).
Never was this more true than of Darwin’s Top End Folk Club – that legendary gun turret venue facing out across the confluence of the Timor and Arafura seas, which in the 1970s and 1980s attracted regular crowds of 300 or more people on many a magical tropic club night. I took great delight in finding out what that “something different” was in the ‘old’ Darwin community, beyond the club’s gun turret walls – and I wasn’t disappointed!
That is how I came to meet those wonderful Cubillo, Hazelbane, Adams, Angeles, Cardona and Mills families – and many more, including of course Valentine Bynoe McGinness – one of the last surviving old pre-war Darwin string band players (in the late 1980s) and perhaps the last surviving melody musician from that era. When I think back on this time I’m reminded of observation by Rob Willis [10] in the forward to his monograph titled Songs, Tunes and Yarns of Ebb Wren that collectors should “always look in their own backyard” before traveling kilometers in search of new material. For 9 years I’d lived not a kilometer away from Val McGinness and didn’t know he existed – this wonderful self-taught mixed-race musician, bush mechanic and jack of all trades. Even after I first heard about the legendary Uncle Val, via his niece Kathy Mills, it took me the best part of a year of patient nudging before the family took me around to meet this then 77 year old patriarch and keeper of family and community music. Such is the importance of trust, credibility and above all patience, when dealing with these communities – everything happens on a different timeline. As my friend and colleague Dr. Karl Neuenfeldt[11] said of recording in the Torres Strait “It took me 2 years to get someone to sit down with me and name some songs from 12 hours of recordings of a Tombstone Unveiling dance and music evening on Badu”.
Of course I was gob-smacked when I finally met Val – by his musicianship, repertoire of tunes and songs and willingness to share it with me. His wife ‘Aunty’ Jane (Jaina) - a Torres Strait Islander lady, also had her own vast repertoire of song and dance. I did a little recording with Val and Jane, always under the watchful eyes of Kathy and family and used a little of this in my 1987 National Folk Festival workshop Some folk’s folk up north in Alice Springs, with their permission. Then time and circumstances intervened. Val spent increasing amounts of time away in Queensland with family, whilst my work also kept me out of Darwin for long periods.
It was nearly a year before our paths crossed again – in very different circumstances this time. One September afternoon in 1988 Val’s grand niece June came to see me. She told me Uncle Val was dying of stomach cancer, with little time left. Could I come around and record Uncle Val for the family, before he went into hospital or passed away? Of course I said yes, but was daunted by the prospect. I shouldn’t have been, for what followed was the most intense period of recording, interviewing, jamming, storytelling, laughing, joking, sadness – and music, music, music I’ve ever experienced.
We recorded at family parties (yes parties – even then), a 50th wedding anniversary, other community functions and at Val’s own home. It gave me a wonderful insight into what it must have been like in the old days of Darwin – a Darwin I and most residents never knew – that “Bohemian underworld” Nicholas Rothwell [12] referred to. On many occasions three generations of family played along with him – whilst a fourth danced around them. At other times he played just for me. The result was a meager 12-15 hours of stereo cassette tape, some of which was family banter, some favorite family music and jokes, kids fighting, dogs barking – the typical folk collector’s fare! Amongst all that were some real gems of both tunes and songs, from Val’s long musical life experience, spanning most of last century in Australia’s Top End. Then he was gone –first to hospital, then to Atherton with his son’s family finally to his maker, in November 1988.
In the months that followed, Val’s grand niece (Kathy Mills’ daughter) Alyson and I set about extracting material from the raw tapes for compilation into what became a set of two 90 minute cassettes for copying and distribution to extended family and friends of Val McGinness. We distributed around 50 sets all up, mostly in Darwin, but also to his family in north Queensland.
I also made a couple of cassettes containing around half a dozen dance tunes Val used to play with legendary TI songman and musician Jaffa Ah Mat, in the old 1930s Darwin String Band. These tunes included Shake Hand Dance, Tea Tree Waltz, Ali’s Quickstep and Jaffa’s March – none of which I’d come across before – and all of which reputedly had their own special dances attached to them. I used these tapes to teach Top End Folk Club musicians such as Tony Suttor, Peter Bate and my son Jamie the tunes. Together with Kathy and Ali Mills, we also taught some of the club’s dancers the Shake Hand Dance and other once-popular dances, including some hula. Before I left Darwin for Townsville in late 1989, we also played these tunes and dances for a Parap Camp - Sunshine Club reunion – and at our own farewell, to the great joy of those “formidable aunties” I referred to earlier!
Thus began a 15 year journey, with its own frustrations, pleasures and intrigue. Having been transferred to Townsville in late 1989, opportunities to visit Darwin for any length of time dwindled. It wasn’t long however, before I started getting enquiries – not just from Darwin, but from all round Australia. “Are you the bloke who made them Val McGinness (or Darwin string band) tapes and could you make me a copy?... my Aunty (Uncle, Dad, Mum, bush band, folklorist colleague) would love a copy … I had one, but my Mum’s tape player chewed it up (or my dog ate it) … that copy of a copy of a copy I had finally gave out!”. ‘Where did you get it from?’ I’d ask. “Not sure, a friend of a friend, who visited Darwin a while back... I think Tony Suttor (or Rob Willis) might have given it to him.” ‘Hey Tony (or Rob) did you send that Val McGinness tape to anyone?’ “No, not me! I can’t even find my own copy these days”.
And so it went on, year after year, as did my encounters with these tunes in a range of places and situations – isn’t the folk process great - alive and well, despite everything? Over the years I heard southern revival bands playing Tea Tree Waltz, saw the music in print, found folk from Tassie to TI who had copies of those taped tunes, heard my recording of Val singing Waltjim But Madilda on the radio and saw it and other sections of these recordings used in the great little documentary film Buffalo Legends – about the history of Australia’s first Aboriginal dominated AFL club – the Darwin Buffaloes. And in amongst all this I saw both the recordings and the tunes, used in the 1993 Darwin musical Keep Him My Heart – the event that saw the first reformation of a Filipino Rondalla(string band) in Darwin in 50 years.
So what did I think of all this? Mixed feelings really. As a product of the folk revival and a committed folk recycler (as folklorist Warren Fahey once termed it) I was thrilled to see this material in circulation, being played again, especially in Darwin and heartened by the interest in this unique Darwin contribution to Australia’s folk heritage. However, another part of me was apprehensive about its wide circulation, without the strict permission or sanction of the family who had asked me to record it, not for my own purposes, but for them in the first instance. Knowing the sensitivities involved first hand, I had for most of that 15 years limited distribution without their specific sanction and had held off finally lodging the original tapes, pending formal family permission – a situation complicated by the strong Jehovah’s Witness connection of Val’s immediate family in Queensland. The situation caused a deal of personal frustration and no doubt consternation amongst colleagues anxious to access this unique Top End material.
In the end however, Val’s family and friends had done as much as anyone to circulate the material, both within their own community and beyond that to extended family and friends across the Top End and all over Australia. As Val’s grand niece Allyson Mills[13]said about the importance of keeping this music going “It’s not as if it’s just the past we’re talking about. Mum (Kathy Mills) has got 29 grand children after all, spread all over Darwin and Australia. This music is also about the present.” Indeed, this diverse community musical heritage, the product of Filipino Rondallas, TI and Malay pearlers, Aboriginal and Islander missions, itinerant depression musicians, brass bands, big bands, Hawaiian hula troops, phonograph and radio, was a living treasure in the eyes of that community, one they longed to revisit and pass onto their kids – and share with greater Darwin.
This, more than anything, impelled Kathy, Ali and me to bite the bullet, by depositing the tapes with the Northern Territory Archives Service in 2002, commencing a small book on Val’s life and music and telling the story of String Bands and Shake Hands – the Days of Old Darwin at the 2002 National Folk Festival in Canberra. It hasn’t been an easy ride. Bringing Darwin’s talented and free spirited Mills Sisters to Canberra for the 2002 NFF was no small challenge – but worth it, as they were the hit of the festival that year. The small monograph has been a longer and often frustrating process – made harder by tyranny of distance impacts on obtaining family feedback regarding content and final permissions. However, this has finally come to fruition with the planned launch of String Bands and Shake Hands – the Life and Music of Valentine McGinness at the 2010 National Folk Festival, Canberra – in the centenary year of Val’s birth.
So what about this Darwin community music heritage? What is so special about it and why is it so important to this multicultural community? Why did it all but disappear and why do they want so desperately to revive it? In many ways it shares common features with many North Australian coastal and island communities from the Whitsundays to Broome. Professor Phil Hayward [14], in his book Tide Lines (describes such communities as archipelagic on a number of levels, from the physical-geographic, to the ethnological, where islands of music and culture are shared across the tide lines of transient contact, which itself brings forth a certain exoticism. But Darwin was much more than just another Top End pearling community – it was literally and culturally where “east met west” as historian Peter Forrest [15] observed (Northern Territory News, 20/8/02) Filipinos, Koepangers, Malays, Greeks, Torres Strait Islanders, Japanese, Chinese all came to work in the pearling, the meat works, the railway and live cattle trade, in what Ernestine Hill (1951) described a “that ramshackle, piratical old Darwin”. They stayed, or moved to and fro, inter-married with local Larrakia and Khungarakang people and created a unique music and dance culture along the way – a fusion of diverse influences - a rich musical tapestry. The early Rondallas began amongst this atmosphere in the Cubillo ‘big house’ in Police Paddock[16]– one such cultural island in a sea of white-dominated, polite Darwin society. They knew little of each other, and still don’t! The Rondallasthrived and were joined in the 1930s, by a proliferation of Filipino and Torres Strait and other ‘islander’ based string bands, playing for dances all over Darwin, from Government House to unemployment camps.
Another layer within this archipelagic strata was also present – those communities comprised of mixed-race stolen generations, taken away, either literally to off-shore islands like Croker and Mellvile Islands, or ‘islands’ within the Darwin community, such as Kahlin Compound. Experience in such ‘island’ communities, whether harsh or benign, left inmates with a lifelong fixation about “identity”– the need to know “who you are and where you came from” according to Kathy Mill’s[17] . Music and dance played (and continue to play) an important role in this search for identity and sense of place for these people, as a means of “calling their culture to them”as Kathy describes it. “We don’t just sing songs of this place, but from all over (when we get together), so no-one is left out” Kathy says[18]. Yet, in another sense they also felt “shamed” about this Kriol culture – and kept it to themselves, both because of this shame and as means of exclusion / inclusion - a sort of secret password to re-enforce their shared community identity, in contrast to the broader European society, according to Bill Dempsey [19]
World War 2 scattered Darwin’s population and along with it the string bands. However many mixed race folk returned and were, for many years housed in former army huts at Parap118 Camp. Music again provided the ties that bind. Ad hoc bands were formed and re-formed and parties and dances organized, especially when the TI Boys (like Henry ‘Seaman’ Dan) came to town. Still restricted by the Aboriginal Ordinance, they set up their own Sunshine Club as their cultural focus and formed the Australian Half Caste Progressive Association, to fight the race laws.
TV and Cyclone Tracy pretty much saw the end of this era, as people died, or moved away. However, musicians like Delphin Cubillo, Jaffa Ah Mat and Babe Damaso were still around right up into the early 1980s, though I didn’t know them personally (mores the pity). To my knowledge no recordings of these fine Darwin musicians survive. However, fortunately for myself and this community I did get to know Val McGinness, and record at least some of his vast repertoire which he accumulated in company with other musicians of that that community and era. As a still active and skilled melody musician – on both mandolin and Hawaiian steel guitar - he was the ‘keeper’ of many old string band tunes, most of which would otherwise have disappeared for lack of players.
So, when Garry Lee[20] set about writing his family musical Keep Him My Heart where did he turn for some of the old tunes for his fledgling Rondalla? – you guessed it, my old tapes! Not all the tunes came from that source but important ones like the Shake Hand Dance, Tea Tree Waltz and Jaffa’s March did. And didn’t Darwin love it – both old and new! That Rondalla, containing both original (1930s and 40s) guitarists Gabe Hazelbane and Benny Cubillo, younger Cubillo family members, plus recent Filipino migrants, still exists – albeit tenuously at times. It would be great to bring them to a National Folk Festival some time - which brings me back to the 2002 Festival of Darwin.
It started when I was visiting Darwin prior to the 2002 National Folk Festival to organize the Darwin Mills Sisters’ visit for our String Bands and Shake Hands presentation in Canberra. As I was about to leave, my friend Jenny Milne of AusDance collared me and said “how come you’re doing this in bloody Canberra and not Darwin?” to which I replied that no-one had bloody asked us! That quip set in train a six month frenzy of lobbying, arm-twisting and activity by Jenny, Ali Mills and those ever-present “formidable aunties” to bring back to life something very special, involving literally hundreds of community members in dance and music performance, community events, resurrecting old photos and re-living old times. Tony Suttor undertook to provide the music (much of it from those dreaded tapes) to both Rondalla and a revival Sunshine Club Band, made up of community members and Top End Folk Club musicians, including me. People from 8 to 80 years old practiced the Shake Hand Dance the Veleta, Polka Masurka, Tangoette and hula; musicians practiced and aunties made endless leis - for months!
Festival events included community dances at old Darwin halls, photo exhibitions, a musical tribute to Val McGinness (my contribution) and of course the main festival concert event on Darwin’s Esplanade at sunset. Seaman Dan, that septuagenarian TI performer, who started his singing career in Darwin was there, as was Ted Egan, who hit Darwin around 1950 en route to South America and stayed – to eventually become NT administrator. It was an unforgettable sight – a three level stage with musicians in the middle, dancers at ground level and a huge screen showing images of old Darwin people and places above. The music played, the dancers danced and the huge crowd stayed till the end, enjoying every moment. For the old Darwin mixed race community, it restored a sense of pride in their cultural legacy and helped “piss off the shame job mentality” as Bill Dempsey[21] once urged. For newer Darwin residents, it gave them a new dimension to their sense of place in cosmopolitan Darwin. For Darwin as a whole, it set in train a process of community awareness that generated significant, though at times tenuous outcomes.
I left that Festival of Darwin with many great memories; the sight of a Darwin Rondalla once again playing at Government House for the first time since the 1940s; watching Seaman Dan share music with mates he’d not seen for 50 years; all those people from 8 to 80 doing the Shake Hand Dance as the sun set over Darwin Harbour. However the most enjoyable festival event for me was the post-festival community party at Darwin’s old Railway Institute Club venue. Amid the music, dancing and conversation of that wonderful evening I closed my eyes and tried to picture what it must have been like in the hay day of the old pre-war Immigrants’ Hall or post-war Parap Camp Sunshine Club – not a stone’s throw away from there. Was this how it was in those days of old Darwin town? I’d like to think so. And was this folk music and folklore collection is about? I’d like to think so too. And you know what the best thing of all was? They didn’t have to play those bloody tapes of mine any more!
References
[1] Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian newspaper of August 23, 2002.
[2] Ted Egan, Song It’s on again tonight in dear old Darwin Town
[3] Maisie Austin[3] Quality of Life- A reflection of life in Darwin during the post-war years. (1992 Colemans Printing Pty. Ltd., Darwin , 1992, ISBN 0 646 0523 4)
[4] Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian newspaper of August 23, 2002.
[5] Gary (Cubillo) Lee, Keep Him My Heart - a Larrakia-Filipino Love Story. Musical play written and produced by Gary Leee and performed in 1993 at Darwin High School’s Tank theatre.
[6] Kathy Mills, oral history interview conducted by Jeff Corfield in February 2002.
[7] Valentine McGinness, Oral history interview with conducted by Jeff Corfield, September 1988 and lodged with Northern Territory Archives Service in 2002. NTRS 226, TS number pending.
[8] Bill Dempsey, in Buffalo Legends – A film by Paul Roberts and Kootji Raymond
Released 1997 by Ronin Films, PO Box 1005, Civic Square, ACT, 2608
[9] Bill Scott , When is a folk song , in Stringybark and Greenhide, February 1980
[10] Rob Willis in Songs, Tunes and Yarns of Ebb Wren (Willis and Meridith, 1993)
[11] Karl Neuenfeldt, personal communication., 2001)
[12] Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian newspaper of August 23, 2002.
[13] Allyson Mills personal communication, 2002
[14] Phillip Hayward, in Tide Lines: Music, Tourism and Cultural Transition in the Whitsunday Islands (and adjacent coast) published by the Music Archive for the Pacific Press (Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia, 2002, ISBN 0-646-41297-3
[15] Peter Forrest , in Northern Territory News, 20/8/02
[16] Inez Cubillo-Carter, Keeper of Stories - The History of the Cubillo Family 1788- 1996, published in 2000 by Cubillo-Carter Enterprises, 47 Kempeana Crescent, Alice Springs, N.T. 0870 ISBN 0 646 29338
[17] Kathy Mills , oral history interview conducted by Jeff Corfield in November 2001.
[18] Kathy Mills , personal communication, June 2004
[19] Bill Dempsey, in Buffalo Legends – A film by Paul Roberts and Kootji Raymond
Released 1997 by Ronin Films, PO Box 1005, Civic Square, ACT, 2608
[20] Gary (Cubillo) Lee, Keep Him My Heart - a Larrakia-Filipino Love Story. Musical play written and produced by Gary Leee and performed in 1993 at Darwin High School’s Tank theatre.
[21] Bill Dempsey, in Buffalo Legends – A film by Paul Roberts and Kootji Raymond
Released 1997 by Ronin Films, PO Box 1005, Civic Square, ACT, 2608
No comments:
Post a Comment