Substance and style in electronic recording of Australian children’s folklore
Gwenda Beed Davey
Children’s folklore may be considered two have two main dimensions, folklore FOR children and folklore OF children. Folklore for children includes nursery rhymes, folk or ‘fairy’ tales, family sayings and games, whereas folklore of children includes playground games and rhymes, chants and taunts. These two subsets of children’s folklore are also distinguished by their modes of transmission; folklore FOR children is mainly transmitted by adults to children, whereas folklore OF children is usually transmitted from child to child, mostly in the first six years of primary school. Both dimensions of children’s folklore have been extensively published in the twentieth century, although publication of folklore for children is almost as old as printing itself.[1]
Sound recording of children’s folklore in Australia became possible only with the development of commercially produced, portable recorders in the 1940s, although sound recording as such began in the nineteenth century, with the earliest fieldwork around the 1890s. Most of the important collections of sound recordings of Australian children’s folklore are housed in the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Section, and in the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection at Museum Victoria. Evidence of other locations would be warmly received. According to Fish Trout: You’re Out,[2] an online survey of National Library holdings of children’s folklore sound recordings completed by Gwenda Davey in 2002, the earliest collection of recorded children’s lore in Australia is that of Norman O’Connor, made in the 1950s and 60s during his field collecting of ‘old songs’, when some children’s material was included by his informants in their recordings. Norm O’Connor aimed to record high-quality sound. He mainly used an Australian-made Byer 66 recorder, although late in his collecting period he constructed a recorder using Byer parts, batteries and a wind-up gramophone motor, to enable recording in remote locations where power was unavailable.[3] Some of his outstanding recordings are those of the Creswick (Victoria) singer Simon McDonald, who included in his songs There was an old woman wrapped up in a blanket,[4] a variation of the ancient nursery rhyme
There was an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Seventeen times as high as the moon;
Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom.
Old woman, old woman, old woman, quoth I,
Where are you going to up so high?
To brush the cobwebs off the sky!
May I go with you? Aye, by-and-by.[5]
John Meredith’s recordings are usually considered to be the earliest sound recordings of folklore held in the National Library of Australia, although his first period of collecting included only five items recorded from Aboriginal children, including a lullaby and a ‘rhythm of corroboree’ at La Perouse in New South Wales, around 1954.[6] Meredith had two periods of activity as a collector, his independent collecting between 1953 and 1961 and his collecting in the 1980s and 1990s, assisted by the National Library, which had acquired his earlier recordings in 1963. In the 1950s Meredith, constrained severely by the cost of recording tape, focused almost entirely on songs, tunes and recitations and recorded little if any contextual information from informants.[7]
The lack of context in early sound recordings was by no means unique to John Meredith. Hazel de Berg, whose collection of oral history recordings is the first in the National Library of Australia (TRC1)[8], eliminated her own voice and any other sound – or information - apart from the voice of her informants. Clearly, these pioneers of sound recording had to create their own methodology, whether for oral history interviews or folkloric recordings.
John Meredith’s second period of collecting, from 1981, included a number of recordings of children’s folklore, including some of the first recordings made in primary school playgrounds in late 1986, in Huonville, Tasmania, and Mudgee and Thirlmere in New South Wales.[9] Skipping and clapping songs and rhymes for the game of Elastics were recorded in these schools, and between 1990 and 1993 John Meredith also recorded a number of adult recollections of childhood and childhood games.[10] One of his informants, Mr Harry Dick of Timboon, Victoria, recorded in 1984 an unusual version of the old folk song (often sung to children) ‘If you’ll marry me’. Marilyn Monroe sang the song about ‘a paper of pins’ in one of her last and finest films, Bus Stop (1956); Harry Dick sang about ‘a little waterin’ can’:
I’ll get you a little waterin’ can
To water your flowers when the sun goes down;
If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,
If you’ll marry me.
Adult recollections of childhood games are an important source of historical and comparative material, and Museum Victoria houses a number of significant recollections, in both electronic and non-electronic forms. Particularly interesting is the Aboriginal Children’s Play Project, not least because it highlights the need to avoid restrictive or overly-complex access conditions imposed on the use of recorded material. These problems caused delays for several years in permitting access to the recordings. Almost 70 interviews were carried out in Victoria in the mid 1990s, with informants ranging in age from four years to their seventies, with some recalling childhoods spent on Aboriginal settlements such as Cummeragunja and Framlingham. As well as bush and river play, game included marbles and string games. The project is discussed in greater detail in an article by Kate Darian-Smith in Play and FolkloreNo. 51, April 2009.[11]
A collection of sound recordings of childhood recollections was made for Museum Victoria’s then Children’s Museum by Gwenda Davey in 1988 for use in the ‘Talking Chair’ at the Museum’s ‘You’re It!’ exhibition, about children’s play. The comfortable wing chair was designed by Grant Featherston, originally for Australia’s exhibit at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. Each of the wings housed a speaker, and the person sitting in the chair could hear sound recordings through the wings. The ‘Talking Chair’ recordings are of particular interest as they include some of Australia’s most notable – and cerebral – comedians, such as Rod Quantock and John Clarke. Rod Quantock’s recollections include a detailed account of children replaying cricket test matches, with wickets made from matches stuck into cracks in floor boards and bats made from half a wooden dolly peg.
It seems very likely that Australian folklore collectors’ interest in children’s lore was greatly encouraged by the seminal publication in 1969 of Ian Turner’s Cinderella Dressed in Yella: Australian Children’s Play-Rhymes. The book, which included a scholarly article by Turner, attracted a great deal of publicity because of censorship problems (which eventually failed). Ian Turner also spoke about children’s rhymes at the 1968 Port Phillip Folk Music Festival in Melbourne, and again, it is likely that many current and future collectors were in his audience. Turner’s position as an academic at Monash University gave an additional imprimatur to research into children’s folklore, and his acknowledgement of the American Fulbright scholar Dr Dorothy Howard’s Australian research was to have enormous significance.
From 1969, collectors began making sound recordings of children’s folklore as part of their general searches for Australian traditional songs, poems and stories. Alan Scott, Helen O’Shea, Barry York and Chris Sullivan included some children’s folklore in their recordings. At Sutton Forest Public School in New South Wales in 1985 Alan Scott recorded the skipping game
I am a Girl Guide dressed in blue,
These are the things that I can do:
Stand at ease,
Bend my knees,
Salute to the King,
Bow to the Queen,
Never turn my back on the Union Jack.
O-U-T spells Out.
This well-known rhyme also has the frequent variation where the line ‘Bow to the Queen’ is followed by ‘Show my knickers to the football team’. This recalls one of the sorriest episodes in the documentation of Australian children’s folklore, when a teacher in Western Australia in the early 1990s was vilified and prosecuted for photographing children skipping and chanting this rhyme, among many others, as part of a research project.[12]
After 1969, some Australian collectors began to focus solely on children’s folklore in their sound recordings. Wendy Lowenstein had already provided Ian Turner with a great deal of the children’s lore included in Cinderella Dressed in Yella (1969)[13], presumably on paper, as her children’s sound recordings date from 1969, in Victoria and Western Australia. She also independently published Shocking, Shocking, Shocking: the improper play rhymes of Australian children in 1974:[14]
Shocking, shocking, shocking,
A mouse ran up my stocking;
He got to me knee,
And what did he see?
Shocking, shocking, shocking.
From 1973, June Factor’s students at the Institute of Early Childhood Development in Melbourne had been studying children’s traditional games and rhymes in primary school playgrounds. Most of their research had been documented on paper, but a few students made recordings on domestic cassette recorders. Although the sound quality was variable, and the recordings were certainly not made for archival purposes, their importance and rarity ensured that all these recordings were preserved as part of the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection in the National Library.[15] The originals are held in the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection at Museum Victoria. Interestingly, one of these recordings includes not only songs, chants, rhymes and stories but also some Grade 2 children ‘talking about playground games’, an early example of context creeping into the sound recordings.[16] The large body of data collected by Factor’s students contributed to the second edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella (1978), published under the joint names of Ian Turner, June Factor and Wendy Lowenstein,[17]and to the formation of the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection in 1979.
There are other collections of children’s folklore recordings whose primary purpose was other than archival. The Multicultural Cassette Series was produced as an aid for teachers in pre-schools and primary schools. It was funded in 1975 by the Interim Children’s Commission (which fell along with the Whitlam government), and aimed to assist language and cultural maintenance among young children in some major community languages, namely Italian, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, Croatian, Arabic, Macedonian – and English. Field recordings of traditional songs, rhymes and stories told to children were made by Gwenda Davey and Norm O’Connor, with considerable assistance in locating informants, from Priscilla Clarke.[18] One item popular in Greek families was the rhyme Moon so Bright, often said to refer to the illegal Greek schools which operated at night during Greece’s long occupation by the Ottoman empire:
Moon so bright, shine at night;
Light my way to go to school;
To work and play,
And learn the rules,
And all good things.
The recordings were edited into a kit of 28 cassettes and an accompanying manual. Stylistically, the cassettes included no English, although the Manual included English translations or synopses of all items on the cassettes. The original materials from this series were combined with June Factor’s material to establish in 1979 the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection, now housed at Museum Victoria. In 2004 the Collection was honoured by UNESCO by inclusion in the UNESCO Australia Memory of the World Register.
Also focused on cultural maintenance are the CDs and DVDs produced since 1999 by Karl Neuenfeldt and Nigel Pegrum in a number of islands in the Torres Strait. This important work is described in detail in the chapter in this book written by Karl Neuenfeldt and Jeffrey Waia, although the traditional songs and dances taught to children and recorded by Karl Neuenfeldt, Nigel Pegrum and Will Kepa were also discussed in Play and Folklore No.52, produced by Museum Victoria in November 2009.
Earlier than either the Multicultural Cassette Series or the Neuenfeldt recordings were those made by Peter Parkhill, who pioneered field recording among non-English-speaking communities in Australia in the early 1970s. Some of his recordings preserved in the National Library include items for children. A popular Turkish song, Mendil (The Red Handkerchief) is an interesting example of an adult love song used for children, possibly as a lullaby, a common practice in many languages – the English Lavender Blue is one example. Peter Parkhill’s recording of Mendil tells the listener to
Go to the mountains and get some snow;
The wood smells wet, bring it in a golden bowl.
Break a golden nut in the golden bowl
And bring me the red handkerchief.
I should have not broken the nut,
I should not have broken my lover’s heart.
In 2005 the then curator of Oral History and Folklore at the National Library of Australia, Mark Cranfield, commissioned a four-year project to document children’s traditional playground lore, using sound recordings and photographs. The fieldwork began in Victoria, in three primary schools, Warrandyte, Harcourt Valley and Preston West, and all three provided some interesting findings. Harcourt Valley Primary is a rural school in the heart of Victoria’s apple growing region. It has 100 pupils and is ethnically almost entirely Anglo-Celtic.
By contrast, Preston West Primary is a culturally diverse school in an inner suburb of Melbourne. It has 300 pupils from over fifty countries, and only 50% are of Anglo-Celtic background. There are 29 home languages other than English spoken by the children, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Mandarin, Somali, Urdu and Vietnamese. Both Harcourt Valley and Preston West Primary Schools have a harmonious playground and a rich play culture, supported by teachers and parents.
In all three schools of the National Library project, children’s play was valued, and treated with respect. Of particular interest were the circumstances surrounding the establishment of a new school in Victoria, Harcourt Valley, near Bendigo, after one of the two existing schools in Harcourt burned down. Many of the parents and teachers involved in selecting a site for the new school were insistent that the new site must be adjacent to a pine plantation, similar to that of the old, destroyed school. There’s some history here. Some years ago, it became popular for state schools in Victoria to establish a pine plantation as an investment to supplement future school funding. But in the case of Harcourt Valley school, a new pine plantation wasn’t wanted for financial reasons – it was wanted because it was a magical place for children, to build cubby houses and to carry out all kinds of imaginative play. This information was obtained from a recorded interview with one of the teachers from the school – a practice increasingly used by fieldworkers to supplement observations and recordings made with children in the playground.
This project effectively became a pilot for, and transmuted into, a larger research program, Childhood, Tradition and Change which received initial funding from the Australian Research Council in July 2006. The National Library was one of five partners in the study, together with Melbourne, Curtin and Deakin Universities and Museum Victoria.
Childhood, Tradition and Change is a national study of the historical and contemporary practices and significance of Australian children’s playlore. The project is headed by Professor Kate Darian‑Smith from Melbourne University, and will conclude at the end of 2010. June Factor and Gwenda Davey are Principal Researchers on the project. Eight experienced fieldworkers have been spending a week in a number of primary schools in every Australian State and Territory, observing children’s playground activities and then making both audio and video recordings as well as taking photographs – all where parental consent has been given. A great deal of contextual data is collected, such as who plays and where in the school playground, and children record their observations about the meaning and significance of the games they play.
Sally Grant was one of the fieldworkers for Childhood, Tradition and Change, and recorded an interview with three Year 3 students at the Orana Rudolf Steiner School in Canberra about what she described as ‘an impressive cubby’. The children’s account is very revealing about the energy, intensity and persistence of much children’s play:
We first started [the cubby]on the little tepee next to the tree...then built it bigger...there’s about ten rooms...one room we set some traps up...one with a log...if they stepped on it it would bump another stick and cause a dust bomb to fall down...we built a pit trap...covered with sticks and bark and dirt and leaves...it didn’t really work that well...[The cubby] has three levels...we’re still building...the second one collapsed...We have protectors because people steal some of our sticks...we have spies...I’m one of the guards...[It was demolished] eight times...something destroys it over the weekend...then we build more...we’ll fix up the bits that fell down...I think it’s big enough...probably as high as a Shetland pony or a miniature pony...I couldn’t even touch the top.[19]
The data collected by Childhood, Tradition and Change will be compared and contrasted with the work of Dr Dorothy Howard in the 1950s, with that of Lindsay and Palmer in the 1970s, of Heather Russell in the 1980s, and with some smaller projects. Audio recordings are being made for the National Library of Australia and video recordings for Museum Victoria. The Childhood, Tradition and Change project has its own website.[20]
Museum Victoria has some significant video tapes, dating back to the 1970s. Some of June Factor’s students at the Institute of Early Childhood Development produced some valuable video footage, including an edited tape Just a Little Bit Different, which filmed the play of newly arrived Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian children in the Blackburn Language Centre. In 1986 Gwenda Davey and Heather Russell produced the video Ring a Rosy, featuring folklore FOR children among Turkish, Vietnamese and Anglo-Australian adults and children. The Museum also holds some video tapes of children’s games made by in the 1980s by Rob Willis, one of the National Library’s most experienced and prolific collectors.
Childhood, Tradition and Change has not been without problems, as might be expected from a project of its range and complexity. Initially, two State Education Departments refused permission for the project to work in schools in their State – though fortunately they eventually saw the error of their ways. There are some problems, too, with the state-of-the art equipment which is necessary for digital transfer of audio recordings. For the Childhood, Tradition and Change project, the National Library has chosen to go with the hard disc drive recorder (Sound Devices 722). This is creating some problems in terms of both time and money. Fieldworkers cannot do their timed summaries directly off the hard disc; recordings must be copied on to an external hard drive which is sent to the National Library, which in turn sends CDs or MP3 discs back to fieldworkers who then prepare timed summaries. This is to ensure the timed summaries and the preservation copies lodged at the Library correlate.
It has also been a disappointment that ‘cinema verite’ sound or video recordings cannot be made directly in the playground, as fieldworkers found in their first trial visits to schools. The first sign of a tape recorder or boom microphone in the playground causes, if not a riot, excitement and ‘mobbing’ which interferes with the game being played. Everyone thinks they’re going to be on television! Fieldworkers had to restrict their initial three-day observation period to pencil and paper notation of activities, the names and grades of players, and some discussions with the players about the activity itself. Actual sound and video recordings were then made by taking children out of class, provided parental consent had been obtained.
Problems have also arisen because of stringent ethics requirements from both Melbourne University and the State Education Departments which have made it virtually impossible to publicly show photographs or video footage of the children’s games recorded, even though the only children recorded in the final two days of the week’s fieldwork were those with parental consent. Nevertheless, the richness of the body of childlore recovered from the project has compensated for these hurdles and disappointments.
A particularly important outcome of the Childhood, Tradition and Change project is the establishment of a unique archive of children’s play activities. Since 2006 the Project Manager, Dr Nikki Henningham, has been creating an electronic data base, documenting fieldworkers’ observations and photographs. The Childhood, Tradition and Change (CTAC) database uses the On-line Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a database program developed by scholars at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre to capture, structure and relate information relating to the project. In particular, information gathered by fieldworkers from disparate sites across Australia is entered into an electronic database according to basic archival principles that makes it possible for the research team to:
- Access summary information about games, schools, people and relevant publications online,
- Access scanned copies of original fieldwork documents online,
- Browse, compare and contrast information received from all schools online,
- Perform general searches for information about particular schools and games online,
- Analyse all photographs associated with the project online,
- Classify game types according to particular features or ‘functions’.
A particular strength of the database is the ability to relate details about a particular type of game played at a particular school, to similar types of games played at another school. Furthermore, because the output is web-based and password protected, anyone authorised to access the information may do so from anywhere, at any time, providing they can access the world wide web.
At present only members of the research team are permitted to access the database. The database includes photographs of children and access restrictions are placed on all visual materials associated with the project. Also, although the technology is available to relate audio and video files to the database, this has not been done because the drain on resources is too great at this time.
It is probably true to say that Australian folklorists were astounded by the announcement in London in June 2009 that ‘clapping and skipping games that are popular in the school playground are to be converted into Wii-type computer games as part of a unique collaboration between three universities, the British Library and Nintendo’[21]. Particularly surprising to some was the announcement of the project’s backing by Iona Opie,[22]although examination of the project has, in many cases, changed Australian folklorists’ initial concerns into cautious interest and some excitement. The 600,000 pound project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Beyond Text programme.
According to the project’s leader, Professor Andrew Burn from the Higher Education Institute of the Institute of Education, University of London, the project will ‘update, analyse and re-present three important collections of children’s playground songs and rhymes: the Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs [British Library], and selections from collections at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition...[Sheffield University] and the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture...’[23]
The project has three aspects: collections will be digitised to create a new archive at the British Library, a two-year study of playground culture will be carried out in two primary schools, one in London and one in Sheffield, and a series of games for the Nintendo Wii will be developed ‘to capture playground games and make them playable as computer games without losing their traditional character’.[24]
Dr Burn’s announcement also noted that the project will ‘culminate in a series of high-profile events: a children’s conference in Sheffield, a conference for researchers, educators and policy-makers at the British Library, a demonstration of the Wii prototype at the BETT show, and a book presenting the research’.[25] The BETT show is the world’s largest exhibition of educational technology, held annually at the London Olympia.
For readers who are not familiar with Nintendo Wii games, the British project will not convert active playground games to sedentary – or solitary – activities! Wii games can be played solo, but they are also are socially interactive, with several players, and plenty of movement. Andrew Burn also stated that ‘the project aims to preserve this important aspect of our national culture; but also to explore how it continues to be part of the lives of children living in the age of computer games and the internet. What does this oral tradition borrow from the media, and how might it connect with the entertainment and information technologies of the age of new media?’[26]
In March 2010 Dr Andrew Burn sent the following update to the editors of Play and Folklore at Museum Victoria. He wrote
We are now halfway through the project. We have digitised and annotated about half of the Opie sound archive at the British Library. Have found much interesting unpublished material there: eg more games and songs related to media culture; more variants of tunes and songs than appear in eg The Singing Game; more variety of scatalogical material collected on housing estatyes in London.
We have collected a considerable amount of new material on the two playgrounds, confirming that the 'traditional' genres documented by the Opies and others still exist as a robust culture; but also that new kinds of game, especially fantasy play related to children's media cultures, is appearing.
We have produced early iterations of adaptations of clapping games for the Nintendo Wii - user tests suggest keen interest from the children in this, though too early to be specific about the cultural outcomes.
We have begin work with the Bodleian Library to match up material there from the Opie manuscript archive with material from the BL sound archive, filling out the picture.
We have held an interim conference, attended by folklorists, children's media specialists and computer games scholars. Our main respondent - which will be of interest to you - was Prof Kathy Marsh from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, author of The Musical Playground.
Currently one of the most exciting aspects of sound recordings of children’s folklore is the ability to hear voices from the past online. The National Library of Australia is pioneering work to add sound to its digital collections – as at the beginning of the year 2010, about one thousand recordings can be heard.[27]
[2] The counting-out rhyme Fish Trout, You’re Out was recorded by Helen O’Shea in 1989
[3] O’Connor, Norman, personal communication 26 December 2009.
[4] TRC2539/011
[5] Opie, Iona and Peter, The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (London, Oxford University Press, 1955) 70.
[6] TRC4/3A
[7] Keith McKenry, personal communication, 4 January 2010. For an overview of Meredith’s work as a collector, see McKenry, K, ‘John Meredith: A Biographical Sketch’, in K.Bradley (ed) John Meredith, a tribute (Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2006).
[8] Tape Recording Collection (TRC). All distinct collections of sound recordings in the National Library’s Oral History and Folklore Section have a TRC number. Hazel de Berg’s collection is TRC1.
[9] TRC 2222 R213-216, R226-227, 228-229, 233-234.
[10] TRC 2590/1, 2590/62-63, 2590/73.
[11] Darian-Smith, Kate, ‘The Aboriginal Children’s Play Project’, Play and Folklore No 51, April 2009 (Melbourne, Museum Victoria). See http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/books-and-journals/journals/play-and-folklore
[12] See Play and Folklore issues nos. 25, 26 and 27, 1993 and 1994.
[13] In 1978 the second edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella was published jointly by Ian Turner, June Factor and Wendy Lowenstein (Richmond, Vic, Heinemann , 1978).
[14] Lowenstein, Wendy Shocking, Shocking, Shocking: the improper play rhymes of Australian children (Melbourne, Fish and Chip Press, 1974).
[15] TRC 2632/15, 16, 17
[16] TRC 2632/15
[17] Op cit
[18] Dr Priscilla Clarke was then the director of Boroondara Kindergarten in Richmond. Subsequently she became Director of the Free Kindergarten Association Multicultural Resource Centre and eventually Director of the Free Kindergarten Association itself.
[19] TRC5911/25
[20] http://www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/CTC
[21] Institute of Education University of London Playground games for the Nintendo generation, 10 June 2009http://www.ioe.ac.uk/newsEvents/27010.html
[22] ibid
[23] Burn, Andrew Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age, Higher Education Institute, Institute of Education, University of London, accessed 28 December 2009. http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/playground games/index.php
[24] ibid
[25] ibid
[26] ibid
[27] My thanks to Kevin Bradley, Curator of Oral History and Folklore and Director of Sound Preservation at the National Library of Australia, for reading this chapter in manuscript form. All responsibility for its content is, however, my own.
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